FRIENDS OF HIS YOUTH
147
only the best epochs know; and entering into the world in those days,
even in coming round the very first corner one felt the breath of the
spirit on one's cheeks.
The music that Ulrich and Clarisse had heard while they
were outside, talking, sometimes stopped without their noticing it.
Walter then went to the window. He could not see the two of them,
but he felt that they were only just beyond the limits of his field of
vision. He was tormented by jealousy. The base intoxication of
sluggishly sensual music lured him back. The piano behind his back
lay open like a bed that had been rumpled by a sleeper who did
not want to wake because he did not want to face reality. He was
racked by the jealousy of one who is paralyzed and feels how the
able-bodied walk; and he could not bring himself to join them, for
his
anguish left him no way of defending himself against them.
When Walter got up in the morning and had to hurry to the
office, when he talked to people during the day and when he traveled
home among them in the afternoon, he felt that he was a significant
personality .and called to great things. He believed then that he saw
everything differently; he would be moved by things that others
passed by unheedingly, and where others reached out for something
unheedingly, for him the very movement of his own arm was full
of spiritual adventure or of the paralysis of self-love. He was sensitive,
and his feelings were always moved by broodings, full of depressions,
billowing dales and hills; he was never indifferent, but saw fortune
or misfortune in everything ,and so always had occasion for vivid
thoughts. Such people exert an unusual attraction over others, be–
cause the moral motion in which they continuously find themselves
is
transmitted to those others. In their conversation everything as–
sumes a personal significance; and because one can be continuously
preoccupied with oneself in one's association with them, they provide
a pleasure that one can otherwise obtain only from a psychoanalyst
or an individual psychologist-and for a fee-with the further dif–
ference that in the latter case one feels ill, whereas Walter made it
possible for people to appear very important to themselves for reasons
that had previously escaped their attention. With this quality of
spreading intellectual preoccupation with oneself, he had also con-
