1 Diapsalmata
1 DIAPSALMATA
ad se ipsum
Amitié, plaisir et bien,
Tout n’est que vent, que fumée:
Pour mieux dire, tout n’est rien.1
WHAT is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music. His fate is like that of those unfortunates who were slowly tortured by a gentle fire in Phalaris’s bull; their cries could not reach the tyrant’s ears to cause him dismay, to him they sounded like sweet music.2 And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ – that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.’ And the critics come forward and say: ‘That’s the way, that’s how the rules of aesthetics say it should be done.’ Of course, a critic resembles a poet to a hair, except he has no anguish in his heart, no music on his lips. So I tell you, I would rather be a swineherd at Amagerbro and be understood by the swine than a poet and misunderstood by people. […]
I prefer talking with children, with them one can still hope they may become rational beings; but those who have become that – Lord save us!
Aren’t people absurd! They never use the freedoms they do have but demand those they don’t have; they have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
I can’t be bothered. I can’t be bothered to ride, the motion is too violent; I can’t be bothered to walk, it’s strenuous; I can’t be bothered to lie down, for either I’d have to stay lying down and that I can’t be bothered with, or I’d have to get up again, and I can’t be bothered with that either. In short: I just can’t be bothered.
As everyone knows, there are insects which die in the moment of fertilization. Thus it is with all joy, life’s supreme and most voluptuous moment of pleasure is attended by death. […]
This is the main defect with everything human, that it is only through opposition that the object of desire is possessed. I shan’t speak of the various syndromes that can keep the psychologist busy (the melancholic has the best-developed sense of humour, the most extravagant person is often the one most prone to the picturesque, the dissolute one often the most moral, the doubter often the most religious), but simply recall that it is through sin that one first catches sight of salvation.
Besides my other numerous circle of acquaintances I have one more intimate confidant – my melancholy. In the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, he waves to me, calls me to one side, even though physically I stay put. My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known; what wonder, then, that I love her in return. […]
Old age realizes the dreams of youth; look at Swift: in his youth he built an asylum, in his old age he himself entered it.3
It should worry one to see with what hypochondriac profundity a former generation of Englishmen have discovered the ambiguity at the bottom of laughter. Thus Dr Hartley4 has remarked: ‘When laughter first manifests itself in the infant, it is an incipient cry, excited by pain, or by a feeling of pain suddenly inhibited, and recurring at brief intervals.’ What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?
There are times when one can be so infinitely pained on seeing someone all alone in the world. Thus the other day I saw a poor girl walking all alone to church to be confirmed. […]
I say of my sorrow what the Englishman says of his home: my sorrow is my castle. Many consider sorrow one of life’s comforts.
I feel as a chessman must when the opponent says of it: that piece cannot be moved. […]
I’m stunted as a sheva, weak and unaspirated as a dagesh lene,5 I feel like a letter written back-to-front in the line, yet rampant as a three-tailed pasha,6 jealous of myself and my thoughts as the bank is of its printing plates, and generally as self-reflected as any reflexive pronoun. If only it went with misfortune and sorrow as with conscious good deeds, where those who do them have their reward ‘taken away’.7 If that were true of sorrows, I’d be the happiest of men; for I take all my troubles in advance and still they all stay behind.
The tremendous poetic power of folk literature finds expression in, among other ways, its having the strength to desire. Compared to it, the desire of our own time is both sinful and boring because what it covets is the neighbour’s. That other desire knows very well that the neighbour no more than itself has what it seeks. And when its desire is sinful it is on such a titanic scale as to make man tremble. It won’t let its price be beaten down by the cold probabilities of a sober reason. Don Juan still strides over the stage with his 1,003 mistresses. Out of deference to the tradition no one dares smile. If a writer ventured the like in our own time he would be ridiculed. […]
Alas, the door of fortune does not open inwards so that one can force it by charging at it; it opens outwards and so there is nothing one can do.
