Chapter 22
The ordinary young man, German or otherwise, hungrily emerging from boyhood into a toothsome world made to be eaten, cures himself of his appetite by indulging it till he is ill, and then on a firm foundation of his own foolish corpse, or, as the poet puts it, of his dead self, begins to build up the better things of his later years. Klutz was an ordinary young man, and arrived at early manhood as hungry as his fellows; but his father was a parson, his grandfather had been a parson, his uncles were all parsons, and Fate, coming cruelly to him in the gloomy robes of the Lutheran Church, his natural follies had had no opportunity of getting out, developing, and dissolving, but remained shut up in his heart, where they amused themselves by seething uninterruptedly, to his great discomfort, w
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