Two happy ones. – Truly, despite his youth, this person knows how to improvise life and amazes even the keenest observer – for he never seems to make a mistake even though he constantly plays the riskiest game. It reminds one of those masters of musical improvisation to whose hands the listener would also like to ascribe a divine infallibility even though, like every mortal, they make a mistake here and there. But they are practised and inventive and always ready at any moment to incorporate into the thematic order the most accidental note to which the stroke of a finger or a mood drives them, breathing a beautiful meaning and a soul into an accident. Here is an entirely different person: basically everything he wills and plans goes wrong. What occasionally he set his heart on several times brought him to the edge of the abyss and within a hair of destruction; and if he did escape that, it was certainly not just ‘with a black eye.’ Do you believe he is unhappy about this? He decided long ago not to take his own wishes and plans so seriously. ‘If I don’t succeed at this,’ he says to himself, ‘I might succeed at that; and on the whole I don’t know whether I should be more grateful towards my failures than towards any success. Was I made to be stubborn and to have a bull’s horns? That which constitutes the value and outcome of life for me lies elsewhere; my pride as well as my misery lie elsewhere. I know more about life because I have so often been on the verge of losing it; and precisely therefore do I get more out of life than any of you!’