I think I have the courage to doubt everything; I think I have the courage to fight everything. But I do not have the courage to know anything, nor to possess, to own anything. Most people complain that the world is so prosaic, that life isn’t like a romantic novel where opportunities are always so favourable. What I complain of is that life is not like a novel where there are hard-hearted fathers, and goblins and trolls to fight with, enchanted princesses to free. What are all such enemies taken together compared to the pallid, bloodless, glutinous nocturnal shapes with which I fight and to which I myself give life and being.
How barren is my soul and thought, and yet incessantly tormented by vacuous, rapturous and agonizing birth pangs! Is my spirit to be forever tongue-tied? Must I always babble? What I need is a voice as penetrating as the glance of Lynceus, terrifying as the sigh of the giants, persistent as a sound of nature, mocking as a frost-chilled gust of wind, malicious as Echo’s callous scorn,8 with a compass from the deepest bass to the most melting chest-notes, modulating from the whisper of gentle holiness to the violent fury of rage. That is what I need to get air, to give expression to what is on my mind, to stir the bowels of my wrath and of my sympathy. – But my voice is only hoarse like the cry of a gull, or dying away like the blessing upon the lips of the dumb.
What is to come? What does the future hold? I don’t know, I have no idea. When from a fixed point a spider plunges down as is its nature, it sees always before it an empty space in which it cannot find a footing however much it flounders. That is how it is with me: always an empty space before me, what drives me on is a result that lies behind me. This life is back-to-front and terrible, unendurable.
After all, it is the best time of one’s life, the first period of falling in love, when with every meeting, every glance, one brings home something new to rejoice over.
My reflection on life altogether lacks meaning. I take it some evil spirit has put a pair of spectacles on my nose, one glass of which magnifies to an enormous degree, while the other reduces to the same degree. […]
Of all ridiculous things in the world what strikes me as the most ridiculous of all is being busy in the world, to be a man quick to his meals and quick to his work. So when, at the crucial moment, I see a fly settle on such a businessman’s nose, or he is bespattered by a carriage which passes him by in even greater haste, or the drawbridge is raised, or a tile falls from the roof and strikes him dead, I laugh from the bottom of my heart. And who could help laughing? For what do they achieve, these busy botchers? Are they not like the housewife who, in confusion at the fire in her house, saved the fire-tongs? What else do they salvage from the great fire of life?
I lack altogether patience to live. I cannot see the grass grow, but since I cannot I don’t feel at all inclined to. My views are the fleeting observations of a ‘travelling scholar’9 rushing through life in the greatest haste. People say the good Lord fills the stomach before the eyes. I haven’t noticed; my eyes have had enough and I am weary of everything, and yet I hunger.
Ask any questions you will, just don’t ask me for reasons. A young girl is excused for not being able to give reasons, they say she lives in her feelings. It is different with me. Generally, I have so many and usually mutually contradictory reasons that, for that reason, it is impossible for me to give reasons. Also cause and effect don’t seem to hang properly together. At one time huge and powerful causes give rise to tiny and unimpressive little effects, occasionally to none at all; at another a brisk little cause gives birth to a colossal effect. […]
Life has become a bitter drink to me, and yet it must be taken in drops, counted one by one.
No one comes back from the dead, no one has entered the world without crying; no one is asked when he wishes to enter life, nor when he wishes to leave.
Time passes, life is a stream, people say, and so on. I haven’t noticed it. Time stands still and I with it. All the plans I form fly straight back at me, when I want to spit in my own face.
When I get up in the morning I go straight back to bed again. I feel best in the evening, the moment I dowse the candle, pull the eiderdown over my head. I raise myself up once more, look about the room with an indescribable peace of mind, and then it’s goodnight, down under the eiderdown.
What am I good for? For nothing or everything. That is an unusual capability. I wonder if the world will appreciate it? God knows if the girls get jobs who look for positions as maids-of-all-work or, failing that, as anything at all.
