If for a time I felt closer to Rasputin and feared Goethe’s intolerance, it was because I had a faint suspicion that if you, Oskar, had been drumming in Goethe’s day, he would have thought you merely unnatural, condemned you as the very incarnation of the unnatural, while feeding his own nature—which you have always admired and strived for, even when it gave itself such unnatural airs—feeding his natural temperament, on sugary sweet confections, then beaten you, poor wretch, to death, if not with his fist or his Faust, then with a thick volume of his Theory of Colours.