Yet once they interested me greatly, filling with music and with
colour the grey void of my life. Whence has come the change?
In myself. To myself I have become a subject of excruciating
interest. To myself I am a vastly more picturesque personage
than any debonair hooligan of quattro-cento Verona. He has faded
into the dullest (and most offensive) dog of a ghost. I only
exist. This sounds like the colossal vanity of Bedlam. Heaven
knows it is not. If you are racked with toothache from ear to
ear, from crown to chin, and from eyeball to cerebellum, is not
the whole universe concentrated in that head of yours? Are you
not to yourself in that hour of torture the most vitally
important of created beings? And no one blames you for it. Let
me therefore be without blame in my hour of moral toothache.
In the days gone by I was the victim of a singular hallucination.
I flattered myself on being the one individual in the world not
summoned to play his part in the comedy of Life. I sat alone in
the great auditorium like the mad king of Bavaria, watching with
little zest what seemed but a sorry spectacle.
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