I reach to embrace you, I dream of touching your heart with my fingers, But I am a stranger, wandering always; Wistful and coldly mocking your dull faces As you slip from my arms like a shadow; Hating and laughing at your little sacredness... For you will not know me... Only the dark trees know me and the white stars And the friendless night that comes smiling to me for comfort, And the cold wind that warms itself in my heart. For you have sent me, doomed me to wander, And only they know me—the far-away things. Only they come to me, Taking my hate and my love into their vastness. And sometime you will hear the things I have spoken to them— Unsaid things of myself and of you— Coming out of their distances; Tears for your sorrow and wild laughters for your joy. And then you will know me Even as they knew me: Not as an exile singing But as a part of your soul that wandered away. “Splendid Isolation”[3] JOHN GRIMES He might have removed mountains or carved out empires; instead he turns his nails against provincial society and scratches. Pechorin—egoist, self-seeker, hater, superman in swaddlings—stifled to madness by the air of Russia, bled of energy, his idealism thwarted; fearing to raise his head from the ashes and launch against circumstance, there was nothing in all Holy Russia that could test his soul in supreme activity. He lacked the moral courage that forced the sons of the fathers into revolution. There was left mockery, and the insulting of the soul with puny wickedness, vapid and provincial. So genius was poured into the mould of the commonplace. Pechorin sought a splendid isolation. He killed humanity in his heart, became a creature of self, and began to hate as sincerely as a revengeful, spoiled child. His hatred becomes sordid vindictiveness; his emotions correspond to tantrums. He feeds upon the ruined hopes and the despair of society, making himself “an author of middle-class tragedies.”