From Moral Failings Fled

So many of Stalin's victims hoped, against hope, that if only they confessed to their crimes -- even, and perhaps especially, to crimes that they did not commit -- the system and the great leader would spare them.  But we know that there was no such absolution.

From my own moral failings, real moral failings, fled, I adopted a different strategy.  Glimpsing out of the corner of one eye the shadow of Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities, I decided to hide in his shadow.  And indeed with some difficulty I managed to occupy this space, but as if in an ill-conceived spelunking, with my arms outstretched without recourse into a narrowing funnel.  

Occupying that space itself was, for me, the severest of punishments.