Look at that sun! It lies like gold over the grey wall of the town and the turret of the watchtower opposite my window. In my north-facing room it cannot of course penetrate, but I see it as I saw it in the days of my youth. Why is the monk at Saint Sebaldus preaching about the end of the world? The world won't come to an end because Constantinople has fallen into the hands of the heathen, because the Holy Roman Empire's fortresses are threatened, because poor mankind wanders into sin as it has to wander in pain and inexpressible misery! A friendly swaying moves the trees of my youth. They bow to each other over the gates that separate neighbours' gardens. The unsteady shadows of branch and leaf dance on the ground. The happy birds hop and flutter in the treetops. The summer flowers of my youth bloom in my garden and in the gardens of my neighbours. The world defends itself today as it did in olden days through beauty and loveliness against the words of the angry monk. Tolle! Lege! Take and read and understand rightly and take care not to attribute a false meaning to the word that is opened up to you and stands for your life and the life of your contemporaries! When Michael and I had become young men and played our part in torchlit dances and bearded masques, our neighbour's little girl slipped through the green hedge and came shyly and yet deliberately to the bower where we first sat with our teacher Theodoros Antoniades, exiled from Chios, whose evil star had led him, to prove a real blessing to me, to Nuremberg. In his flight from the Turks he had only been able to take with him a few rolled-up parchments and books he had written himself and his language, which was like a revelation to me and fell on my soul like a rainbow. I helped the homeless refugee to live and he taught me his Greek tongue and tried to teach it to my friend and would perhaps have managed it if the child had not stuck her curly little head into the green bower. Master Theodoros was just drawing his first gamma on the table with a piece of chalk when the child appeared and Greek went out of the window for the wild child Michael Groland von Laufenholz. He caught up the child with a laugh, lifted her, made much of her and disrupted the lesson in no uncertain way. I told him off severely, but he laughed all the more and the girl got no further than the alphabet. But his fate was decided thereby and so was mine.