What answer can I give? It's easy to say "Work," or "Give your property to the poor," or "Know yourself," and because it's so easy to say this I don't know what to answer.
My therapeutist colleagues, when teaching methods of cure, advise one "to individualise each particular case." This advice must be followed in order to convince one's self that the remedies recommended in the text-books as the best and most thoroughly suitable as a general rule, are quite unsuitable in particular cases. It applies to moral affections as well. But I must answer something. So I say:
"You've too much time on your hands, my dear. You must take up something.... In fact, why shouldn't you go on the stage again, if you have a vocation."
"You have the manner and tone of a victim. I don't like it, my dear. You have yourself to blame. Remember, you began by getting angry with people and things in general; but you never did anything to improve either of them. You didn't put up a struggle against the evil. You got tired. You're not a victim of the struggle but of your own weakness. Certainly you were young then and inexperienced. But now everything can be different. Come on, be an actress. You will work; you will serve in the temple of art."...
"Don't be so clever, Nicolai," she interrupts. "Let's agree once for all: let's speak about actors, actresses, writers, but let us leave art out of it. You're a rare and excellent man. But you don't understand enough about art to consider it truly sacred. You have no _flair,_ no ear for art. You've been busy all your life, and you never had time to acquire the _flair._ Really ... I don't love these conversations about art!" she continues nervously. "I don't love them. They've vulgarised it enough already, thank you."
"_They_ vulgarised it by their drunkenness, newspapers by their over-familiarity, clever people by philosophy."
"A great deal. If a man philosophises, it means he doesn't understand."
So that it should not come to bitter words, I hasten to change the subject, and then keep silence for a long while. It's not till we come out of the forest and drive towards Katy's bungalow, I return to the subject and ask:
"Still, you haven't answered me why you don't want to go on the stage?"