Pistorius interpreted it as follows: “The swing, which sent you up into the air, is the great property of mankind, which everyone possesses. It is the feeling of close relationship with the springs of every force, but it soon causes anxiety. It is cursedly dangerous! For that reason most people willingly renounce flying, preferring to walk according to prescribed laws along the footpath. But not you. You fly higher, as befits an intelligent fellow. And behold, you make a wonderful discovery there, namely, you gradually get the mastery over the impelling force. In other words, you acquire a fine little force of your own, an instrument, a rudder. That is splendid. Without that one goes floating into the air without any will of one’s own; madmen, for instance, do that. They have deeper presentiments than the people on the footpath. But they have no key and no rudder, they fall whistling through the air, down into the fathomless depths. But you, Sinclair, you manage all right! And how, pray? You probably don’t even know. You manage with a new instrument, with a breath regulator. And now you can see, that your soul isn’t really ‘personal’ at bottom. I mean that you didn’t invent this regulator. It isn’t new. It is a loan, it has existed for thousands of years. It is the balancing organ fish have--the air-bladder. Even to-day we actually still have a few very rare kinds of fish whose air-bladder is at the same time a sort of lung; and on occasion can use it to breathe with. In your dream you made use of your lungs in exactly the same way as these fish do their air-bladder.” He even brought me a volume on zoölogy, and showed me the original drawings of these ancient fish. And with a peculiar thrill I felt an organ of early evolutionary epochs functioning in me. CHAPTER SIX JACOB WRESTLES WITH GOD I cannot relate in brief all that I learned from the singular musician Pistorius about Abraxas. The most important result of his teaching was that I made a further step forward on the road to self-realization. I was then about eighteen years old. I was a young man rather out of the ordinary, precocious in a hundred things, in a hundred other things backward and helpless. When from time to time I used to compare myself with others, I was often proud and conceited, but just as frequently I felt depressed and humiliated. I had often looked upon myself as a genius, often as half mad. I could not share the pleasures and life of the fellows of my age, and often I heaped reproaches on myself and was consumed with cares, thinking I was hopelessly cut off from them, and that life was closed to me. Pistorius, himself full-grown and an eccentric, taught me to preserve my courage and my self-esteem. In constantly finding some value in my words, in my dreams, in the play of my imagination and in my ideas, in taking them seriously and discussing them, he set me an example.