around the age of 30 that he started turning away from this point of view when he encountered karl schmidt and had a critical engagement with schmidt that resulted in a short essay that he would describe much later in his life that he would describe as a quote-unquote changed expression the disillusion and a realization that to really understand the crisis of wymar and the crisis of civilization one would need a point of view less empty and brutal than the point of view of what he would actually eventually german nihilism. and so this is the point where he is starting to really seriously focus on jewish and arab thought of the middle ages. but i think that, you know, and this comes a lot from the german nihilism essay, strauss was very concerned that he had been tempted by what he called german nihilism. and that by, you know, setting up these positions and then deconstructing them he was trying to provide an education to others who might have also had these temptations. and i suggest in the book that this was a kind of philosophical form of -- [inaudible] that there is a transgression at