My peroration in these two months, my definitely not brilliant but nonetheless true-to-character departure, was calculated to make me seem a depraved person. This is the primary interpretation. Such an interpretation has the effect of instantly making her suffering totally autopathetic, free of all sympathy, with the result that her suffering does not become at all dialectical to her, as if she had any fault, something for which to reproach herself. The same approach must now be followed. What would be the most provocative thing to do next? I suppose even a scoundrel like that is not without a certain concern for the poor girl. A villain does indeed stand completely outside the good, but if he is brazen enough to want to communicate with it through an almost cavalier kind of sympathy—I know of nothing more outrageous. That confidential forgery bears precisely the stamp of this sympathy. It is devoid of passion but in courteous form. To keep the mood proper, I have, while writing, continually imagined someone who has had or has a toothache, someone about whose state of health one is not without concern.
In other respects, it has been abhorrent to me to write all that, not because of her, for my hope is that it will be of benefit to her, but because of those through whose hands it goes, and in turn for a very special reason. I am convinced; I bet a hundred to one that all three of them after reading it will say, [VI 233] “Well, he is nevertheless not as bad as I thought, he is indeed not entirely without concern.” It is unbelievable how stricken with stupidity people are with regard to the ethical. By being sufficiently brazen to want to be utterly despicable, one becomes a pretty decent fellow, almost as good as most folk—because, good heavens, many a man has had a love affair and has let a girl sit and wait, but if he just shows a little sympathy, then he is really a nice fellow. And yet being a rogue is not so hopeless; salvation is possible. But to be able to show sympathy in that way is indisputable evidence that one has damaged one’s own soul.
And now for a rest. I recall all my thoughts from the labor of scheming; I concentrate them on her, on my concern and on my wish. I refuse to be disturbed by anything, but I also wish to do what I regard as my duty. If it can be right to be a fool in the world for the sake of a good cause,123 then it presumably can also be defensible to be scheming, or rather I am afraid of a belated misgiving and regret if I have left anything unattempted. I do not think much of schemes, not because I do not calculate everything to the best of my ability but because the matter is so important to me.
Oh, pain compounded! We grow further and further apart; a lifetime lies between us, and to me it seems as if now an eternity must lie between us if she really tears herself loose from me. It is as if I served two masters:124 I do everything to work her loose, to wipe out everything between us, and then I also discipline my soul so that it may keep itself at the peak of my wish, so that if its fulfillment were ever possible it might be just as much aflame at the moment she is lost to me forever as it was when everything favored our union, as it was most intense of all when she knelt at my feet and pleaded. To wish is not so difficult while one is young, but to keep the soul concentrated upon the wish when secret resentment and when mortal anxiety waste away one’s powers is not easy. To caper about when the horse is young and fiery and long-winded is not difficult; it is instead difficult not to do that. But when the horse is tired, when it totteringly stumbles ahead, when it almost falls down at every step—then the horse cannot [VI 234] caper about. But the Spirit gives life,125 and just as an old king said: A king may die, but he must not become ill, so it is my consolation that I can die but I must not become tired. For what is it to have spirit but to have will, and what is it to have will but to have it beyond all measure, since the person who does not have it beyond all measure but only to a certain degree does not have it at all.
126February 28. Morning.
A year ago today. Courage and perseverance! I shall reach the religious with her. This is a security that gives life assurance, or, alas! is it only a precaution, akin to putting money in the widows’ pension fund. In other respects I am able to do everything with proficiency and am developing it more and more. Her youthfulness demands all my effort, and I am as youthful as it is possible for me to be. I believe it is working. A few days ago there was a man who said of us that we were a proper young engaged couple. Obviously, we are that indeed: she by virtue of her seventeen years and I by virtue of the artificial leg I use. The deception is working, as it always does for me. To express myself directly seldom succeeds for me, but to express myself indirectly and deceptively succeeds beyond measure. It is a natural aptitude I have, a reflectiveness I was born with. But I am also learning something else; I am learning the comic from the bottom up: a young fiancé with an artificial leg! To me I am just another Captain Gribskopf.127 Yet this comedy, my secret, is nothing to joke about. The effort I do not fear, for I rejoice in her, but I do fear misunderstanding.
February 28.128 Midnight.
Only this was lacking—she seeks me out; that is obvious. So, then, I have been shadowboxing; she must have a backlog of sympathy, a nerve in which I still pain her sympathetically. She cannot have received that confidential communication yet; so it was lucky that I thought of sending it. In my countenance [VI 235] she will find nothing. My face is no advertising publication or, if it must be, it is for miscellaneous announcements that are so miscellaneous that no one can make head or tail of them.
As early as last Wednesday it struck me that this was the second time and on a Wednesday that I had seen her on Hauser Square. She knows from before that every Wednesday at precisely four o’clock I go down this street; she knows that I have business with a man who lives there. If she is seeking me out, then I dare to bear witness within myself that I have not gone a step out of my way to seek her out. I am so uneasy, almost to the point of madness, lest I do something that could prompt suspicion on her part, and my uneasiness then makes me assume that she is just as sensitive to the least little thing as I am.
