Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should have respected myself, then. I should have respected myself because I should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could have believed myself. Question: What is he? Answer: A sluggard¹; how very pleasant it would have been to hear that of oneself! It would mean that I was positively² defined, it would mean that there was something to say about me. “Sluggard”— why, it is a calling and vocation³, it is a career. Do not jest, it is so. I should then be a member of the best club by right, and should find my occupation in continually respecting myself. I knew a gentleman who prided himself all his life on being a connoisseur⁴ of Lafitte. He considered this as his positive virtue⁵, and never doubted himself. He died, not simply with a tranquil⁶, but with a triumphant⁷ conscience, and he was quite right, too. Then I should have chosen a career for myself, I should have been a sluggard and a glutton⁸, not a simple one, but, for instance, one with sympathies for everything sublime⁹ and beautiful. How do you like that? I have long had visions of it. That “sublime and beautiful” weighs heavily on my mind at forty But that is at forty; then — oh, then it would have been different! I should have found for myself a form of activity in keeping with it, to be precise, drinking to the health of everything “sublime and beautiful.” I should have snatched at every opportunity to drop a tear into my glass and then to drain it to all that is “sublime and beautiful.” I should then have turned everything into the sublime and the beautiful; in the nastiest, unquestionable trash, I should have sought out the sublime and the beautiful. I should have

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