Such nobility of spirit could not exist for long. He suffered too much at hearing so many sad stories. I think everyone must have met him, and spilled their troubles. His sensibility was legendary, but for him it was a permanent wound. His receptive and unselective spirit continually bled. He was a real man, being full of sympathy, and because of this people would not leave him alone, but continually kept at him with their plans and complaints. By liking others and respecting their suffering, he did not hate himself. He considered it infantile to hate oneself, to analyse motives, take oneself to pieces with dislike and hold one’s nostrils at the smell. It would mean splitting himself in two, and the part which did the splitting had no real interest in it except self-hatred which, like self-love, is a flame that shrivels you up. He was tempted, however, to let that other part of himself take him to pieces and tell him the truth. I suspected all the time that he had let it do this to him anyway, and that the experiment had failed.
