It goes to my heart to part with people; even were it my sworn hereditary foe: one is going to see him no more. Pauline was anything but my sworn hereditary foe. Out in the streets there were more new year well-wishers going their rounds, the watchmen, who were giving utterance to their good wishes in wind instrumental music and miserable verse. Stiff, old-fashioned, rude verses always touch me more--particularly in an appropriate mouth--than your sapless, new poems, all tricked out with artificial flowers and ice-plants; poetry altogether wretched is better than the mediocre. I decided upon going through the town gate; my heart was filled with emotions of very different kinds--for you see it was only eleven o'clock and the cold night was full of stars. And it was the last night of the year, and I didn't want to pass from the old year to the new in sleep, though that is how I would pass from this life to the next. I resolved to take that flushed, throbbing heart of mine out of the streets, and to a quieter company. Place a man in some waste Sahara desert stretching further than the eye can reach, and afterwards pen him up into the narrowest of corners, he will be struck, in both cases, by the same vivid consciousness of his own individuality--the widest spaces and the narrowest have the same powerful effect in quickening our perception of our own Ego and of its relationship. There is nothing, on the whole, oftener forgotten than that which is what forgets--namely, the forgetter's _self_. Not only do the mechanical employments of labour and trade always draw men out of themselves, but the mental effort of study and investigation, also, renders scholars and philosophers just as deaf and blind to their own Ego, and its position with respect to other entities--deafer and blinder even. Nothing is more difficult than to convert an object of contemplation (which we always _move away_ to a certain distance from ourselves, and from the mind's eye, so as to bring the latter to bear on it properly) into an object of sensation, and to feel that the object is the eye itself. I have often read whole books on the subject of the Ego, and of printing, right through, until at last I saw, to my astonishment, that the Ego and the printed letters were before--me so to speak under my nose. Let the reader say truly: has he not even at this moment, while I have been talking, been forgetting that there are letters before him, ay, and his own Ego into the bargain?