# Steppenwolf/Section 7

​······· Once more I stood in the round corridor, still excited by the hunting adventure. And everywhere on all the countless doors were the alluring inscriptions:
MUTABOR TRANSFORMATION INTO ANY ANIMAL OR PLANT YOU PLEASE
KAMASUTRAM INSTRUCTION IN THE INDIAN ARTS OF LOVE COURSE FOR BEGINNERS; FORTY-TWO DIFFERENT METHODS AND PRACTICES
DELIGHTFUL SUICIDE YOU LAUGH YOURSELF TO BITS
DO YOU WANT TO BE ALL SPIRIT? THE WISDOM OF THE EAST.
DOWNFALL OF THE WEST MODERATE PRICES. NEVER SURPASSED
COMPENDIUM OF ART TRANSFORMATION FROM TIME INTO SPACE BY MEANS OF MUSIC
LAUGHING TEARS CABINET OF HUMOUR
SOLITUDE MADE EASY COMPLETE SUBSTITUTE FOR ALL FORMS OF SOCIABILITY.
The series of inscriptions was endless. One was
GUIDANCE IN THE BUILDING UP OF THE PERSONALITY. SUCCESS GUARANTEED
This seemed to me to be worth looking into and I went in at this door.
I found myself in a quiet twilit room where a man with something like a large chess-board in front of him sat in Eastern fashion on the floor. At the first glance I thought it was friend Pablo. He wore at any rate a similar gorgeous silk jacket and had the same dark and shining eyes.
“Are you Pablo?” I asked.
“I am not anybody,” he replied amiably. “We have no names here and we are not anybody. I am a chess-player. Do you wish for instruction in the building up of the personality?”
“Yes, please.”
​“Then be so kind as to place a few dozen of your pieces at my disposal.”
“My pieces—?”
“Of the pieces into which you saw your so-called personality broken up. I can’t play without pieces.”
He held a glass up to me and again I saw the unity of my personality broken up into many selves whose number seemed even to have increased. The pieces were now, however, very small, about the size of chessmen. The player took a dozen or so of them in his sure and quiet fingers and placed them on the ground near the board. As he did so he began to speak in the monotonous way of one who goes through a recitation or reading that he has often gone through before.
“The mistaken and unhappy notion that a man is an enduring unity is known to you. It is also known to you that man consists of a multitude of souls, of numerous selves. The separation of the unity of the personality into these numerous pieces passes for madness. Science has invented the name Schizomania for it. Science is in this so far right as no multiplicity may be dealt with unless there be a series, a certain order and grouping. It is wrong in so far as it holds that one only and binding and lifelong order is possible for the multiplicity of subordinate selves. This ​error of science has many unpleasant consequences, and the single advantage of simplifying the work of the state-appointed pastors and masters and saving them the labours of original thought. In consequence of this error many persons pass for normal, and indeed for highly valuable members of society, who are incurably mad; and many, on the other hand, are looked upon as mad who are geniuses. Hence it is that we supplement the imperfect psychology of science by the conception that we call the art of building up the soul. We demonstrate to any one whose soul has fallen to pieces that he can rearrange these pieces of a previous self in what order he pleases, and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life. As the playwright shapes a drama from a handful of characters, so do we from the pieces of the disintegrated self build up ever new groups, with ever new interplay and suspense, and new situations that are eternally inexhaustible. Look!”
With the sure and silent touch of his clever fingers he took hold of my pieces, all the old men and young men and children and women, cheerful and sad, strong and weak, nimble and clumsy, and swiftly arranged them on his board for a game. At once they formed themselves into groups and families, games and battles, friendships and enmities, making a small world. For ​a while he let this lively and yet orderly world go through its evolutions before my enraptured eyes in play and strife, making treaties and fighting battles, wooing, marrying and multiplying. It was indeed a crowded stage, a moving breathless drama.
