O such a small thing! Pooh! I have fattened up, though my cock still cannot cast its shadow and rarely comes out. Why bring up, fuss over, mess with, such a small thing? pshaw! small lie, small confusion, a little weakness, brief forgetting, tiny distortion . . . I return like someone on a swing . . .

Mad Meg in the Maelstrom

If I bent every hair on the head of history in the same way, its skull would he cheerful and curly.

Well, I saw him often after that: at his home, occasionally in the park where he walked, and of course in that absurd great hall where he lectured.

Look at me, Kohler. I’m small, eh? even tiny, you might say. Yet I’ve the bones of a giant. I limp. You see? I limp. Yet I’ve enormous speed. My voice is high, ja? feminine, some call it—all right—I’ve overheard the jokes—it’s light, it’s thin. But it strikes a blow like a truncheon. Then my head, Kohler—see?—my head is white where it isn’t bald; my face is bent and creased and quite caved in. And my eyes protrude; my nose is hairy. Hah—shit—god. Ugly, ja? And I’ve this sickness inside me. Yet I am handsome as a Prussian prince, and like them, immoderately loved. Oh, Kohler—greatness—let me tell you, Kohler, because they’ve got it all wrong—greatness—greatness doesn’t lie in health or size or stride or carriage. Hoo—no—tee hee, William, tee hee—how absurd. Running, jumping, throwing spears or inscribing lead plates . . . god-a-mercy. Greatness doesn’t rest on any quality of thought or kind of mind like a teaspoon on a table: on subtlety—hebe jeebee Joseph—on precocity or quickness—jammay! kiddies, what a concept!—ah! on the strange, unique, original, profound, then—such holy ghosts, eh?—or the vast and threatening Sublime somehow—what immaculate blah!

I had to walk quickly to keep up, I remember. Tabor half-skipped, milling his arms, turning his torso back and forth—facing front, then facing me as I tried to stay alongside. He was like a pointed stick you might spin to start a fire.