“So then,” he says, without for a second taking his eyes off me during the whole of our conversation, “so then, you can manage to look at everything in life as an object of observation and severe minute analysis?”
“Yes, I can. Predominance of the thinking over the emotional faculties is a characteristic of my brain.”
“Don’t you consider this a disadvantage to you? Such constant vigilance must deprive you of all directness in feeling.”
“To some extent, yes. But this want of directness is fully compensated by the very process of observation and analysis, which are a source of intense pleasure to me. Besides, in the place of mere intensity of impression, I attain a far wider range; for my mind has the pleasure of perceiving and discriminating certain nice shades, which escape the notice of others.”
A smile rises to Roslawski’s lips, and I feel my soul freezing within me.
And now, summer is dead and gone: withered with suffering and desire, the flame-red flower of Life has fallen to the ground. Now once more the infinite ice-plains are stretching all around me. Behold the sun quenched in the black sky, and the greenish Northern Lights rising above the horizon. And my ice-cold dreams, that had died, now come to life again. And see! that Soul of mine, which trampled my flowers beneath her feet, girds up her loins and goes forth into the snowy Infinite, priding herself upon her sorry triumph, and singing joyously her lofty and sublime hymn to Death!
Oh, how terrible it is, when the Soul is victorious! How terrible!
The weather has changed very suddenly; it is nearly as warm as in summer, and the leaves seem to have turned yellow with heat.
I am coming home from the office, alone and forsaken by all.
I am dreaming (like a dream indeed it is) of the boundless fields, the picturesque ridges, the dark forests and fragrant meadows of Klosow. I see the park, too, with its neatly-trimmed shrubberies and lofty trees; their bare trunks and leafy tops forming a canopy high overhead under the sky, and the foliage turning yellow or red in the sunny glare. The pond, too, do I see—so large that it may be called a lake—the pond, bleak and desolate in the moonless, starless night; that night, when I broke away from the magic spell of Life, and slew my own felicity with my own hands.