How Professor Ansorge's face looked up close was at first really impossible to say, and for a very simple reason: the thinker could not actually look at anyone for any length of time, or even into the distance with head held high, the pose that photographers like to have. The natural expression of his face included a working forehead, veiled face, and lowered eyes, which now and then would take stock of the situation with a short and swift glance. If someone temporarily forced him into a direct look by speaking to him, then this extremely unharmonious face, jagging angularly in all its features, would become somewhat reserved, wily, shifting, and downright hypocritical. Its expression was through-and-through self-conscious, since candor and directness were for it in every respect unnatural. What was natural fr it was the expression of cautious mistrust, at times full of peasant cunning.

The face assumed its most positive expression when the thinker looked at the ground or, glancing at his manuscript, spoke with composure and concentration as he thought to himself. In spite of his extraordinarily short stature, his effect at the podium was quite normal, due to his austere and resilient bearing and the well-disposed proportions of his philosophically insignificant corporeality. His lecture was totally devoid of gesture and bombast. The one rhetorical device at his disposal, which he certainly did not forego, was an artful soberness and thesis-like rigor in the construction of his ideas. His bronze-colored countenance seemed full of expression from the manifest effort of mental concentration and through its plain but interesting asymmetries. The penetrating look of his dark eyes was directed only in passing at his listeners. It was the forehead, which was traversed and arched by a highly prominent vein, that laid claim to total animation. One saw it literally working of its own accord, without regard for the audience, which was roused to listen to the lecture more than solicited to think with it. The tangled black hair and an old-fashioned, stiff white collar gave the whole of this face an impressive frame, while the whole man stood at his podium in conscious isolation, as he turned page after page of his manuscript with a slightly conceited hand gesture that betrayed the proud and modest consciousness of a man who knows his way around his subject matter and has nothing to worry about.

Pp. 425-426

¶ 10:52 PM