Young Ofeg's Ditties/Ditty 4

​I was twenty years old when I went out into the world to seek happiness. I wandered both long and unceasingly, I wandered both far and near. Yet I found her not. The world lay like an inert mass, life lacked colour, and men concerned me not. There was nothing to which I could attach myself, and I was far from sufficient to myself.

So I consulted books. "Love a woman," said they, "for love alone can reveal to you the hidden meanings of things and the beauty of existence. Love a woman; and you will hear harps in the air, and feel sunshine in your soul, and happiness will fly into your mouth of its own accord, like the roast sparrows of Schlaraffenland."

Then I set out to seek the woman, and I found her one day at the forest quell. Every morning and every evening for five years I bore her water cruse, and so she became mine. But ​when I had owned her for three days and three nights, I saw an earwig in the apple of her eye, and a maggot in the corner of her mouth, and I left her.

Again I consulted books. "Men never find happiness," said they, "unless they find hearth and home, and wife and child." So I fastened a hobble to my leg, and put my head into the social halter; but when I found that the iron still ate into my soul and that they wanted me to grind the seed I desired to sow for a future ingathering into meal for the common larder, I jumped up, turned my house on end, and went out into the King's highway.

And one man pointed a finger at me, and the other called insulting names, and the children pelted me with stones, and the grown-up folk with rotten fruit, and every window was propped full of jeering people. Then I quitted the town and went out into the world, and ascended a high mountain. Behind me, down in the valleys, lay the dwelling-places of men, with all their thousand towns; I had an endless bird's-eye view of them, and they ​appeared as a single ant heap, but in front of me the mountains sank perpendicularly into an abyss of the bottom of which I could get no glimpse; and a murmur whispered in the air as when a multitude speaks, thousands of voices and yet only one, and it was a human voice but as if it came from a giant riding on the whirl of the storm:—

"What is called happiness in the world you have forsaken is nothing more than the petty phantasies of petty minds, a toy for children; but the great happiness in the face of which you shrink as you shrink now before the mountain cleft, she is fearful in her majesty, as is everything great. If you dare not the leap, turn back, for then you are fit for the small happiness of the world; but if you desire to attain the greater, hurl yourself headlong into the depths. But bear in mind: your fate is concealed from you, no one knows what the black gulf hides except those who have seen it with their own eyes, and there is no return journey for those once down. Dare—win—with shut eyes—with set teeth——"

​I am going to the new world that he alone sees who has quitted the abodes of men, and from which there is no return road. And my thoughts circle round my head like birds, and the most delicate moods of my soul take butterfly form, and my dreams wax like green leaves and many-coloured flowers on the strand of a sea in which they are mirrored, and the very seas are my own soul, and the blue sky is arched above my head by the most ethereal of my fancies.