The Adolescent

“Fakirism, the poetry of nonentity and impotence,” people will decide, “the triumph of untalentedness and mediocrity!” Yes, I admit that it’s partly the triumph of both untalentedness and mediocrity, but hardly of impotence. I liked terribly to imagine a being, precisely an untalented and mediocre one, standing before the world and telling it with a smile: you are Galileos and Copernicuses, Charlemagnes and Napoleons, you are Pushkins and Shakespeares, you are field marshals and hofmarshals, and here I am—giftlessness and illegitimacy, and all the same I’m superior to you, because you submit to it yourselves. I confess, I’ve pushed this fantasy to such a verge that I’ve even ruled out education. It seemed to me that it would be more beautiful if this person was even filthily uneducated. This already exaggerated dream even influenced my results then in the final grade of high school; I stopped studying precisely out of fanaticism: it was as if lack of education added beauty to the ideal. Now I’ve changed my convictions on this point; education doesn’t hurt.

Gentlemen, can it be that independence of mind, even the least bit of it, is so painful for you? Blessed is he who has his ideal of beauty, even if it’s a mistaken one! But I believe in mine. Only I’ve explained it improperly, clumsily, primitively. Ten years from now, of course, I’ll explain it better. And this I’ll keep as a memento.

IV

I’VE FINISHED THE “idea.” If the description is banal, superficial—I’m to blame, and not the “idea.” I’ve already warned you that the simplest ideas are the hardest to understand; I’ll now add that they are also the hardest to explain, the more so as I’ve described the “idea” still in its former shape. There is also an inverse law for ideas: banal, hasty ideas are understood extraordinarily quickly, and invariably by a crowd, invariably by the whole street; moreover, they are considered the greatest and most brilliant, but only on the day of their appearance. What’s cheap is not durable. Quick understanding is only a sign of the banality of what is understood. Bismarck’s idea was instantly regarded as brilliant, and Bismarck himself as a brilliant man;²⁹ but this quickness is precisely suspicious: I wait for Bismarck ten years from now, and then we’ll see what’s left of his idea, and maybe of Mr. Chancellor himself. Of course, I haven’t introduced this highly extraneous and inappropriate observation for the sake of comparison, but also as a reminder. (An explanation for the overly crude reader.)

And now I’ll tell two anecdotes, so as to finish with the “idea” altogether, and not have it interfere in any way with the story.