XXI.
Thus violently absorbing though the mental condition here suggested was, it was not permanent. It was childish and child-like by virtue of my years; the riper expressions which I here make use of to describe it always seem on the verge of distorting its character. My faith in my lucky star barely persisted a few years unassailed. My childish idea had been very much strengthened when, at fifteen years of age, in the first part of my finishing examination, I received Distinction in all my subjects, and received a mighty blow when, at seventeen, I only had Very Good in five subjects, thus barely securing Distinction for the whole.
I ceased to preoccupy myself about my likeness to Petsjórin after having recovered from a half, or quarter, falling in love, an unharmonious affair, barren of results, which I had hashed up for myself through fanciful and affected reverie, and which made me realise the fundamental simplicity of my own nature,--and I then shook off the unnatural physiognomy like a mask. Belief in my own unbounded superiority and the absolutely unmeasured ambition in which this belief had vented itself, collapsed suddenly when at the age of eighteen, feeling my way independently for the first time, and mentally testing people, I learnt to recognise the real mental superiority great writers possess. It was chiefly my first reading of the principal works of Kierkegaard that marked this epoch in my life. I felt, face to face with the first great mind that, as it were, had personally confronted me, all my real insignificance, understood all at once that I had as yet neither lived nor suffered, felt nor thought, and that nothing was more uncertain than whether I might one day evince talent. The one certain thing was that my present status seemed to amount to nothing at all.