I have no more board games and dice games, pointed shoes and modish clothes to throw into the flames. I do not need to jostle with the others at the church of Saint Sebaldus. How potent the words of that fiery monk Johannes Capistranus though! The great unrest he has caused in the feelings of the people in this town has laid hold of me too. I have not been able to defend myself against them and so here I sit on St Lawrence's day in the year of the fall of Byzantium and write down what I experienced in my youth when the crown belonging to the German people was almost lost and when I too was led to fight for it along with others. While the town heaves and swells and thunders like a far-off sea, I am writing what the gentle voice once said that set me so soon on the way through life and that penetrated both my ear and heart in the wildest and the most anarchic of times. I am from an old and resourceful Nuremberg family. I studied, not without diligence and understanding, law in Prague before moving to Leipzig when the Hussite heresy began to trouble us. I wielded my sword for my town and the Empire, had command of the town of Gleven in hard-fought battles and was the town's envoy to the Republic of Venice and to the Queen of Naples, Joanna the Second. Marsilio Ficino called me his friend and Cosimo de' Medici took me into his Platonic Academy in Florence. I am master of my own body and master in my own house. I am a wealthy man and am tired of life. Tired of life? Perhaps not, but I have had many long years of experiencing it and Brother Johannes at St Sebaldus today has nothing to tell me. Truly I am not tired of life, but like the saintly bishop of Hippo, Aurelius Augustinus, I know that the games of grown-ups are called business and, as I early rejected the games of my youth, so I have now foresworn the games of adults. I am now at peace by the grace of God. At peace! I am still pleased with my great and splendid alma mater, its art and its cleverness, the favour and the fame it enjoys among nations. I take pleasure in remembering the beauty of the world, how, for instance, I can bring to mind the shining of the Tyrrhenian sea in the sunshine even today. I take pleasure in the noble men and women who have met with me under Germany's sky as well as that of Italy. Truly I have seen much in the world, truly I have lived and live still. Only today it is not of the earth's splendour I write under this tolling of bells occasioned by one who is preaching atonement at the church of Saint Sebaldus.