“I have no comment,” the optician replied. “That’s Luisa’s business. Don’t you have anything better to do than get involved in her business?”

“No,” the shopkeeper and Farmer Häubel’s granddaughter said in chorus.

“Unfortunately,” Elsbeth said.

The optician sighed. “That she’s in love with him is a bit of an exaggeration, she hardly knows him.”

“But you don’t need to know someone to love them,” Elsbeth said.

“Do you know more?” Farmer Häubel’s granddaughter asked.

“Of course,” said the optician. He cleared his throat. “Knowledge is living in unwavering serenity.”

The shopkeeper packed the optician’s heat patches into  a bag. “Now, that sounds a lot like celibacy,” he remarked.

The optician walked around reciting his quotes and annoying everyone in the village every bit as much as Friedhelm had with his song about the lovely Westerwald.

The optician had been trying to use Buddhism to get the upper hand with his inner voices when they became insufferably loud, especially after ten o’clock at night. But it didn’t work any better than trying to tame them with the smoky sayings on postcards from the county seat.

At ten o’clock, after setting his corduroy slippers on the bedside rug, the optician stretched out on his bed, which was big enough for exactly one person.

When the optician was a child, his mother had always told him that if he put all his worries into his slippers at night, they wouldn’t be there in the morning. It had never worked, because his inner voices believed themselves better than mere worries that would be satisfied with slippers as lodgings.

The voices regularly reproached the optician for everything he’d done wrong or hadn’t done at all. They chose random events from every period of his life and threw them at his slipperless feet. It didn’t matter to them in the slightest that these were things he hadn’t done precisely because the voices had advised against doing them; they reproached him with everything he hadn’t done whether or not it was on account of them.

“When you were six you didn’t jump over the Apfelbach River, even though everyone else did,” they rebuked him, for example.

“But you told me it was a bad idea,” the optician objected.

“That’s completely irrelevant,” they replied. It was always the voices and not the optician who decided what was relevant.

Their favorite topic was Selma. “How long has it been now, that you haven’t dared tell her you love her?” they smirked.

“You know exactly how long,” the optician said. “No one knows better than you.”

“Tell us,” they insisted.

“But you always advised me not to,” the optician exclaimed.