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(always with the timidity of a child approaching a house haunted by demons) and found him so deep in thought that he failed to hear my knock, when suddenly, ashamed and dismayed, I stood before his self-forgetful figure, I felt as if it were only Wagner sitting there, a physical shell in Faust’s garment, while the spirit roamed mysterious chasms, visiting sinister ceremonies on Walpurgis Night. At such moments his senses were entirely sealed away; he heard neither an approaching footstep nor a timid greeting. Then, suddenly recollecting himself, he would start up and try to cover the awkwardness: he would walk up and down and try to divert my observant glance away from him by asking questions. But the darkness still shadowed his brow for a long time, and only his ardent discourse could disperse those clouds gathering from within.
    He must sometimes have felt how much the sight of him moved me, perhaps he saw it in my eyes, my restless hands, perhaps he suspected that a request for his confidence hovered unseen on my lips, or recognized in my tentative attitude a secret longing to take his pain into myself. Yes, surely he must feel it, for he would suddenly interrupt his lively conversation and look at me intently, and indeed the curious warmth of his gaze, darkened by its own depth, would pour over me. Then he would often grasp my hand, holding it restlessly for some time—and I always expected: now, now, now he is going to talk to me. But instead there was usually a brusque gesture, sometimes even a cold, intentionally deflating or ironic remark. He, who was enthusiasm itself, who nourished and aroused it in me, would suddenly strike it away from me as if marking a mistake in a poorly written essay, and the more he saw how receptive to him I was, yearning for his confidence, the more curtly would he make such icy comments as: “You don’t see the point,” or: “Don’t exaggerate like that,” remarks which angered me and made me despair. How I suffered from this man who moved from hot to cold like a bright flash of lightning, who unknowingly inflamed me, only to pour frosty water over me all of a sudden, whose exuberant mind spurred on my own, only to lash me with irony—I had a terrible feeling that the closer I tried to come to him, the more harshly, even fearfully he repelled me. Nothing could, nothing must approach him and his secret.
    For I realized more and more acutely that secrecy strangely, eerily haunted his magically attractive depths. I guessed at something unspoken in his curiously fleeting glance, which would show ardour and then shrink away when I gratefully opened my mind to him; I sensed it from his wife’s bitterly compressed lips, from the oddly cold, reserved attitude of the townspeople, who looked almost offended to hear praise of him—I sensed it from a hundred oddities and sudden moments of distress. And what torment it was to believe myself in the inner circle of such a life, and yet to be wandering, lost as if in a labyrinth, unable to find the way to its centre and its heart!
    However, it was his sudden absences that I found most inexplicable and agitating of all. One day, when I was going to his lecture, I found a notice hanging up to say that there would be no classes for the next two days. The students did not seem surprised, but having been with him only the day before I hurried home, afraid he might be ill. His wife merely smiled dryly when my impetuous entrance betrayed my agitation. “Oh, this happens quite often,” she said, in a noticeably cold tone. “You just don’t know about it yet.” And indeed the other students told me that he did indeed disappear overnight like this quite often, sometimes simply telegraphing an apology; one of them had once met him at four in the morning in a Berlin street, another had seen him in a bar in a strange city. He would rush off all at once like a cork popping out of a bottle, and on his