"It must once be, and be over; we must see each other as we are, and
then hate each other, if it must be so. I make thy sister unhappy; thou
makest mine unhappy and me too; these things just balance each other.
Thou distortedst thyself out of an angel to me more and more
passionately into a destroying angel. Strangle me, then, but I grapple
thee too.
"Now look upon me, I draw off my mask, I have convulsive movements on
my face, like people who live after drinking sweet poison. I have made
myself drunk with poison, I have swallowed the poison-pill, the great
poison globule, the earth-globe. Out with it freely! I exult no more, I
believe nothing more, I do not even lament right valiantly. My tree is
hollowed out, burnt to a coal by fantastic fire. When, occasionally, in
this state, the intestinal worms of the soul, exasperation, ecstasy,
love, and the like, crawl round again, and gnaw and devour each other,
then do I look down from myself to them; like polypuses, I cut them in
twain and turn them wrong end foremost and stick them into each other.
Then I look again at my own act of looking, and as this goes on _ad
infinitum_, what then comes to one from it all? If others have an
idealism of faith, so have I an idealism of the heart, and every one
who has often gone through with all sensations on the stage, on paper,
and on the earth, is in the same case. What boots it? If thou shouldst
die at this moment, I often say to myself, then, as all radii of life
run together into the minute point of a moment, all would verily be
wiped out, invisible; to me, then, it is as if I had been nothing.
Often I look upon the mountains and floods and the ground about me, and
it seems to me as if they could at any and every moment flutter asunder
and melt away in smoke, and I with them. The future life (as even the
present is hardly to be called a life), and all that hangs thereupon,
belongs to the ecstasies which one winks at; especially it belongs to
the ecstasy of love.
"As thou so readily assumest every difference from thyself to be
enervation, so do I say to thee outright: Only ascend farther, only
knead thyself more thoroughly, only lift thy head higher out of the hot
waves of the feelings, then wilt thou no longer lose thyself in them,
but let them billow on alone. There is a cold, daring spirit in man,
which nothing touches at all,--not even virtue; for it alone chooses
that, and is its creator, not its creature. I once experienced at sea a
storm, in which the whole element furiously and jaggedly and foamingly
lashed itself into commotion, and flung its waters pell-mell through
each other, while overhead the sun looked on in silence;--so be thou!
The heart is the storm; self is the heaven.
"Believest thou that the romancers and tragedians, that is, the men of
genius among them, who have a thousand times aped, and aped their own
apings of everything, divine and human, are other than I? What keeps
them and the world's people still real is the hunger after money and
praise; this eating gastric-juice is the animal glue, the salient
point in the soft floating and fleeting world. The apes are geniuses
among beasts; and the geniuses are--not merely before higher beings,
as Pope says of Newton, but even here below--apes, in aesthetic
imitation, in heartlessness, malignity, malicious pleasure, sensuality,
and--merriment.
"The last and last but one I reserve for myself. Against the
_longueurs_ (lengthy passages) in life's book,--a book which no man
understands,--there is no remedy except some merry passages, of which I
think no more so soon as I have read them. In order only to get over
this cold, hobbly life, I will surely sooner scatter below me rose-cups
than thistles. Joy is of itself worth something, if only that it crowds
out something worse before one lays down his heavy head and sinks into
nothingness.
"Such am I; such was I; then I saw thee, and would be thy _Thou_--but
it serves not, for I cannot go back; thou, however, goest forward, thou
becomest my very self one day,--and then I _would_ have loved thy
sister! May she forgive me for it! Here drink pure wine! I know best
how one fares with the women,--how their love blesses and robs,--how
all love, like other fire, _kindles_ itself with much better wood than
that which _feeds_ it,-and how, universally, the Devil gets all he
brings.
"O, why then can no woman love but just so far as one will have her,
and no further,--absolutely none? Hear me now: everywhere lazy
preachers would fain hold us back from all transitory pleasure by
telling us of the discomfort that comes after. Is not then the
discomfort transitory too? Rabette meant well with me, on the same
ground of desire upon which I meant well with her and myself. But does
any one know, then, what purgatorial hours one wades through with a
strange heart, which is full, without making full, and whose love one
at last hates,--_before_ which, but not _with_ which, one weeps, and
never about the same thing, and to which one dreads to unveil any
emotion, for fear of seeing it transmuted into nourishment of
love,--from whose anger one imbibes the greater wrath, and from its
love the lesser! And now to have absolutely the more joyous relations
screwed down forever to this state of torment, when they ought rather
to exalt us above the tormenting ones, the long wished for gods'-bliss
of life perverted forever into a flat show and copper-plate
engraving,--the heart into a breast and mask,--the marrow of existence
into sharp bones,--and yet, as to all reproaches of coldness, chained
only to silence, bound innocent and dumb to the rack,--and that, too,
without end!
"No, sooner give me the frenzy which one draws from the temple of love
as well as from that of the Eumenides! Better burn up in a real flame
of misery, without hope, without utterance, even to paleness and
madness, than be so loving and not loved! He who has once burned in
this hell, Albano, continues to frequent it forevermore: that is the
last misery. Can I not worry down life and death, and wounds and stings
beforehand?--and certainly I am not weak. Nevertheless, I am not the
man to put restraints upon a sentimental discourse, or harpsichord
fantasy, or reading or singing, not though sorrow in person should hold
before me a menace, undersigned by all the gods, that a female listener
whom I cannot endure would immediately thereupon become my lover, and
from that my mistress and my hell.