Then he passed his hand swiftly over the board and gently swept all the pieces into a heap; and, meditatively with an artist’s skill, made up a new game of the same pieces with quite other groupings, relationships and entanglements. The second game had an affinity with the first, it was the same world built of the same material, but the key was different, the time changed, the motif was differently given out and the situations differently presented.
And in this fashion the clever architect built up one game after another out of the figures, each of which was a bit of myself, and every game had a distant resemblance to every other. Each belonged recognisably to the same world and acknowledged a common origin. Yet each was entirely new.
“This is the art of life,” he said dreamily. “You may yourself as an artist develop the game of your life and lend it animation. You may complicate and enrich it as you please. It lies in your hands. Just as madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizo​mania the beginning of all art and all fantasy. Even learned men have come to a partial recognition of this, as may be gathered, for example, from Prince Wunderhorn, that enchanting book, in which the industry and pains of a man of learning, with the assistance of the genius of a number of madmen and artists shut up as such, are immortalised. Here, take your little pieces away with you. The game will often give you pleasure. The piece that to-day grew to the proportions of an intolerable bugbear, you will degrade tomorrow to a mere lay figure, The luckless Cinderella will in the next game be the princess. I wish you much pleasure, my dear sir.”
I bowed low in gratitude to the gifted chess-player, put the little pieces in my pocket and withdrew through the narrow door.
My real intention was to seat myself at once on the floor in the corridor and play the game for hours, for whole eternities; but I was no sooner in the bright light of the circular theatre passage than a new and irresistible current carried me along. A dazzling poster flashed before my eyes:
MARVELLOUS TAMING OF THE STEPPENWOLF
Many different emotions surged up in me at the sight of this announcement. My heart was painfully contracted by all kinds of fears and repressions from my former life and the reality I had ​left behind. With trembling hand I opened the door and found myself in the booth of a Fair with an iron rail separating me from a wretched stage. On the stage I saw an animal-tamer—a cheap-jack gentleman with a pompous air—who in spite of a large moustache, exuberantly muscular biceps and his absurd circus get-up had a malicious and decidedly unpleasant resemblance to myself. The strong man led on a leash like a dog—lamentable sight—a large, beautiful but terribly emaciated wolf, whose eyes were cowed and furtive; and it was as disgusting as it was intriguing, as horrible as it was all the same secretly entertaining, to see this brutal tamer of animals put the noble and yet so ignominiously obedient beast of prey through a series of tricks and sensational turns.
At any rate, the man, my diabolically distorted double, had his wolf marvellously broken. The wolf was obediently attentive to every command and responded like a dog to every call and every crack of the whip. He went down on his knees, lay for dead, and, aping the lord of creation, carried a loaf, an egg, a piece of meat, a basket in his mouth with cheerful obedience; and he even had to pick up the whip that the tamer had let fall and carry it after him in his teeth while he wagged his tail with an unbearable submissiveness. A rabbit was put in front of him and then ​a white lamb. He bared his teeth, it is true, and the saliva dropped from his mouth while he trembled with desire, but he did not touch either of the animals; and at the word of command he jumped over them with a graceful leap, as they cowered trembling on the floor. More—he laid himself down between the rabbit and the lamb and embraced them with his foremost paws to form a touching family group, at the same time eating a stick of chocolate from the man’s hand. It was an agony to witness the fantastic extent to which the wolf had learnt to belie his nature; and I stood there with my hair on end.
There was some compensation, however, both for the horrified spectator and for the wolf himself, in the second part of the programme. For after this refined exhibition of animal-taming and when the man with a winning smile had made his triumphant bow over the group of the wolf and the lamb, the rôles were reversed. My engaging double suddenly with a low reverence laid his whip at the wolf’s feet and became as agitated, as shrunken and wretched, as the wolf had been before. The wolf, however, licked his chops with a grin, his constraint and dissimulation erased. His eyes kindled. His whole body was taut and showed the joy he felt at recovering his wild nature.
