"Look at me when I take off my mask! My face twitches convulsively, like the face of a man who has taken poison. I have indeed taken poison; I have swallowed the great poison ball, the ball called Earth.... I am like a hollow tree, charred by a _fantastic fire_. When the worms in the intestines of the Ego--anger, ecstasy, love, and the like--begin to crawl about in me and devour each other, I look down upon them from the height of my Ego, I cut them in pieces as if they were polypi and fasten them into each other. Then I look on at myself looking on. This repeats itself _ad infinitum_. What is the use of it all? Mine is not the usual idealism, the idealism of faith; mine is _an idealism of the heart_, peculiar to those who have often experienced all the emotions, on the stage, on paper, or in real life. But of what good is it?... I often look upon the mountains and the rivers and the ground round about me, and feel as if at any moment they might dissolve and disappear, and I with them.... There is in man a callous, bold spirit, which asserts its independence of everything, even of virtue. Man chooses virtue if he will; he is its creator, not its creature. I once experienced a storm at sea, when the raging, foaming waters lashed themselves into great crested billows, while from a calm sky the sun serenely looked on. So be it with you! The heart is the storm, the sky the Ego!... Do you believe that the authors of tragedies and novels, or at any rate the geniuses among them, who a thousand times over have aped everything human and divine, are different from me? What really sustains them and the others is their hunger for money and renown.... The apes are the geniuses amongst the beasts, and geniuses are apes in their æsthetic mimicry, in heartlessness, malignity, sensuality, and--gaiety." He relates how an inclination which was simply the result of ennui had led him to seduce his friend's sister. "I lost nothing; in me there is no innocence. I gained nothing, for I hate sensual pleasure. The broad black shadow which some call remorse quickly blotted out the fleeting bright picture of the magic-lantern; but is the black worse for the eyes than the bright?"