I knew without knowing, I knew without wonder, I knew as one knows oneself, I knew what it is impossible to know – and, I would say, I knew it even more clearly than I do now. For life has worn me down: continual uneasiness, concealment of my knowledge, pretence, fear, a painful straining of all my nerves – not to let down, not to ring out … and even to this day I still feel an ache in that part of my memory where the very beginning of this effort is recorded, that is, the occasion when I first understood that things which to me had seemed natural were actually forbidden, impossible, that any
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