Particularly they liked the late eighteenth
century, the period of Goethe and of Shelley, and Mozart.
They played with the past, and with the great figures of the past, a
sort of little game of chess, or marionettes, all to please themselves.
They had all the great men for their marionettes, and they two were the
God of the show, working it all. As for the future, that they never
mentioned except one laughed out some mocking dream of the destruction
of the world by a ridiculous catastrophe of man's invention: a man
invented such a perfect explosive that it blew the earth in two, and
the two halves set off in different directions through space, to the
dismay of the inhabitants: or else the people of the world divided into
two halves, and each half decided IT was perfect and right, the other
half was wrong and must be destroyed; so another end of the world. Or
else, Loerke's dream of fear, the world went cold, and snow fell
everywhere, and only white creatures, polar-bears, white foxes, and men
like awful white snow-birds, persisted in ice cruelty.
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