And now the wolf commanded and the man ​obeyed. At the word of command the man sank on his knees, let his tongue loll out and tore his clothes off with his filed teeth. He went on two feet or all-fours just as the wolf ordered him, played the human being, lay for dead, let the wolf ride on his back and carried the whip after him. With the aptness of a dog he submitted gladly to every humiliation and perversion of his nature. A lovely girl came on to the stage and went up to the tamed man. She stroked his chin and rubbed her cheek against his; but he remained on all-fours, remained a beast. He shook his head and began to show his teeth at the charming creature—so menacingly and wolfishly at last, that she ran away. Chocolate was put before him, but with a contemptuous sniff he thrust it from him with his snout. Finally the white lamb and the fat piebald rabbit were brought on again and the docile man gave his last turn and played the wolf most amusingly. He seized the shrieking creatures in his fingers and teeth, tore them limb from limb, grinningly chewed the living flesh and rapturously drank their warm blood while his eyes closed in a dreamy delight.
I made for the door in horror and dashed out. This Magic Theatre was clearly no paradise. All hell lay beneath its charming surface. O God, was there even here no release?
In fear I hurried this way and that. I had ​the taste of blood and chocolate in my mouth, the one as hateful as the other. I desired nothing but to be beyond this wave of disgust. I wrestled with myself for more bearable, friendlier pictures. “O Friend, not these notes!” sang in my head. and with horror I remembered those terrible photographs from the Front that one saw occasionally during the war—those heaps of bodies entangled with each other, whose faces were changed to grinning ghouls by their gas-masks. How silly and childish of me, a humanely minded opponent of war though I was, to have been horrified by those pictures. To-day I knew that no tamer of beasts, no General, no insane person could hatch a thought or a picture in his brain that I could not match myself with one every bit as frightful, every bit as savage and wicked, as crude and stupid.
With an immense relief I remembered the notice I had seen on first entering the theatre, the one that the nice boy had stormed so furiously—
ALL GIRLS ARE YOURS
and it seemed to me, all in all, that there was really nothing else so desirable as this. I was greatly cheered at finding that I could escape from that cursed wolf-world, and went in.
The fragrance of spring-time met me. The very atmosphere of boyhood and youth, so deeply ​familiar and yet so legendary, was around me and in my veins flowed the blood of those days. All that I had done and thought and been since, fell away from me and I was young again. An hour, a few minutes before, I had prided myself on knowing what love was and desire and longing, but it had been the love and the longing of an old man. Now I was young again and this glowing current of fire that I felt in me, this mighty impulse, this unloosening passion like that wind in March that brings the thaw, was young and new and genuine. How the flame that I had forgotten leaped up again, how darkly stole on my ears the tones of long ago! My blood was on fire, and blossomed forth as my soul cried aloud and sang. I was a boy of fifteen or sixteen with my head full of Latin and Greek and poetry. I was all ardour and ambition and my fancy was laden with the artist’s dreams. But far deeper and stronger and more awful than all there burned and leapt in me the flame of love, the hunger of sex, the fever and the foreboding of desire.
I was standing on a spur of the hills above the little town where I lived. The wind wafted the smell of spring and violets through my long hair. Below in the town I saw the gleam of the river and the windows of my home, and all that I saw and heard and smelt overwhelmed me, as fresh and reeling from creation, as radiant in ​depth of colour, swayed by the wind of spring in as magical a transfiguration, as when once I looked on the world with the eyes of youth—first youth and poetry. With wandering hand I pulled a half-opened leaf-bud from a bush that was newly green. I looked at it and smelt it (with the smell everything of those days came back in a glow) and then I put it between my lips, lips that no girl had ever kissed, and began playfully to bite it. At the sour and aromatically bitter taste I knew at once and exactly what it was that I was living over again. It all came back. I was living again an hour of the last years of my boyhood, a Sunday afternoon in early spring, the day that on a lonely walk I met Rosa Kreisler and greeted her so shyly and fell in love with her so madly.