One should be an enigma not just to others but to oneself too. I study myself. When I’m tired of that I light a cigar to pass the time, and think: God only knows what the good Lord really meant with me, or what He meant to make of me. […]
The sorcerer Virgil had himself chopped in pieces and placed in a cauldron to be cooked for eight days, thus to become rejuvenated.10 He had someone watch out that no intruder peeped into the cauldron. The watchman was unable, however, to resist the temptation. It was too soon. Virgil disappeared with a cry, like a little child. I, too, have probably looked too early into the cauldron, into the cauldron of life and its historical development, and no doubt will never manage to be more than a child. […]
Let others complain that our age is evil; my complaint is that it is paltry. For it is without passion. People’s thoughts are thin and flimsy as lace, they themselves are as pitiable as lacemakers. The thoughts in their hearts are too paltry to be sinful. For a worm it might be considered a sin to harbour such thoughts, but not for the human being shaped in the image of God. Their desires are stodgy and sluggish, their passions sleepy. They do their duty, these hucksters, but like the Jews, they let themselves clip the coin just a little; they think that however well the good Lord keeps His books, they can still get away with cheating Him a little. Fie upon them! That’s why my soul always reverts to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that it’s human beings talking. There people hate, people love, people murder their enemy and curse his descendants through all generations, there people sin.
I divide my time thus: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. When I sleep I never dream; that would be a pity, for sleeping is the height of genius.
Being a perfect human being is after all the highest goal. Now I have corns, that’s always a help. […]
The best proof adduced of the wretchedness of life is that derived from contemplating its glory.
Most people are in such a rush to enjoy themselves that they hurry right past it. They are like the dwarf who kept guard over an abducted princess in his castle. One day he took an after-dinner nap. When he woke up an hour later she was gone. Quickly he pulled on his seven-league boots and with one step he had far outstripped her.
My soul is so heavy that no longer can any thought sustain it, no wingbeat lift it up into the ether. If it moves, it only sweeps along the ground like the low flight of birds when a thunderstorm is brewing.
How empty life is and without meaning. – We bury a man, we follow him to the grave, we throw three spades of earth on him, we ride out in a coach, we ride home in a coach, we take comfort in the thought that a long life awaits us. But how long is threescore years and ten? Why not finish it at once? Why not stay out there and step down into the grave with him, and draw lots for who should have the misfortune to be the last alive to throw the last three spades of earth on the last of the dead? […]
Wretched fate! In vain you paint your furrowed face like an old harlot, in vain you make a racket with your fool’s bells. You bore me, it’s always the same, an idem per idem.11 No variation, always a rehash. Come, sleep and death, you promise nothing, you keep everything. […]
A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.
Whatever can be the meaning of this life? If we divide mankind into two large classes, we can say that one works for a living, the other has no need to. But working for one’s living can’t be the meaning of life; to suppose that constantly procuring the conditions of life should be the answer to the question of the meaning of what they make possible is a contradiction. Usually the lives of the other class have no meaning either, beyond that of consuming the said conditions. To say that the meaning of life is to die seems again to be a contradiction.
The real pleasure consists not in what one takes pleasure in but in the mind. If I had in my service a humble spirit who, when I asked for a glass of water, brought me all the world’s most expensive wines nicely blended in a goblet, I would dismiss him until he learned that the pleasure consists not in what I enjoy but in having my way.
So it isn’t I who am master of my life, I am just one of the threads to be woven into life’s calico! Well then, even if I cannot spin, I can at least cut the thread in two. […]
I seem destined to suffer every possible mood, to gain experience in all directions. I lie every moment like a child learning how to swim, out in the middle of the sea. I scream (which I have learned from the Greeks, from whom one can learn what is purely human); for although I have a harness around my waist, I cannot see the pole that is to hold me up. It is a fearful way to gain experience.
It’s rather remarkable, one acquires a conception of the eternal from the two most appalling opposites. If I think of that unhappy bookkeeper who lost his mind in despair at ruining a merchant house through saying that seven and six make fourteen; if I think of him repeating seven and six are fourteen to himself, day in and day out, unmindful of all else, I have an image of eternity. – If I imagine a voluptuously beautiful woman in a harem, reclining on a sofa in all her allure, not caring for anything in the world, I have another image for eternity.
What the philosophers say about reality is often as deceptive as when you see a sign in a second-hand store that reads: Pressing Done Here. If you went in with your clothes to have them pressed you would be fooled; the sign is for sale.
