No. 172. I Am the Dwarf of Myself. These days, when he painted, he felt the presence beside him of another being. But it was no doppelganger, no mere double he felt there. It was, rather--and more disturbingly--an obnoxious, dwarfish version of himself, a creature like him in every way but pathetically small and, as he saw it, annoyingly ineffectual. He remembered a phrase from Nietzsche (he thought it was from Nietzsche) : "I am the dwarf of myself." This dispiriting little creature was assuredly far from Nietzsche's vigorous, terrifying Ubermensch; this little fellow was pure Undermensch! Annoyed at failing to find the dwarf-of-myself mention in Nietzsche, he came across something else instead. It was from Thus Spake Zarathustra: "Stop dwarf !" I said. "It is I or you! But I am the stronger of us two--you do not know my abysmal thought, that you could not bear."