In self-justification, and also perhaps to diminish the degree of the censure in your waking consciousness of my ignorance of this language indispensable for contemporary life, I consider it necessary to say, with a humble heart and cheeks flushed with shame, that although I too was taught this language in my childhood, and even though certain of my elders who prepared me for responsible life, constantly forced me “without sparing or economizing” any intimidatory means to “learn by rote” the host of various “nuances” which in their totality compose this contemporary “delight”, yet, unfortunately of course for you, of all that I then learned by rote, nothing stuck and nothing whatsoever has survived for my present activities as a writer. BTG I

Every man, if he can even a little seriously think, so to say “without being identified” with his passions, must agree with this if he takes into account merely one single fact often repeated in the process of our inner life, namely, that all our experiencings which at first, just at the moment they are still proceeding in us, seem to be stark terrors, appear, after the lapse of only an insignificant time and when these experiencings have been replaced by others and are recalled by chance, and when according to our logical reasoning we are already in another mood, not worth, as is said, “a brass farthing”. BTG XLVIII