Thus violently absorbing though the mental condition here suggested
was, it was not permanent. It was childish and child-like by virtue of
my years; the riper expressions which I here make use of to describe it
always seem on the verge of distorting its character. My faith in my
lucky star barely persisted a few years unassailed. My childish idea
had been very much strengthened when, at fifteen years of age, in the
first part of my finishing examination, I received _Distinction_ in all
my subjects, and received a mighty blow when, at seventeen, I only had
_Very Good_ in five subjects, thus barely securing Distinction for the
whole.
I ceased to preoccupy myself about my likeness to Petsjórin after
having recovered from a half, or quarter, falling in love, an
unharmonious affair, barren of results, which I had hashed up for
myself through fanciful and affected reverie, and which made me realise
the fundamental simplicity of my own nature,--and I then shook off the
unnatural physiognomy like a mask. Belief in my own unbounded
superiority and the absolutely unmeasured ambition in which this belief
had vented itself, collapsed suddenly when at the age of eighteen,
feeling my way independently for the first time, and mentally testing
people, I learnt to recognise the real mental superiority great writers
possess. It was chiefly my first reading of the principal works of
Kierkegaard that marked this epoch in my life. I felt, face to face
with the first great mind that, as it were, had personally confronted
me, all my real insignificance, understood all at once that I had as
yet neither lived nor suffered, felt nor thought, and that nothing was
more uncertain than whether I might one day evince talent. The one
certain thing was that my present status seemed to amount to nothing at
all.