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p473 He was taken from us, that strangely seraphic little being was taken from this earth -- oh, my God, why should I seek soft words for the harshest, most incomprehensible cruelty I have ever witnessed? Even yet it tempts my heart to bitter murmur, yes, to rebellion. He was set on with frightful, savage fury and in a few days snatched away by an illness [cerebro-spinal meningitis, of course] of which there had been for a long time no case in the vicinity. Our good Dr. Kurbis was greatly surprised by the violence of its recurrence; but he told us that children convalescing from measles or whooping-cough were susceptible to it...
I will spare you the details; apparently meningitis is a particularly nasty way to die. Anyway, this is the crucial passage:
p477 ...when I [Zeitblom] spoke a few words of consolation and hope [to Adrian]:
“Spare yourself,” he roughly interrupted; “spare yourself the humanistic quibbles. He is taking him. Just let him make it short. Perhaps he can’t make it any shorter, with his miserable means.”
And he sprang back up, stood against the wall, and leaned the back of his head against the paneling.
“Take him, monster!” he cried, in a voice that pierced me to the marrow. “Take him, hell-hound, but make all the haste you can, if you won’t tolerate any of this either, cur, swine, viper! I thought,” he said in a low, confidential voice, and turned to me suddenly, taking a step forwards and looking at me with a lost, forlorn gaze I shall never forget. “I thought he would concede this much, after all, maybe just this; but no, where should he learn mercy, who is without any bowels of compassion? Probably it was just exactly this he had to crush in his beastly fury. Take him, scum, filth, excrement!” he shrieked, and stepped away from me again as though back to the Cross. [His pose at the end of the previous paragraph is supposed to suggest a crucifixion, I guess. And just by the by, I was sore tempted to let my "crusifiction" misspelling stand here.] “Take his body, you have power over that. But you’ll have to put up with leaving me his soul, his sweet and precious soul, that is where you lose out and make yourself a laughing-stock -- and for that I will laugh you to scorn, aeons on end. Let there be eternities rolled between my place and his, yet I shall know that he is there whence you were thrown out, orts and draff that you are! The thought will be moisture on my tongue and a hosannah to mock you in my foulest cursings!”
...
p478 I was leaving when he stopped me, calling my name, my last name, Zeitblom, which sounded hard too. And when I turned round:
“I find,” he said, “that it is not to be.”
“What, Adrian, is not to be?”
“The good and noble,” he answered me; “what we call the human, although it is good, and noble. What human beings have fought for and stormed citadels, what the ecstatics exultantly announced -- that is not to be. It will be taken back. I will take it back.”
“I don’t quite understand, dear man. What will you take back?”
“The Ninth Symphony,” he replied. And then no more came, though I waited for it.
[Zeitblom leaves the next day and Adrian’s farwell is] p479 “‘Then to the elements. Be free, and fare thou well!’” [Source ]
He turned quickly away...
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