For me nothing is more dangerous than recollection. Once I have recalled some life-situation it ceases to exist. People say that separation helps to revive love. That is quite true, but it revives it in a purely poetic way. A life in recollection is the most perfect imaginable; memory gives you your fill more abundantly than all of reality and has a security which no reality possesses. A life-situation recalled has already passed into eternity and has no more temporal interest.
If anyone should keep a diary it’s me, to aid my memory a little. After a while it often happens that I completely forget what reasons motivated me to do this or that, not just in bagatelles, but also in taking the most decisive steps. Should the reason then occur to me, sometimes it seems so strange that I myself refuse to believe it was the reason. This doubt would be removed if I had something written to refer to. In any case a reason is a curious thing; if I concentrate all my passion on it, it grows into a huge necessity that can move heaven and earth; if I lack passion, I look down on it with scorn. – I have speculated for some time as to the real reason why I resigned my post as secondary-school teacher. Thinking it over now, it occurs to me that such a position was the very thing for me. Today it dawned on me: that was precisely the reason, I had to consider myself absolutely fitted for the job. So if I’d continued in it I had everything to lose, nothing to gain. Wherefore I thought it proper to resign my post and seek employment with a travelling theatre, the reason being that I had no talent, and so everything to gain. […]
The social striving and the exquisite sympathy that goes with it, is becoming more and more widespread. In Leipzig a committee has been formed which, out of sympathy for the sad end of old horses, has decided to eat them.
I have only one friend, Echo. And why is Echo my friend? Because I love my sorrow, and Echo does not take it away from me. I have only one confidant, the silence of the night. And why is it my confidant? Because it is silent.
As it happened to Parmeniscus in the legend, who in the cave of Trophonius lost the ability to laugh but got it back on Delos at the sight of the shapeless block which was supposed to be the image of the goddess Leto, so too with me.12 When I was very young I forgot in the cave of Trophonius how to laugh; when I became older, when I opened my eyes and saw reality, I started to laugh and haven’t stopped since. I saw the meaning of life was getting a livelihood, its goal acquiring a titular office,13 that love’s rich desire was getting hold of a well-to-do girl, that the blessedness of friendship was to help one another in financial embarrassment, that wisdom was what the majority assumed it to be, that enthusiasm was to make a speech, that courage was to risk losing ten dollars, that cordiality consisted in saying ‘You’re welcome’ after a dinner, that fear of God was to go to communion once a year. That’s what I saw, and I laughed.
What is it that binds me? Of what was the fetter that bound the Fenris wolf formed?14 It was wrought of the noise of the cat’s paws as it walks on the ground, of women’s beards, of the roots of rocks, the sinews of the bear, the breath offish, and the spittle of birds. So, too, am I bound by a fetter formed of dark fancies, of disturbing dreams, of restless thoughts, of dire misgivings, of inexplicable anxieties. This chain is ‘very supple, soft as silk, resilient to the strongest tensions, and cannot be torn in two’.15
It’s rather strange, the same thing preoccupies us at every age in life and we always get just so far, or rather we go backwards. At fifteen when I was in grammar school, I wrote with much unction about the proofs of God’s existence and the immortality of the soul, about the concept of faith, about the significance of the miracle. For my examen artium I wrote an essay on the immortality of the soul for which I was awarded prae ceteris; later I won a prize for an essay on this subject. Who would believe, after such a solid and very promising start, that in my twenty-fifth year I should have reached the point where I cannot produce a single proof of the immortality of the soul. I remember particularly from my school days that an essay of mine on ‘The Immortality of the Soul’ received exceptional praise from the teacher and was read out by him, as much for the beauty of the style as for the content. Alas! I threw that essay away long ago. How unfortunate! Perhaps my doubting soul would have been captivated by it, as much for the content as for the beauty of the style. So my advice to parents, guardians and teachers is to warn children entrusted to them to set aside the Danish essays written at the age of fifteen. Giving this advice is the only thing I can do for the good of mankind. […]
How true to form human nature runs! With what native genius a small child often shows us a living image of the larger situation. I was greatly amused today at little Ludvig. He sat in his little chair and looked about him with visible pleasure. Then the nanny, Mary, went through the room. ‘Mary.’ ‘Yes, little Ludvig,’ she answered with her usual friendliness and came over to him. He leaned his large head slightly to one side, fastened his immense eyes upon her with a touch of roguishness, and then said quite phlegmatically: ‘Not this Mary, it was the other Mary.’ What do we older people do? We cry out to the whole world, and when it makes a friendly approach, we say: ‘It wasn’t this Mary.’
