But out where I was, under the twinkling heavens, and on a snow-covered height, round about which there gleamed a white, frozen plain, my Ego burst away from its relationships (while in connection with them it was no more than an attribute, a quality), and it became a personage--a separate entity. And then I could look upon myself. All marked points of time--stanzas as it were, or music phrases, of existence--new years' days for example, and birthdays, lift man high out of and up above the waves which are round him; he clears the water from his eyes, and looks about him, and says--"How the current has been carrying me along, drowning my hearing, and blinding my sight! Those are the waves, down there, onward, which have been bearing me along, and these, now coming toward me, when I dip down among them, will whirl me away!" Without this clear, distinct consciousness of one's Ego, there can be no freedom, and no calm equanimity amid the crowding elbowing tumult of the world. I shall go on with my story. I stood upon an iceberg, but my soul was all aglow--the cloven moon shone brightly down, and the shadows of the pine-trees about me lay, like dismembered limbs of the night, black upon the lily ground of snow. Away, some distance from me, a man seemed to be kneeling motionless on the ground. And now 12 o'clock struck, and 1794, year of war and tumult, fell, with all its rivers of blood, into the ocean of eternity; the booming after-tone of the bell seemed to say to me, "Now has Destiny, with the twelfth stroke of her hammer, knocked down the old year to you, poor perishing mortals, at her auction of minutes." The kneeling man now stood up and went quickly away. I could long see him and his shadow disappearing in the moonlight. I left my height, the boundary hill between two years, and went down to where the man had been kneeling. I found a crucifix and a black leather prayer-book in duodecimo, all thumbed yellow, except one leaf at the beginning on which was the name of the owner, whose knees had worn deep traces in the ice. I knew him well, he was a cottager whose two sons had had to go to the war. On looking more closely, I found he had drawn a circle in the snow, to keep off evil spirits.