She came, that day, alone and dreamingly up the hill towards me. She had not seen me and the sight of her approaching filled me with apprehension and suspense. I saw her hair, tied in two thick plaits, with loose strands on either side, her cheeks blown by the wind. I saw for the first time in my life how beautiful she was, and how beautiful and dreamlike the play of the wind in her delicate hair, how beautiful and provocative the fall of her thin blue dress over her young limbs; and just as the bitter spice of the chewed bud coursed through me with the whole dread pleasure and pain of spring, so the sight of the ​girl filled me with the whole deadly foreboding of love, the foreboding of woman. In that moment was contained the shock and the forewarning of enormous possibilities and promises, nameless delight, unthinkable bewilderments, anguish, suffering, release to the innermost and deepest guilt. Oh, how sharp was the bitter taste of spring on my tongue! And how the wind streamed playfully through the loose hair beside her rosy cheeks! She was close now. She looked up and recognised me. For a moment she blushed a little and looked aside; but when I took off my school-cap, she was self-possessed at once and, raising her head, returned my greeting with a smile that was quite grown-up. Then, entirely mistress of the situation, she went slowly on, in a halo of the thousand wishes, hopes and adorations that I sent after her.
So it had once been on a Sunday thirty-five years before and all that had been then came back to me in this moment. Hill and town, March wind and buddy taste, Rosa and her brown hair, the welling-up of desire and the sweet suffocation of anguish. All was as it was then, and it seemed to me that I had never in my life loved as I loved Rosa that day. But this time it was given me to greet her otherwise than on that occasion. I saw her blush when she recognised me, and the pains she took to conceal it, and I knew at once that she ​had a liking for me and that this encounter meant the same for her as for me. And this time instead of standing ceremoniously cap in hand till she had gone by, I did, in spite of anguish bordering on obsession, what my blood bade me do. I cried: “Rosa! Thank God, you’ve come, you beautiful, beautiful girl. I love you so dearly.” It was not perhaps the most brilliant of all the things that might have been said at this moment, but there was no need for brilliance, and it was enough and more. Rosa did not put on her grown-up air, and she did not go on. She stopped and looked at me and, growing even redder than before, she said: “Heaven be praised, Harry—do you really like me?” Her brown eyes lit up her strong face, and they showed me that my past life and loves had all been false and perplexed and full of stupid unhappiness from that very moment on a Sunday afternoon when I had let Rosa pass me by. Now, however, the blunder was put right. Everything went differently and everything was good.
We clasped hands, and hand in hand walked slowly on as happy as we were embarrassed. We did not know what to do or to say, so we began to walk faster from embarrassment and then broke into a run, and ran till we lost our breath and had to stand still. But we did not let go our hands. We were both still children and did not know quite what to do with each other. That Sunday ​we did not even kiss, but we were immeasurably happy. We stood to get our breath. We sat on the grass and I stroked her hand while she passed the other one shyly over my hair. And then we got up again and tried to measure which of us was the taller. In reality, I was the taller by a finger’s breath, but I would not have it so. I maintained that we were of exactly the same height and that God had designed us for each other and that later on we would marry. Then Rosa said that she smelt violets and we knelt in the short spring grass and looked for them and found a few with short stalks and I gave her mine and she gave me hers, and as it was getting chill and the sun slanted low over the cliffs, Rosa said she must go home. At this we both became very sad, for I dared not accompany her. But now we shared a secret and it was our dearest possession. I stayed behind on the cliffs and lying down with my face over the edge of the sheer descent, I looked down over the town and watched for her sweet little figure to appear far below and saw it pass the spring and over the bridge. And now I knew that she had reached her home and was going from room to room, and I lay up there far away from her; but there was a bond between her and me. The same current ran in both of us and a secret passed to and fro.