My life is like an eternal night; when at last I die, I can say with Achilles:
Du bist vollbracht, Nachtweide meines Daseyns.16 […]
I am like the Lüneburger pig.17 My thinking is a passion. I am very good at rooting out truffles for others; I myself take no pleasure in them. I root out the problems with my snout, but all I can do with them is toss them back over my head.
I struggle in vain. My foot slips. My life is still a poet’s existence. What could be more unhappy? I am chosen; fate laughs at me when it suddenly shows me how everything I do to resist becomes an element in such an existence. I depict hope so vividly that every hopeful individual will recognize himself in my portrayal; and yet it is a fake, for while I depict it I am thinking of recollection. […]
How terrible is tedium – how terribly tedious. I know no stronger expression, none truer, for like is all that like knows. If only there were a higher expression, a stronger one, then at least there would still be some movement. I lie stretched out, inert; all I see is emptiness, all I live on is emptiness, all I move in is emptiness. I do not even suffer pain. At least the vulture kept on pecking at Prometheus’s liver, and Loki had the poison constantly dripping down on him; at least there was an interruption, however monotonous. But even pain has lost its power to refresh me. Were I offered all the world’s glories or all its torments, they would affect me indifferently, I would not turn over on the other side either to reach for or to escape them. I die death itself.18 Is there anything that could divert me? Yes, if I caught sight of a fidelity that stood every trial, an enthusiasm that sustained everything, a faith that moved mountains; if I came by a thought that bound together the finite and the infinite. But my soul’s poisonous doubt is all-consuming. My soul is like the dead sea, over which no bird can fly; when it gets halfway, it sinks down spent to its death and destruction. […]
Tautology nevertheless is and remains the supreme principle, the highest law of thought.19 So no wonder that most people use it. It’s not all that impoverished either, and might well fill out a whole life. It has its playful, witty, entertaining form in the infinite judgements.20 This is the paradoxical and transcendental kind of tautology. It has its serious, scientific and edifying form. The formula for this is: when each of two magnitudes are equal to one and the same third magnitude, they are equal to each other. This is a quantitative inference. This kind of tautology is especially useful for rostrums and pulpits, where one is expected to say something significant.
The disproportion in my build is that my forelegs are too short. Like the Australian kangaroo I have quite short forelegs but infinitely long hind legs. As a rule I sit quite still, but whenever I move I make a huge leap to the horror of all those to whom I am bound by the tender bonds of kinship and friendship.
EITHER/OR
An ecstatic lecture
If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world’s follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both; whether you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both. If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it; if you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum of all practical wisdom. It isn’t just in single moments that I view everything aeterno modo, as Spinoza says; I am constantly aeterno modo. Many people think that’s what they are too when, having done the one or the other, they combine or mediate these opposites. But this is a misunderstanding, for the true eternity lies not behind either/or but ahead of it. So their eternity will also be in a painful succession of moments in time, since they will have the double regret to live on. My practical wisdom is easy to understand, for I have only one principle, which is not even my starting-point. One must distinguish between the successive dialectic in either/or and the eternal dialectic touched on here. In saying that I do not start out from my principle, the opposite of this is not a starting-out from it, but simply the negative expression of my principle, the expression for its grasping itself as in opposition to a starting-out or a not-starting-out from it. I do not start out from my principle, for were I to do so, I would regret it. If I were not to start out from it, I would also regret it. Therefore if it seemed to any of my highly esteemed hearers that there was something in what I was saying, he would only prove that his mind was unsuited to philosophy. If he thought there was movement in what was said, that would prove the same. On the other hand, for those hearers capable of following me, in spite of my not making any movement, I will now unfold the eternal truth whereby this philosophy remains in itself and admits of nothing higher. For if I started out from my principle, I would be unable to stop again; if I didn’t stop, I would regret it; if I stopped, I would also regret it, etc. Since I never start, however, I can always stop, for my eternal starting is my eternal stopping. Experience has shown that it isn’t at all difficult for philosophy to begin. Far from it: it begins with nothing and can accordingly always begin.21 What seems so difficult to philosophy and the philosophers is to stop. This difficulty, too, I have avoided. For if anyone believed that in stopping at this point I am really stopping, he proves he has no speculative insight. For I do not stop; I stopped that time I began. My philosophy has, therefore, the advantage of brevity and irrefutability. For if anyone were to contradict it I would surely be justified in pronouncing him insane. Philosophy, then, is constantly aetemo modo and does not have, like blessed Sintenis,22 just single hours which are lived for eternity.
