"What about the self-confidence of financial astrologers? What does the gibberish of the daily newspapers tell us? How much reality do the mythical models of contemporary physics and cosmology contain? What is the goal of the pathological mobility of our contemporaries? What does the omnipresent mania for abbreviations conceal? And what X for a U are the arts fooling us with?" That his information on these questions falls from the tree of absolute knowledge is something the author, as cunningly as wisely, does not claim. "Fallen fruit," he calls them, "picked up in various large and small baskets. "With a sharp tongue, unapologetically and belligerently, Hans Magnus Enzensberger confronts us with zeitgeist and mainstream in a varied sequence of observations, notations, short essays, memoirs, dialogues, poems and glosses. But there is no shortage of tributes: to familiar and beloved people, to brothers and sisters in spirit. The German language, whose profundity and abysses the author gets to the bottom of with lexical fine drilling, gets its right. And last but not least, nature in its wondrous and capricious manifestations.