Neither father, nor mother, nor grandmother, nor the sisters would have thought of reproaching me with something. And this was perfectly horrible! At that time when I, with all the ignorance of a child, wanted to go to Spain and father brought me home, I had promised myself that would never sadden him again anything similar, and now it had turned out so very differently and so much worse! I was not concerned about my future or about a job; I could have obtained this any time. Now, with matters being as they were, the thing for me to do was not to turn sideways off my path, but to set on that course right now and for ever on the other end of which were those ideals which I bore within the deepest depth of my heart since my boyhood: To become an author, to become a poet! Learning, learning, learning! To work myself up by what is great, beautiful, noble, out of my present deep and low state! To get to know the world as a stage, and the people who swarm on it! And in the end of this hard, laborious life, to write for that other stage, for the theatre, to solve, there, the mysteries which had captured me since my earliest childhood and which, though I felt them then, I was still far, far, far from comprehending! The process which formed those thoughts and intentions within me was not at all clearly, shortly, and concisely expressing itself, oh no, because inside of me there was now the very opposite of clarity; it was night; there were only a few free moments when I saw further than the present day would allow me. This night was not entirely dark; it had the faint light of dawn. And strangely, it only extended over the soul, not the mind as well. My soul was ill, not my mind. I possessed the capability to make every logical conclusion, to solve every mathematical problem. I had the keenest insight in everything unconnected with my inner self; but as soon as something approached me, to interact with me, this insight stopped. I was not able to inspect myself, to understand myself, to guide and control myself. Just occasionally, a moment came which granted me the ability to know what I wanted, and then, this wish was my only desire until the next one of these moments came. This was a condition I had never observed before in another human being and never read about in any book. And mentally, I was very well aware of this condition of the soul, but did not possess the power to alter and even less to overcome it. I developed the realization that I no longer was one whole, but a split personality, very much according to the new doctrine, that man is not an individual, but a drama. In this drama, there were several characters, acting out their parts, who at some time were entirely indistinguishable and then again took on their very well distinguished forms.