English is not my native language, and up to the age of 20, I wasn’t capable of writing a single paragraph in English without major errors in grammar and word choice.
Perhaps, purely as a matter of style, my results would be better if I were to stick to German. But I like to write for an international audience.
At the beginning of the third millennium, anything written solely in German is unlikely to have much impact. In this respect, German, unfortunately, ranks on the same level as Italian, Dutch, or Swedish, and far below Arabic, Chinese, and even French and Spanish.
I don’t care if my writing falls short of qualifying as literature. I do not write to produce beautiful sentences. I write to communicate ideas.
My ideas evolve. I was not born with a fixed set of ideas, and I didn’t receive a fixed set of ideas by divine inspiration, as founders of religions have claimed. While my ideas from a few years ago went in the same direction as the ideas I hold now, they are not identical.
Furthermore, my knowledge is not universal. While my ideas on how we ought to view ourselves in this world are based on what I know about it, errors in my perception of facts, and the way these errors are reflected in my writing, undermine not only my credibility but also the correctness of my opinions.
Nevertheless, I am confident that my current opinions on the world and the meaning of human life, by and large, make better sense than what has been produced by other writers.
If I look at how off the mark other explanations of the world are (especially religious ones), then I am very happy indeed if I am more than 50 percent right.
On the other hand, I sometimes tone down my opinions simply because I want to live in peace. Personally, I see no benefit in being in the public arena, and I have no intention whatsoever of being a hero or a fighter for the truth.
Because my individual life will cease with my individual death, and I have, at the bottom of my heart, no interest in a world in which I do not exist, I would always recant like Galileo when my writing starts to disturb the path I have chosen for my existence: a largely anonymous life of sexual pleasure, and after that, if possible, a comfortable death.
