Strange, incredibly incomprehensible as it now seems to me that I could, while reasoning about life, overlook the whole life of mankind that surrounded me on all sides; that I could to such a degree blunder so absurdly as to think that my life, and Solomon’s and Schopenhauer’s, is the real, normal life, and that the life of the milliards is a circumstance undeserving of attention⁠—strange as this now is to me, I see that so it was. In the delusion of my pride of intellect it seemed to me so indubitable that I and Solomon and Schopenhauer had stated the question so truly and exactly that nothing else was possible⁠—so indubitable did it seem that all those milliards consisted of men who had not yet arrived at an apprehension of all the profundity of the question⁠—that I sought for the meaning of my life without it once occurring to me to ask: “But what meaning is and has been given to their lives by all the milliards of common folk who live and have lived in the world?”