Reflections: Various Variations on Old Themes

monument to the stretch of life that has vanished into eternity. In it will be recorded how much of myself I have buried. But the Iliad of an ordinary man, who has accomplished nothing, will be boring, and our life now flows across such a prosaic, smoothly mown field, so full of prudence and caution, etc. etc. I do not believe this; no, life is just as diverse, bright, and full of poetry, passions, and collisions as the existence of knights in the Middle Ages, or the existence of the Romans and the Greeks. And what kind of accomplishments are we talking about? He who has lived with mind and heart, who has spent a sultry youth, who has humanly suffered with every suffering and sympathized with every ecstasy, who can point to a woman and say "here is my companion," and to a man and say "here is my friend"—he has accomplished something. "Every human being," says Heine, "is a universe that is born with him and dies with him; under every tombstone is buried a whole world history"—and the history of every existence holds its own interest. Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Teniers, and the entire Flemish school understood this. The interest consists in the spectacle of the spirit's development under the influence of time, circumstances, and accidents that stretch or shorten its normal, general direction.

Some secret force compelled me to live: there is little of my own in this; the time was chosen for me, and my domain is within it; I have no past on earth, nor will I have a future in a few years. Where this body comes from, the strength of which Hamlet marveled at, I do not know. But life is my natural right; I manage it as its master, I push my "I" into everything surrounding me, I struggle with it, I open my soul to everything, I absorb the whole world with it, I melt it down as if in a crucible, I realize my connection with humanity, with infinity—and it is said that the history of this cultivation, from childish spontaneity, from this peaceful sleep on a mother's breast, to consciousness, to the demand for participation in everything human, to an independent life—is devoid of interest. It cannot be!

But enough.

With delight, I will relive my 25 years, I will become a child again with a bare neck, I will sit down at the primer; then I will meet him