The background of the dull pomp of Potsdam must have made all this
more certain. It was bound to come.
And so one day, or, as I have suggested, suddenly late one night,
there came to the young artist bending over tonsorial books that
quaint, mad, odd, preposterous inspiration. Ah, what pleasure there is
in the madness of youth; it is not like the madness of age, clinging
to outworn formul?; it is the madness of breaking away, of galloping
among precipices, of dallying with the impossible, of courting the
absurd. And this inspiration, it was in none of the books; the
lecturer barbers had not lectured on it, could not dream of it and did
not dare to; there was no tradition for it, no precedent; it was mad;
and to introduce it into the pomp of Potsdam, that was the daring of
madness. And this preposterous inspiration of the absurd young
barber-madman was nothing less than a moustache that without any curve
at all, or any suggestion of sanity, should go suddenly up at the ends
very nearly as high as the eyes!
He must have told his young fellow craftsmen first, for youth goes
first to youth with its hallucinations.
Pages:
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83