Please forgive me, but I can’t see to it at once; I have something else I must do, but perhaps you’ll wait for me down by the entrance and walk home with me.” So saying, he gave me his hand, a slender and delicate hand that touched my fingers more lightly than a glove, and then turned in a friendly manner to the next student.

I waited outside the entrance for ten minutes, my heart beating fast. What was I to say if he asked after my studies, how could I confess that I had never thought about poetry much in either my work or my hours of leisure? Would he not despise me, even exclude me without more ado from that ardent circle which had so magically surrounded me today? But no sooner did he appear, rapidly striding closer with a smile, than his presence dispelled all my awkwardness, and I confessed unasked (unable to conceal anything about myself from him) to the way in which I had wasted my first term. Yet again that warm and sympathetic glance dwelt on me. “Well, music has rests as well as notes,” he said with an encouraging smile, and obviously intent on not shaming my ignorance further he turned to humdrum personal questions—where was my home, where was I going to lodge here? When I told him that I had not yet found a room he offered his help, suggesting that I might like to enquire first in the building where he himself lived; a half-deaf old lady had a nice little room to rent, and any of his students who took it had always been happy there. He’d see to everything else himself, he said; if I really showed that I meant what I said about taking my studies seriously, he would consider it a pleasant duty to help me in every way. On reaching his rooms he once again offered me his hand and invited me to visit him at home next evening, so that we could work out a programme of study for me together. So great was my gratitude for this man’s unhoped-for kindness that I merely shook his hand respectfully, raised my hat in some confusion, and forgot to say even a word of thanks.


Of course I immediately rented the little room in the same building. I would have taken it even if it had not appealed to me at all, solely for the naively grateful notion of being physically closer to this captivating man, who had taught me more in an hour than anyone else I had ever heard. But the room was charming anyway: on the attic floor above my professor’s own lodgings, it was a little dark because of the overhanging wooden gables, and its window offered a panoramic view of the nearby rooftops and the church tower. There was a green square in the distance, and the clouds I loved at home sailed overhead. The landlady, a little old lady who was deaf as a post, looked after her lodgers with a touchingly maternal concern; I had come to an agreement with her within a couple of minutes, and an hour later I was hauling my suitcase up the creaking wooden stairs.

I did not go out that evening; I even forgot to eat or smoke. The first thing I did was to take the Shakespeare I happened to have packed out of my case and read it impatiently, for the first time in years. That lecture had aroused my passionate curiosity, and I read the poet’s words as never before. Can one account for such transformations? A new world suddenly opened up on the printed page before me, the words moved vigorously towards me as if they had been seeking me for centuries; the verse coursed through my veins in a fiery torrent, carrying me away, inducing the same strange sense of relaxation behind the brow as one feels in a dream of flight. I shook, I trembled, I felt the hot surge of my blood like a fever—I had never had such an experience before, yet I had done nothing but listen to an impassioned lecture. However, the exhilaration of that lecture must have lingered on within me, and when I read a line aloud I heard my voice unconsciously imitating his, the sentences raced on in the same headlong rhythm, my hands felt impelled to move, arching in the air like his own—as if by magic, in a single hour, I had broken through the wall which previously stood between me and the world of the intellect, and passionate as I was by nature, I had discovered a new passion, one which has remained with me to the present day: a desire to share my enjoyment of all earthly delights in the inspired poetic word. By chance I had come upon Coriolanus, and as if reeling in a frenzy I discovered in myself all the characteristics of that strangest of the Romans: pride, arrogance, wrath, contempt, mockery, all the salty, leaden, golden, metallic elements of the emotions. What a new delight it was to divine and understand all this at once, as if by magic! I read on and on until my eyes were burning, and when I looked at the time it was three-thirty in the morning. Almost alarmed by this new force which had both stirred and numbed my senses for six hours on end, I put out the light. But the images still glowed and quivered within me; I could hardly sleep with longing for the next day and looking forward to it, a day which was to expand the world so enchantingly opened up to me yet further and make it entirely my own.

Next day, however, brought disappointment. My impatience had made me one of the first to arrive at the lecture hall, where my teacher (as I will call him from now on) was to speak on English phonetics. Even as he came in I received a shock—was this the same man as yesterday, or was it only my excited mood and my memory that had made him a Coriolanus, wielding words in the Forum like lightning, heroically bold, crushing, compelling? The figure who entered the room, footsteps dragging slightly, was a tired old man. As if a shining but opaque film had been lifted from his countenance I now saw, from where I was sitting in the front row of desks, his almost unhealthily pallid features, furrowed by deep wrinkles and broad crevices, with blue shadows wearing channels away in the dull grey of his cheeks. Lids too heavy for his eyes shadowed them as he read his lecture, and the mouth, its lips too pale, too thin, delivered the words with no resonance: where was his merriment, where were the high spirits rejoicing in themselves? Even the voice sounded strange, moving stiffly through grey, crunching sand at a monotonous and tiring pace, as if sobered by the grammatical subject.

I was overcome by restlessness. This was not the man I had been waiting for since the early hours of the morning—where was the astrally radiant countenance he had shown me yesterday? This was a worn-out professor droning his way objectively through his subject; I listened with growing anxiety, wondering whether yesterday’s tone might return after all, the warmly vibrant note that had struck my feelings like a hand playing music, moving them to passion. Increasingly restless, I raised my eyes to him, full of disappointment as I scanned that now alien face: yes, this was undeniably the same countenance, but as if emptied, drained of all its creative forces, tired and old, the parchment mask of an elderly man. Were such things possible? Could a man be so youthful one minute and have aged so much the next? Did such sudden surges of the spirit occur that they could change the countenance as well as the spoken word, making it decades younger?

The question tormented me. I burned within, as if with thirst, to know more about the dual aspect of this man, and as soon as he had left the rostrum and walked past us without a glance, I hurried off to the library, following a sudden impulse, and asked for his works. Perhaps he had just been tired today, his energy muted by some physical discomfort, but here, in words set down to endure, I would find the key to his nature, which I found so curiously challenging, and the way to approach it. The library assistant brought the books; I was surprised to find how few there were.