I would have liked to keep silent about these religious conditions, but was not allowed to, because it is my task, to say everything honestly, what influenced me in my internal and external development. This Christianity of the seminary seemed to me to be without soul to the same extent as it was seeking conflict. It did not satisfy and nevertheless pretended to be the only pure, true teaching. How poor and how godforsaken did this make a person feel! The others did not even accept this as a disaster; they were indifferent; but I, who required religious love, felt sick from the cold and withdrew into my self. Here also, I grew increasingly lonelier, and even more, much more than at home. And here, I became even more of a stranger to my grade than I had been there. This was partially due to the conditions, but also partially due to myself. I knew much more than my fellow students. I may say so without being suspected of bragging. Because what I knew was nothing but a mess, an unregulated, unsystematic accumulation of knowledge, which did not benefit me in the least, but only burdened me. Whenever I might have let anyone notice something of my unfruitful masses of information, I was stared at in amazement and laughed at. They felt instinctively that I was less enviable than lamentable. The others, most of them the sons of teachers, might not have learnt as much as I, but what they had learnt was firmly stored and well arranged in the chambers of their memory, always ready to be used. I felt that I was very disadvantaged compared to them and yet resisted to admit that much to myself and them. The quiet and busy main part of my work most of all consisted of putting my poor head in order, and this, unfortunately, took more time than I wished. Whatever I built up, kept on falling down. It was like exhaustingly digging through a pile of snow, which kept on caving in. And in all this, there was one contradiction which simply could not be removed. This was the contradiction between my extraordinarily fruitful imagination and the dryness and absolute lack of poetry in the form of teaching practised here. At that time, I was still much too young, to realize, where this dryness came from. They did not teach that much of what had to be learnt, but rather the manner in which we had to learn. We were taught to learn. Once we understood this, the rest was easy. We were given lots of bones; therefore our lessons were so almost painfully dry. But out of these bones, the skeletons of the individual sciences were combined, the flesh of which was to be added later. But with me, the very opposite had occurred up to now: I had gathered a huge amount of flesh, but not a single sustaining, supporting bone to go with it. My knowledge lacked a firm bone-structure. In respect to my mental possessions, I was a squid, which had neither internally nor externally something to hold on to, and therefore also no place to feel at home. And the