If he could not avoid looking at him, he was almost always seized by disillusion. Every movement of Basini’s filled him with nausea, the blurred shadows of his illusions were replaced by a cold, blunt brightness; his soul seemed to shrink until nothing remained of it but the memory of an earlier desire, which now seemed unutterably incomprehensible and repellent. He pressed his foot against the floor and hunched over himself, just to escape the pain of that shame.

He wondered what the others would say to him if they knew his secret, what his parents, his teachers would say.

But that final astonishment regularly brought his torments to an end. He was overwhelmed by a cool fatigue; with a pleasant shiver, his hot, slack skin became taut once more. Then he calmly let everyone pass by. But he was filled with a certain disdain for them all. He secretly suspected everyone he spoke to of the most terrible things.

And aside from that he thought he detected an absence of shame in them. He didn’t think the others suffered as he knew he did. They seemed to lack the crown of thorns that his own pangs of conscience had placed upon his head.

But he felt like someone who had awoken from some profound agony. Like someone brushed by the hidden hands of disintegration. Like someone unable to forget the quiet wisdom of a lengthy illness.

He felt happy when he was in that state, and the moments when he longed for it returned again and again.

They began when he was able to look at Basini with indifference once again, and could endure his vile, repellent aspects with a smile. Then, while he knew that he was going to debase himself, he applied a new meaning to it. The uglier and more degrading what Basini offered him was, the greater was the contrast with the feeling of ailing refinement that set in later on.

Törless withdrew to some corner from which he was able to watch while remaining unseen. When he closed his eyes, he was filled with a vague sense of urgency, and when he opened them again he saw nothing to which it might relate. And then, all of a sudden, the thought of Basini grew vast and drew everything to itself. Soon it lost all definition. It seemed no longer to belong to Törless, and it seemed no longer to refer to Basini. It was surrounded by a whirl of emotions, as though by lascivious women in high-necked robes, with masks over their faces.

Törless knew none of them by name, nor did he know what any one of them concealed; but that was exactly where the intoxicating seductiveness lay. He no longer knew himself; and as a result his desire became a wild and contemptuous debauchery, as when, at some wanton party, the lights are suddenly extinguished and no one knows who it is that he is pulling to the ground and covering with kisses.

 

Later, once he had overcome the events of his youth, Törless became a young man with a very fine and sensitive mind. He became one of those aesthetic and intellectual characters upon whom respect for the law and, to some extent, for public morals, has a calming effect, relieving them of the need to think about anything coarse and remote from the finer things of the soul; but who, when asked to declare a more personal interest in the objects of morality and the law, bring to their grandiose outward show of correctness, with its hint of irony, a certain bored insensitivity. Because the interest which really does move them is focused solely upon the growth of their own soul, their own spirit or whatever we might choose to call that thing within us which is increased, now and then, by a thought between the words of a book or the sealed lips of a painting; that thing which sometimes awakens when some lonely, wilful melody drifts away from us and, as it disappears into the distance, tugs strangely at the thin scarlet thread of our blood which it trails behind it; but which has always vanished whenever we write up our files, manufacture machines, go to the circus or pursue a hundred similar occupations.

Such people, then, are extremely indifferent to any objects that challenge only their moral correctness. So, even later in life, Törless never felt any remorse for what had happened in those days. His needs had become so keenly and one-sidedly aesthetic that, had he been told a very similar tale of a lecher’s debaucheries, it would never have occurred to him to voice his outrage at such behaviour. Such a person would have warranted his contempt not for being a lecher, but for being nothing better than that; not for his debaucheries, but for the state of mind that allowed him to commit them; because he was stupid or because his intelligence lacked any spiritual counterweights - always, in short, because of the sad, deprived and pathetic prospect that he presented. And, similarly, he would have despised him whether his vice had consisted in sexual debaucheries or in compulsive and degenerate drinking or cigarette-smoking.

And like everyone whose sole concern is the intensification of his mental abilities, the mere presence of torrid and excessive impulses meant little to him. He liked to think that the capacity for enjoyment, artistic talents, the highly refined spiritual life, was a piece of jewellery upon which one could easily injure oneself. He thought it inevitable that someone with a rich and active inner life would have certain moments about which other people could know nothing, and memories that he kept in secret drawers. And of such a person he asked only that he should know how to make refined use of those moments later in life.

And so, when someone to whom he had told the story of his youth asked him whether he was not sometimes ashamed of that memory, he gave the following reply with a smile: ‘Of course I can’t deny that it was degrading. Why would I? The degradation passed. But something of it lingered for ever: that tiny quantity of poison that is needed to rid the soul of its overly calm, complacent health, and instead to give it a kind of health that is more refined, acute and understanding.

‘And would you wish to count the hours of degradation that are branded on the soul after any great passion? Just think of the hours of deliberate humiliation in love! Those enraptured hours that lovers spend leaning over certain deep wells, or placing their ears to one another’s hearts, listening for the sound of the great, unsettled cats clawing against the dungeon walls? Just to feel themselves trembling! Just to fear being alone above those dark, fiery depths! Just suddenly - out of fear of their own loneliness with those dark forces - to seek refuge within one another!

‘Just look into the eyes of young couples.