Retrospection. – While we are living each phase of our lives we rarely recognize its true pathos, but always see it as the only state that is now possible for us and reasonable and – to use some words and a distinction of the Greeks – thoroughly an ethos and not a pathos.18 Today a few notes of music called back to my memory a winter and a house and a most solitary life, as well as the feeling I lived with: I thought I could continue to live that way forever. But now I understand that it was pathos and passion throughout, comparable to this painful, courageous music which brings certain solace – one is not allowed to possess such things for years at a time, how much the less for eternities: they would make one too ‘overworldly’ for this planet.