We saw each other again here and there all ​through this spring, sometimes on the cliffs, sometimes over the garden hedge; and when the elder began to bloom we gave each other the first shy kiss. It was little that children like us had to give each other and our kiss lacked warmth and fullness. I scarcely ventured to touch the strands of her hair about her ears. But all the love and all the joy that was in us were ours. It was a shy emotion and the troth we plighted was still unripe, but this timid waiting on each other taught us a new happiness. We climbed one little step up on the ladder of love. And thus, beginning from Rosa and the violets, I lived again through all the loves of my life—but under happier stars. Rosa I lost, and Irmgard appeared; and the sun was warmer and the stars less steady, but Irmgard no more than Rosa was mine. Step by step I had to climb. There was much to live through and much to learn; and I had to lose Irmgard and Anna too. Every girl that I had once loved in youth, I loved again, but now I was able to inspire each with love. There was something I could give to each, something each could give to me. Wishes, dreams and possibilities that had once had no other life than my own imagination were lived now in reality. They passed before me like beautiful flowers, Ida and Laura and all whom I had loved for a summer, a month, or a day.
​I was now, as I perceived, that good looking and ardent boy whom I had seen making so eagerly for love’s door. I was living a bit of myself only—a bit that in my actual life and being had not been expressed to a tenth or a thousandth part, and I was living it to the full. I was watching it grow unmolested by any other part of me. It was not perturbed by the thinker, nor tortured by the Steppenwolf, nor dwarfed by the poet, the visionary or the moralist. No—I was nothing now but the lover and I breathed no other happiness and no other suffering than love. Irmgard had already taught me to dance and Ida to kiss, and it was Emma first, the most beautiful of them all, who on an autumn evening beneath a swaying elm gave me her brown breasts to kiss and the cup of passion to drink.
I lived through much in Pablo’s little theatre and not a thousandth part can be told in words. All the girls I had ever loved were mine. Each gave me what she alone had to give and to each I gave what she alone knew how to take. Much love, much happiness, much indulgence, and much bewilderment, too, and suffering fell to my share. All the love that I had missed in my life bloomed magically in my garden during this hour of dreams. There were chaste and tender blooms, garish ones that blazed, dark ones swiftly fading. There were flaring lust, inward reverie, glowing ​melancholy, anguished dying, radiant birth. I found women who were only to be taken by storm and those whom it was a joy to woo and win by degrees. Every twilit corner of my life where, if but for a moment the voice of sex had called me, a woman’s glance kindled me or the gleam of a girl’s white skin allured me, emerged again and all that had been missed was made good. All were mine, each in her own way. The woman with the remarkable dark brown eyes beneath flaxen hair was there. I had stood beside her for a quarter of an hour in the corridor of an express and afterwards she often appeared in my dreams. She did not speak a word, but what she taught me of the art of love was unimaginable, frightful, deathly. And the sleek, still Chinese, from the harbour of Marseilles, with her glassy smile, her smooth dead-black hair and swimming eyes—she too knew undreamed-of things. Each had her secret and the bouquet of her soil. Each kissed and laughed in a fashion of her own, and in her own peculiar way was shameful and in her own peculiar way shameless. They came and went. The stream carried them towards me and washed me up to them and away. I was a child in the stream of sex at play in the midst of all its charm, its danger and surprise. And it astonished me to find how rich my life—the seemingly so poor and loveless life of the Steppenwolf—had been in ​the opportunities and allurements of love. I had missed them. I had fled before them. I had stumbled on over them. I had made haste to forget them. But here they all were stored up in their hundreds, and not one missing. And now that I saw them I gave myself up to them without defence and sank down into the rosy twilight of their underworld. Even that seduction to which Pablo had once invited me came again, and other earlier ones, none of which at the time I had even fully grasped, fantastic games for three or four, caught me into their gambols with a laugh. Many things happened and many games were played not to be said in words.
