Indeed, not long afterward it became one of the most popular human possibilities to subject oneself to a “regimen,” which may be applied with the same success to obesity as to politics and intellectual life. In a regimen, patience, obedience, regularity, equanimity, and other very tidy qualities become major components of a human being in his private condition, while everything that is unbridled, violent, intemperate, and dangerous, all qualities that he, as a wild romantic, cannot dispense with either, has its own excellent place in the regimen. Probably this strange inclination to subject oneself to a regimen, or to lead a strenuous, unpleasant, and paltry life according to the prescription of a doctor, athletic coach, or some other tyrant (even though one could ignore their dictates with equally unsuccessful results) is a by-product of the worker, warrior, and anthill state toward which the world is moving: but there lay the boundary Lindner was unable to cross, nor could he envisage it in his mind’s eye, because his Goethean heritage forbade it. To be sure, his piety was not of a sort that could not have been reconciled to this development; after all, he left the divine to God and undiluted saintliness to the saints; but he could not conceive of renouncing his personality, and the ideal he yearned for was a community of fully responsible moral personalities that, as God’s civil army, would of course struggle against the inconstancy of the lower nature and make a sanctum of everyday life, but would also decorate this sanctum with the great works of art and science. If someone had tallied the schedule of his days, he would have noticed that in every instance it added up to only twenty-three hours, so that sixty minutes of a full day were missing, and of these sixty minutes forty were invariably earmarked for conversation and kindly engagement with the aspirations and nature of other human beings, an endeavor that comprised visits to art exhibitions, concerts, and entertainments. He hated these events. Almost every time, their content offended his sensibility, and in his opinion these chaotic and overrated diversions were occasions for the notorious nervous disorder of the age, with its superfluous stimulants and genuine suffering, its insatiable appetite and its inconstancy, its curiosity and its unavoidable moral decay, to let off steam. He would even smile into his thin beard with dismay at the sight of flush-cheeked couples paying homage to the idols of culture. They did not know that the life force is enhanced by restriction and not by fragmentation. They all suffered from the fear of not having time for everything, and did not know that having time means precisely not having time for everything. Lindner had realized that the poor condition of people’s nerves is not due to the excessive pace of work, which in this age is presumed to be the culprit, but on the contrary to culture and humanitarianism, to breaks in routine, to interruptions in the day’s work, to the minutes of respite during which the individual wants to live his own life, looking for something he might regard as beautiful, or fun, or important: it is from these minutes that the miasmas of impatience, unhappiness, and meaninglessness arise. That was what he felt, and if he—or, more precisely, the visions that rose in his mind at such moments—had held sway, he would have swept all these temples of culture with an iron broom, and festivals of labor and edification, tightly bound to daily activities, would have taken the place of those supposed celebrations of mind and spirit; it really would have required no more than eliminating from an entire age a few minutes a day that owe their sick existence to a falsely understood liberality. But aside from making a few allusions, he had never summoned up the determination to advocate this seriously and in public.