Young Ofeg's Ditties/Ditty 16

​The air was filled with clay-coloured mist, the rain fell in torrents, and the thunder came rolling and booming over the town. Darkness closed over the earth; I lit my lamp and fastened the shutters before my windows.

As the watchman in the cathedral tower was calling midnight, a shriek was heard as if coming from the bowels of the world, and right through the yellow lamp gloom a shining blue-white sword cleft its way. I looked up: a strange man was sitting right in front of me, at the opposite side of the table. His hair had a blue-white gleam, like lightning when the storm is nearly ended; it tumbled in serpentine and zigzag lines over his arched brow; his mouth laughed like a child's, but his eyes looked askance like a lunatic's.

"I am the wandering Jew, also called by men Ahasuerus; I am the bird Phœnix that is burnt at the pyre every hundred years, but that riseth again out of his own ashes."

​Time passed—a second or an hour.

"I am the memory of mankind, that once in the life of every generation flasheth up in its brain as lightning in the night illumines a world that is the world of the day and yet different. I am the great wizard that conjures forth the fata morgana of the future for humanity. I stand with one foot in the greyness of the past, and with the other in the gloom of the to be. I am the tree of knowledge of good and evil that the Lord planted in Eden."

Again time passed—a second or an hour.

"I am he who breaks through the circle into which the spirits of the time form themselves in order to stay or run their course again. I am the eld and the child, I am the conscience of primeval man, whose blood flows out of the universal heart; but I too am the seeing prophet."

And again time passed—a second or an hour.

"Living, I am called mad; dead, I am called genius." With that the cock crew. The stranger had flown, and the grey morning peered through the chinks in the shutter.