When I rose once more to the surface of the unending stream of allurement and vice and entanglement, I was calm and silent. I was equipped, far gone in knowledge, wise, expert—ripe for Hermine. She rose as the last figure in my populous mythology, the last name of an endless series; and at once I came to myself and made an end of this fairy-tale of love; for I did not wish to meet her in this twilight of a magic mirror. I belonged to her not just as this one piece in my game of chess—I belonged to her wholly. Oh, I would now so lay out the pieces in my game that all was centred in her and led to fulfilment.
The stream had washed me ashore. Once again I stood in the silent theatre passage. What now? ​I felt for the little figures in my pocket—but already this impulse died away. Around me was the inexhaustible world of doors, notices and magic mirrors. Listlessly I read the first words that caught my eye, and shuddered.
HOW ONE KILLS FOR LOVE
was what it said.
Swiftly a picture was flashed upon my memory with a jerk and remained there one instant. Hermine at the table of a restaurant, turning all at once from the wine and food, lost in an abyss of speech, with a terrifying earnestness in her face as she said that she would have one aim only in making me her lover, and it was that she should die by my hand. A heavy wave of anguish and darkness flooded my heart. Suddenly everything confronted me once more. Suddenly once more the sense of the last call of fate gripped my heart. Desperately I felt in my pocket for the little figures so that I might practise a little magic and rearrange the lay-out of the board. The figures were no longer there. Instead of them I pulled out a knife. In mortal dread I ran along the corridor, past every door. I stood opposite the gigantic mirror. I looked into it. In the mirror there stood a beautiful wolf as tall as myself. He stood still, glancing shyly from unquiet eyes. As he leered at me, his eyes blazed and he grinned ​a little so that his chops parted and showed his red tongue.
Where was Pablo? Where was Hermine? Where was that clever fellow who had discoursed so pleasantly about the building up of the personality?
Again I looked into the mirror. I had been mad. I must have been mad. There was no wolf in the mirror, lolling his tongue in his maw. It was I, Harry. My face was grey, forsaken of all fancies, fordone with all vice, horribly pale. Still it was a human being, some one one could speak to.
“Harry,” I said, “what are you doing there?”
“Nothing,” said he in the mirror, “I am only waiting. I am waiting for death.”
“Where is death then?”
“Coming,” said the other. And I heard from the empty spaces within the theatre the sound of music, a beautiful and awful music, that music from Don Giovanni that heralds the approach of the guest of stone. With an awful and an iron clang it rang through the ghostly house, coming from the other world, from the immortals.
“Mozart,” I thought, and with the word conjured up the most beloved and the most exalted picture that my inner life contained.
At that, there rang out behind me a peal of laughter, a clear and ice-cold laughter out of a ​world beyond unknown to men, a world born of sufferings, purged and divine humour. I turned about, frozen through with the blessing of this laughter, and there came Mozart. He passed by me laughing as he went and, strolling quietly on, he opened the door of one of the boxes and went in. Eagerly I followed the god of my youth, the object, all my life long, of love and veneration. The music rang on. Mozart was leaning over the front of the box. Of the theatre nothing was to be seen. Darkness filled the boundless space.
“You see,” said Mozart, “it goes all right without the saxophone—though to be sure, I shouldn’t wish to tread on the toes of that famous instrument.”
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We are in the last act of Don Giovanni. Leporello is on his knees, A superb scene, and the music is fine too. There is a lot in it, certainly, that’s very human, but you can hear the other world in it—the laughter, eh?”
“It is the last great music ever written,” said I with the pomposity of a schoolmaster. “Certainly, there was Schubert to come. Hugo Wolf also, and I must not forget the poor, lovely Chopin either. You frown, Maestro? Oh, yes, Beethoven—he is wonderful too. But all that—beautiful as it may be—has something rhapsodical about it, something of disintegration. A work of ​such plentitude and power as Don Giovanni has never since arisen among men.”