Why wasn’t I born in Nyboder, why didn’t I die as a small child? Then my father would have laid me in a little coffin, taken me under his arm, carried me out one Sunday morning to the grave, thrown the earth upon the coffin himself, said a few words half aloud that only he could understand. It could only occur to the unhappy days of old to let small children weep in Elysium because they had died so young.23 […]
My misfortune is this: an angel of death always walks by my side, and it is not the doors of the elect that I am to sprinkle with blood, as a sign that he is to pass them by;24 no, it is precisely their doors that he enters – for only the love that lives in memory is happy.
Wine no longer gladdens my heart; a little of it makes me sad – much, melancholic. My soul is faint and powerless; I dig the spur of pleasure in vain into its flank, it can no more, it no longer rises up in its royal prance. I have lost all my illusions. In vain I try to abandon myself to the infinity of joy; it cannot raise me up, or rather, I cannot raise myself up. Once it had only to beckon and I rose light of foot, sound in body, and bold. When I rode slowly through the forest, it was as though I flew; now when the horse froths ready to drop, it feels as though I do not budge. I am alone, as I have always been; abandoned not by men, that would not pain me, but by the happy spirits of joy who in countless hosts encircled me, who met everywhere with their kind, pointed everywhere to an opportunity. As an intoxicated man gathers youth’s wanton swarm around him, so they flocked about me, the elves of joy, and my smile was due to them. My soul has lost possibility. Were I to wish for anything I would not wish for wealth and power, but for the passion of the possible, that eye which everywhere, ever young, ever burning, sees possibility. Pleasure disappoints, not possibility. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, so intoxicating! […]
My sorrow is my knight’s castle, which lies like an eagle’s eyrie high up upon the mountain peaks among the clouds. No one can take it by storm. From it I fly down into reality and seize my prey; but I do not remain down there, I bring my prey home; and this prey is a picture I weave into the tapestries in my palace. Then I live as one dead. In the baptism of forgetfulness I plunge everything experienced into the eternity of remembrance; everything finite and contingent is forgotten and erased. Then I sit thoughtful like an old man, grey-headed, and in a low voice, almost a whisper, explain the pictures; and by my side a child sits and listens, even though he remembers everything before I tell it.
The sun shines into my room so beautiful and bright; in the next room the window is open. In the street everything is quiet; it is Sunday afternoon. I hear clearly a lark, warbling outside a window in one of the neighbouring buildings, outside the window where the pretty girl lives. Far away, from a distant street, I hear a man crying shrimps. The air is so warm, yet the whole city seems dead. – Then I am reminded of my youth and my first love – I longed then, now I only long for my first longing. What is youth? A dream. What is love? The dream’s content.
Something wonderful happened to me. I was transported into the seventh heaven. All the gods sat there in assembly. By special grace I was accorded the favour of a wish. ‘Will you,’ said Mercury, ‘have youth, or beauty, or power, or a long life, or the prettiest girl, or any other of the many splendours we have in our chest of knick-knacks? So choose, but just one thing.’ For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed myself to the gods as follows: ‘Esteemed contemporaries, I choose one thing: always to have the laughter on my side.’ Not a single word did one god offer in answer; on the contrary they all began to laugh. From this I concluded that my prayer was fulfilled and that the gods knew how to express themselves with taste, for it would hardly have been fitting gravely to answer, ‘It has been granted you.’