I have been reading over his kindly and playful sayings about me in this
book, which are veracious enough in the main substance of them, and it
hurts me to think that I shall never go round to the Crown with him any
more, or sit with him again in a café in Berlin. It was there, at the
Embergshalle, that I found a poem of mine which is called "Emmy," but it
was not for the sake of "material," or for those "impressions and
sensations" of which he speaks, that I went about with him, but for the
sake of the things themselves; and I wondered if he realized it. So what
pleases me most now is when he says that he never thought of my books,
or of myself as a literary man, when we were together. It was because he
was so much more, in his way, than a literary man, that I cared for him
so much, and it was of things more intimate than books that I liked to
talk with him.
His ideas were always his own, and seemed to most people to be
eccentric. He had come to them by way of his own experience, or by
deduction from the experience of others whom he had learned to know from
inside. His mind was stubborn; you saw it in his dogged face, in which
the thin lips were pressed tightly together and the eyes fixed level. He
was rarely turned out of his ground by an argument, for he avoided
debating about things that he did not know. I never saw him conscious of
the beauty of anything; I do not think he read much, or cared for books.
His talk was generally cynical, and he believed in few people and few
opinions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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