“And this was also (aside, naturally, from my Freudian lascivity as an infant, and so on) my first erotic stirring; more precisely: it intimately involved my first conscious erotic stirring . . . but don’t be so foolish as to let out an ‘Aha!’ (uttered with pleasurably closed eyes and leaving an aftertaste)—This delight, I tell you, was transcendental . . . You can believe me: I have since relived those moments thousands of times: I have had every chance for conscientious analysis. In the foreground—inundating me with a hot wave of blood—was: mortification. Behind it, something else opened up, and there the erotic budded. But needless to say, at the time I did not realize what it was. I merely sensed it. From then on, it was to remain in me as a certain urge, however ineffable.

“The connection between it and the yowling and neighing of my little schoolmates was as distant as that between, say, a cyclone and a solar flare. Sure, it had an immediate and painful effect. I saw the shaking and rolling of the little shorn skulls, the obscenely gaping mouth-caverns and red ears dissolving into a rainbow-sparkling radiance in a monstrance of tears, heard their roar through a sharp droning in my ears, tickled by a sobbing from my throat. Nevertheless, this was, so to speak, a straightforward matter: it erected the wall that separated me once and for all from any kind of fellowship, barricaded me outside the much-lauded community in which the others lived so well, so self-complacently. I, for my little part, was now assigned my destined place. I felt as lonesome and abandoned as the ace of spades in the hollow of a not yet apperceived recognition. And I was mockingly watched by the eyes of that model Florentine girl whom Miss Fern had planted as an anima in my soul . . . and my hatred of her moved into my dear endocrine glands and settled there for all time. Hatred: the “measuring emotion,” as Stella so accurately put it. I knew that I would get my revenge. Understand me: Not on the dolts who laughed at me. They were already forgiven, for they knew not what they did. I wanted to take revenge on myself—revenge for the unforgiveable foolishness of my innocence.

“And that is why, dearest friend, this humiliating early experience regrettably did not have an edifying poetic consequence. I did not tarry in majestic isolation, filling the hollow of a not yet apperceived recognition with zealous study, safeguarding the dangerous terrain of the emotional world with solid knowledge—like for example you, honored friend, or like Cousin Wolfgang surprisingly enough on one fine day (which sadly Providence didn’t allow him to survive long either).

“No, for me that Arcadian land of culture has always been a steppe, in which I roam hungrily amidst the rubble of lost realities and howl at the moon in the cold leftover fire pits of departed nomads: still in the hollow of a not apperceived recognition, do you understand? . . . And even that just the core hidden in my being (but then I don’t have to tell you that): My vital self deserted with flying colors and joined the ruffians. For even though the laughter of my tormentors had irrevocably barred me from their community, I became the leader of their brutality. For twelve long years, I was the conductor of their collective baseness. Whenever anyone more finely textured, helpless, apparently awkward wandered into the common lowlands and stimulated the collective mirth, it was I who sounded the alarm with a first splutter from snot-clogged nostrils and thus gave the signal for a frenetic collective invitation.