"The Greeks gave Love and Death the same form, beauty, and torch; for
me it is a murderous torch; but I love Death, and therefore Cupid. Long
has life been to me a tragic muse; willingly to the dagger of a muse do
I offer my breast; a wound is almost half a heart.
"Hear further! Rabette has a fine nature, and follows it; but mine is
for her a cloud of empty, transitory form and structure; she does not
understand me. Could she, then would she be the first to forgive me. O,
I have indeed treated her hardly, as if I were a destiny, and she I.
Resent, but hear![31] On the night of the Illumination her longing and
my emptiness brought us in the fiery rain of joy more warmly together;
among the shiningly mailed and smoothly polished court-faces her
ingenuous one bloomed lovely and living as a fresh child on the stage
or at court; we happened into Tartarus,--we sat down in the place where
thou didst swear to me thy resignation of Linda; in my senses wine
glowed, in hers the heart. O, why is it that, when one speaks and
streams, she has no other words than kisses, and makes one sensual from
ennui, and forces one to speak her speech? My mad boldness, which fancy
and intoxication breathe into me, and which I see coming on and yet
await, seized me and drove me like a night-walker. But always is there
in me something clear-seeing, which itself weaves the drag-net of
delusion, throws it over me, and carries me away entangled in its
meshes. So behold me on that night with the burning net-work about my
head; the rivulet of death murmurs to me, the skeleton sweeps across
the harp-strings,--but, enveloped, imprisoned, darkened, dazzled with
the fiery hurdle-work of pleasure, I heed neither annihilation nor
heaven, nor thyself and _that_ evening, but I drag all together and
into the hurdle,--and so sank thy sister's innocence into the grave,
and I stood upright on the royal coffin, and went down with it.
"I lost nothing,--in me there is no innocence; I gained nothing,--I
hate sensual pleasure. The black shadow, which some call remorse, swept
broadly along after the vanished motley-colored pleasure-images of the
magic-lantern; but is the black less optical than the motley?
"Condemn not thy poor sister; she is now more miserable than I, for she
was happier; but her soul remains innocent. Her innocence lay treasured
up in her heart as a kernel in the stony peach; the kernel itself burst
its mail-coat in the warm, nourishing earth, and forced a way for its
green leaves to the light.
"I visited her afterward. All her soul's pangs passed over into me; for
all actions and sacrifices on her account, I felt myself ready; but for
no feelings. Do what you will, thou and my father, I will positively,
in this stupid stubble-field of life, where one reaps so little in
freedom, not banish myself into the narrow thirty-years' hedge of
marriage. By Heaven! for the miserable, forced intoxication of the
senses, and under it, I have already endured more than it is worth.
"Not that which I yesterday read in thy presence gives me this
resolution,--as to that, ask Rabette about it,--and my frankness toward
thee is a voluntary offering, since the mystery between two might, but
for me, have remained a mystery still: but I will not be misapprehended
by thee,--by thee, the very one who, with so little reflection upon thy
inner being, so easily makest unfavorable comparisons, and dost not
perceive that thou didst sacrifice my sister in Lilar precisely so,
only with more spiritual arms, and didst cast her eyes and joys into
Orcus. I blame thee not; fate makes man a sub-fate to woman. The
passions are poetic liberties, which the moral liberty takes to itself.
Thou didst not, I assure thee, have too good an opinion of me; I am all
for which thou tookest me, only, however, still _more too_; and the
_more too_ is still wanting to thyself.
"O, how much swifter my life flies since I know that _she_[32] is
coming! Fate, which so oft plays weight and wheels, and swings the
pendulum of life with its own hand, heaves off mine, and all wheels
roll unrestrainedly to meet the blissful hour. _She_ is my first love;
before _her_ I tore up all my blooming years, and flung them to her on
her path as flowers; for _her_ I sacrifice, I dare, I do all, when she
comes. O, whoso fears nothing in the empty froth-and-sham-love, what
should he dread or decline in the real, living sun-love? Thou angel,
thou destroying angel, thou camest flying down into my stale, flat
life, thou fleest and appearest, now here, now there, on all my paths
and pastures: O tarry only long enough for me to dig my grave at thy
feet, while thou lookest down upon me!
"Albano, I behold the future and anticipate it; I see full clearly the
long net stretched over the whole stream which is to catch, entangle,
and strangle thee; thy father and others, too, are drawing you both
toward one another therein, God knows for what. It is for that _she_
comes now, and thy tour is only show. My poor sister is soon conquered,
that is, murdered; particularly, as one needs for the purpose, with her
belief in spirits, no other voice than that incorporeal one, which over
the old Prince's heart pointed out to thine its limits!
"What lights burn in the future, between dark situations and bushes, in
murderous corners! Be it as it may, I march forward into the caverns; I
thank God, that this impotent _cold-sweating_ life gains again a
pulsation of the heart, a passion; and then or now do to me, who
_could_ act safely and secretly and dishonestly, what thou choosest.
Fight with me to-day or to-morrow. It shall rejoice me, if thou layest
me on my back in the last, long sleep. O the opium of life makes one in
the beginning lively, then drowsy, how drowsy! Willingly will I love no
more, if I can die. And so without a word further, hate or love me, but
farewell!
"Thy Friend, Or Thy Foe."