“Don’t overstrain yourself,” laughed Mozart, in frightful mockery. “You’re a musician yourself, I perceive. Well, I have given up the trade and retired to take my ease. It is only for amusement that I look on at the business now and then.”
He raised his hands as though he were conducting, and a moon, or some pale constellation, rose somewhere. I looked over the edge of the box into immeasurable depths of space. Mist and clouds floated there. Mountains and sea-shores glimmered, and beneath us extended world-wide a desert plain. On this plain we saw an old gentleman of a worthy aspect, with a long beard, who drearily led a large following of some ten thousand men in black. He had a melancholy and hopeless air; and Mozart said:
“Look, there’s Brahms. He is striving for redemption, but it will take him all his time.”
I realised that the thousands of men in black were the players of all those notes and parts in his scores which according to divine judgment were superfluous.
“Too thickly orchestrated, too much material wasted,” Mozart said with a nod.
And thereupon we saw Richard Wagner marching at the head of a host just as vast, and felt the pressure of those thousands as they clung and ​closed upon him. Him, too, we watched as he dragged himself along with slow and sad step.
“In my young days,” I remarked sadly, “these two musicians passed as the most extreme contrasts conceivable.”
Mozart laughed.
“Yes, that is always the way. Such contrasts, seen from a little distance, always tend to show their increasing similarity. Thick orchestration was in any case neither Wagner’s nor Brahms’ personal failing. It was a fault of their time.”
“What? And have they got to pay for it so dearly?” I cried in protest.
“Naturally. The law must take its course. Until they have paid the debt of their time it cannot be known whether anything personal to themselves is left over to stand to their credit.”
“But they can’t either of them help it!”
“Of course not. They cannot help it either that Adam ate the apple. But they have to pay for it all the same.”
“But that is frightful.”
“Certainly. Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One’s born and at once one is guilty. You must have had a remarkable sort of religious education if you did not know that.”
I was now thoroughly miserable. I saw myself as a dead-weary pilgrim, dragging myself across ​the desert of the other world, laden with the many superfluous books I had written, and all the articles and feuilletons; followed by the army of compositors who had had the type to set up, by the army of readers who had had it all to swallow. My God—and over and above it all there was Adam and the apple, and the whole of original sin. All this, then, was to be paid for in endless purgatory. And only then could the question arise whether, behind all that, there was anything personal, anything of my own, left over; or whether all that I had done and all its consequences were merely the empty foam of the sea and a meaningless ripple in the flow of what was over and done.
Mozart laughed aloud when he saw my long face. He turned a somersault in the air for laughter’s sake and played trills with his heels. At the same time he shouted at me: “Hey, my young man, you are biting your tongue, man, with a gripe in your lung, man? You think of your readers, those carrion-feeders, and all your typesetters, those wretched abettors, and sabre-whetters. You dragon, you make me laugh till I shake me and burst the stitches of my breeches. O heart of a gull, with printer’s ink dull, and soul sorrow-full. A candle I’ll leave you, if that’ll relieve you. Betittled, betattled, spectakled and shackled, and pitifully snagged and by the tail ​wagged, with shilly and shally no more shall you dally. For the devil, I pray, will bear you away and slice you and splice you till that shall suffice you for your writings and rotten plagiarisings ill-gotten.”
This, however, was too much for me. Anger left me no time for melancholy. I caught hold of Mozart by the pig-tail and off he flew. The pig-tail grew longer and longer like the tail of a comet and I was whirled along at the end of it. The devil—but it was cold in this world we traversed! These immortals put up with a rarefied and glacial atmosphere. But it was delightful all the same—this icy air. I could tell that, even in the brief moment that elapsed before I lost my senses, A bitter-sharp and steel-bright icy gaiety coursed through me and a desire to laugh as shrilly and wildly and unearthily as Mozart had done. But then breath and consciousness failed me.