my heart: "You must not forget that you are an independent
scholar. You are a boy no longer."

I was free to loaf, but I worked harder than ever. I was either in an
exalted state of mind or pining away under a spell of yearning and
melancholy--of causeless, meaningless melancholy.

My Talmudic singsong reflected my moods. Sometimes it was a
spirited recitative, ringing with cheery self-consciousness and the
joy of being a lad of sixteen; at other times it was a solemn song,
aglow with devotional ecstasy. When I happened to be dejected in
the commonplace sense of the word, it was a listless murmur,
doleful or sullen. But then the very reading of the Talmud was apt
to dispel my gloom. My voice would gradually rise and ring out,
vibrating with intellectual passion

The intonations of the other scholars, too, echoed the voices of
their hearts, some of them sonorous with religious bliss, others
sad, still others happy-go-lucky. Although absorbed in my book, I
would have a vague consciousness of the connection between the
various singsongs and their respective performers. I would be
aware that the bass voice with the flourishes in front of me
belonged to the stuttering widower from Vitebsk, that the
squeaky, jerky intonation to the right came from the red-headed
fellow whom I loathed for his thick lips, or that the sweet,
unassertive cadences that came floating from the east wall were
being uttered by Reb Rachmiel, the "man of acumen" whose
father-in-law had made a fortune as a war-contractor in the late
conflict with Turkey. All these voices blended in a symphonic
source of inspiration for me. It was divine music in more senses