For the first time, after all I had encountered, I knew what suffering could be. It is still at moments an agony as of hell to recall this and the other thought that then stung me like a white-hot arrow: the shafts have long been drawn out, but the barbed heads are still there. I neither stormed nor maddened. I only felt a freezing hand lay hold of my heart, and gripe it closer and closer till I should have sickened, but that the pain ever stung me into fresh life; and ever since I have gone about the world with that hard lump somewhere in my bosom into which the griping hand and the griped heart have grown and stiffened. I fled at once back to my solitary house, looking for no relief in its solitude, only the negative comfort of escaping the eyes of men. I could not bear the sight of my fellow-creatures. To say that the world had grown black to me, is as nothing: I ceased---I will not say _to believe_ in God, for I never dared say that mighty thing--but I ceased to hope in God. The universe had grown a negation which yet forced its presence upon me--death that bred worms. If there were a God anywhere, this universe could be nothing more than his forsaken moth-eaten garment. He was a God who did not care. Order was all an invention of phosphorescent human brains; light itself the mocking smile of a Jupiter over his writhing sacrifices. At times I laughed at the tortures of my own heart, saying to it, ‘Writhe on, worm; thou deservest thy writhing in that thou writhest. Godless creature, why dost thou not laugh with me? Am I not merry over thee and the world--in that ye are both rottenness to the core?’ The next moment my heart and I would come together with a shock, and I knew it was myself that scorned myself.