The hermit speaks again. – We, too, deal with ‘people’; we, too, modestly don the cloak in which (as which) others know us, respect us, seek us, and so we appear in company, i.e. among others who are disguised but don’t want to admit it. Like all clever masks we, too, politely prop up a chair against the door when confronted with curiosity about anything but our ‘cloak’. But there are other ways and tricks for ‘wandering amongst’, for ‘associating with’, people: for instance, as a ghost – which is highly advisable if one desires to get rid of them quickly and make them afraid. Example: others reach for us and can’t get a hold of us. That’s frightening. Or we enter through a closed door. Or when all the lights are out. Or when we’re already dead. The latter is the trick of posthumous people par excellence. (‘And what were you thinking?’ one of them once said impatiently; ‘Would we wish to endure this estrangement, coldness, and sepulchral silence enveloping us, this entire subterranean, hidden, mute, undiscovered loneliness that we call life but might as well be called death unless we knew what will become of us and that it is only after death that we come into our life and become alive oh, very much alive, we posthumous ones!’)