I shall relate what happened since I have no other purpose here but to ramble on topsy turvy just to keep myself amused, like a child with a shuttlecock, with the recollection of bygone years — to throw out little pictures which each person more or less stores up in the piggy bank of his memory, But if I wish to sing “Achilles’ destructive anger”⁹ I must first of all decide whether or not I have to present the naked truth or, lending it background, toss it out with flowers of fantasy. Truth stings the eyes and can prick the ears. Every person who tells a story should remember this. But again, on the other hand, it’s a bad thing always to chase after flowers and only after flowers, just to scatter them around, to adorn and decorate with them lest it happen that the altar isn’t worth the adornment nor the adornment worth the altar. Only beautiful truth! Truth, truth — a great word.¹⁰ But truth is like fire: it warms, but it also burns. Would that those people who like to call themselves truth-sayers recognized this fact and remembered it. They seek praise and glory in truth. More than one of them boastingly proclaims: “I told him the truth till it hurt!” Bravo! You cut like a surgeon, you shoved a probe into the wound without regard for the patient’s illness. But was this cutting absolutely necessary? Did you have the healing balsam at the same time in your other hand? That’s the question… that’s right, it’s a great question. Just as whether the truth with which you force your way into the depths of the heart, with which you disturb free thought, with which — like a second destiny — you knock someone’s life from its old course and then hurl it onto a new one, with which sometimes you squash the whole life of the soul, squash it into pulp like the berry that falls under your foot and which afterward God alone can return to its old form, its old essence, its old color — whether this truth, I say, is the real truth? Or is it the fruit of just your own personal reasoning, a reasoning subject to errors, for though a truth-sayer you are nothing more than a man. And if you still gild your sentence with friendship, if you strengthen by confidence in that friendship the person who is reeling under your blow; if you didn’t first consider whether or not the revelation of some imagined but painful truth is absolutely necessary; if finally you have in hand remedial means but withhold them — then you are without a heart for you gratify your delight in other people’s misery and you are without reason for you are acting without a goal. Why deprive me of faith in others and myself if a lack of trust is unable to make up for anything? Why do you want to shatter and destroy my delusions if they weren’t harmful to anyone, and reality can’t help me or anyone else? Why don’t you permit me sleep when I doze off on the remnants of my happiness or my hopes if you’re not in a position to give me any better place to rest? Why do you extinguish the torch which lit up the distant future to me with its glow if in your poverty you can’t afford a single small spark? Why do you reckon in my ears all the javelins hurled at me when you don’t protect me from then and I can’t avoid them? What for? Why? For what reason? I could ask myself a thousand times over again but I would always have to answer — because you like to splash, linger, and delight in the warn bath of satisfaction with your own superiority, because you like to have people bowing and scraping all around you, because it’s only then that you see yourself higher.