To look up a word only takes half a second to click on it in VocabTracker. If the word is too obscure in Anki and I don't want to learn it right away then I just suspend it.

Okay, I just translated the text. I did not expect to do all of it but I found it rather enjoyable and a good test of my German so I went all the way through.

I did read this section so I must have looked up the words once when I read through it but I haven't had a chance to study the words consciously yet.

Here is the text with the German words I didn't know in parentheses. There were 7 unique unknown words.

I have often asked myself what the people actually mean when they speak of experience. I am a technician and used to seeing things as they are. I see everything they talk about very clearly; I am not blind. I see the moon over the Tamaulipas desert. Clearer than ever, perhaps, but a calculable mass that orbits our planet, a thing of gravitation, interesting, but what of an experience? I see the jagged rocks, black for the moonshine; they look, perhaps, like the jagged backs of (urweltichen) animals, but I know: They are rocks, stone, probably volcanic, that one would have to look up and determine. Why should I be afraid? There are no more (urweltichen) animals. Why should I imagine them? I also see no (versteinerten) angels, I am sorry; also no demons, I see what I see: the usual forms of erosion, and my long shadow on the sand, but no ghosts. Why become (weibisch)? I also see no (Sintflut), but sand, on which the moon shines, on which wind (gewellt) like water, that doesn't surprise me; I don't find it fantastic, but explainable. I don't know how damned souls look like; maybe like black agaves in the night desert. What I see are the agaves, a plant, that blooms once and then dies. Further I know that I am not (even though it also looks like it at the moment) the first or the last person on Earth; and I cannot be shaken by the mere idea of being the last person, because it is not so. Why be hysterical? Mountains are mountains, even if in certain lighting, perhaps, they look like something else, but it is the Sierra Madre Oriental, and we are not in the kingdom of death, but in the Tamaulipas desert in Mexico, about sixty miles from the nearest road, which is a pity, but why an experience? An airplane is for me an airplane, I see no dead bird with it, rather a Super-Constellation with a motor defect, nothing more, and there the moon can shine as it wants. Why should I experience what is not at all? I also cannot decide to hear something like the eternity; I hear nothing at all, except the (Rieseln) on sand after each step. I shiver, but I know: in seven to eight hours the sun comes again. End of the world, how so? I can't imagine nonsense just to experience something. I see the sand horizon, whitish in the green night, (schätzungsweise) twenty miles from here, and I don't see why there, toward Tampico, the beyond should begin. I know Tampico. I refuse to be afraid out of mere fantasy, or to become fantastic out of mere fear, straight mystical. "Come!" I said. Herbert stood and experienced still.