This had to be investigated. At five minutes to four I was on Hauser Square and went into the goldsmith’s shop. Correct! Two minutes later she came along. She was walking slowly, looking around; she turned in the direction of Tornebuske Street, from which I usually came. In itself, it is an excellent idea to meet on the street, where chance is always ready with an explanation. But since I separated from her, I have declared perpetual warfare on the power we call chance, in order, if possible, to do away with it—which does not need force of arms but particularly memory, a memory that is just as niggling as chance itself. I quickly bolted out of the shop, ran around by Suhms Street, and came down Tornebuske Street precisely at four o’clock, exactly as usual.
We met, passed each other; she was a little self-conscious, perhaps because she was a little disquieted by what amounted almost to taking a forbidden path or because she was a little fatigued by having reconnoitered the terrain. She quickly dropped her eyes and avoided my glance.
So this much is clear—my machinations are more or less futile; but this much is also clear—that she still does have strength.
For me there is nothing to do. Precisely at four o’clock every Wednesday I come to Hauser Square. To stay away would be most imprudent. I believe I have never been so scrupulous about time as I am with this exact hour and minute lest my coming too early or not coming might prompt her suspicion that I was waiting for her or was avoiding her, which in different ways would demonstrate the same thing—that I was concerned about her.
[VI 236] 129March 5. Morning.
A year ago today. No new symptom.130 When a brighter prospect appears before me, when it seems to me that everything must work out, when a happy thought visits my soul, then I hurry to her. I am really young, as young as one must be in the days of one’s youth. At times like this, I do not look for some roundabout way; I rush with the speed of longing in order to be able to rejoice with her. If it would always be like this, if I were capable of always being this way, no matter what it would cost me, then it would be easy to marry.
W
hat her state is in a deeper sense, I do not know, nor do I wish to know it. I prefer not to push her or take her by surprise, but her circumspect reticence makes me wonder. And it is somewhat unfree; it is as if she is afraid of my criticism, that what she says would not be brilliant enough. That is how difficult my external nature has made our mutual understanding for me.
March 5. Midnight.
Solomon’s Dream131
Solomon’s verdict132 is quite familiar; it was able to separate truth from deception and to make the judge famous as the wise prince. His dream is less familiar.
If there is any agony of sympathy, it is to have to be ashamed of one’s father, of the person one loves the most and to whom one owes the most, to have to approach him backward, with face averted, in order not to see his disgrace.133 But what greater blessedness of sympathy is there than to dare to love as the son wishes to love, and then to have the added good fortune of daring to be proud of him because he is the chosen one, the distinguished one, a nation’s strength, a country’s pride, God’s friend, the future’s promise, celebrated in his lifetime, highly praised in his memory! Fortunate Solomon—that was your fate! Among the chosen people (how glorious was this alone, to belong to them!) he was the king’s son (enviable fate!), 134the son of the king who was the chosen one among kings.
So Solomon lived happily with the prophet Nathan.135 The father’s vigor and the father’s achievements did not inspire him to great exploits, for, after all, there was no opportunity [VI 237] left for that, but they inspired him to admiration, and admiration made him a poet. But if the poet was almost envious of his hero, the son was blissful in his devotion to the father.
Then one night the youth paid a visit to his royal father. During the night he is awakened by hearing movements where his father is sleeping. He is seized with horror; he fears it is a knave who wants to murder David. He approaches stealthily—he sees David crushed in spirit, he hears the cry of despair from the penitent’s soul.
Faint, Solomon goes back to his bed; he falls asleep, but he does not rest. He dreams—he dreams that David is an ungodly man, rejected by God, that the royal majesty is God’s anger with him, that he must wear the purple as a punishment, that he is condemned to rule, condemned to listen to the people’s approval, while the righteousness of the Lord secretly and hiddenly passes judgment upon the guilty one. And the dream intimates that God is not the God of the godly but of the ungodly, and that to be singled out by God one has to be an ungodly person, and the horror of the dream is this contradiction.
As David lay on the ground crushed in spirit, Solomon rose from his bed, but his mind was crushed. Horror seized him when he thought of what it means to be God’s chosen one. He suspected that the saint’s intimacy with God, the uprightness of the pure and faultless man before God, was not the explanation, but that secret guilt was the secret that explained everything.136
And Solomon became wise, but he did not become a hero; he became a thinker, but he did not become a man of prayer; and he became a preacher, but he did not become a believer; and he could help many people, but he could not help himself; and he became sensual, but not repentant; and he became crushed but not raised up again, for the power of the will had been overstrained in lifting what was beyond the lad’s strength.137 And he staggered through life, tossed about by life, strong, supranaturally strong—that is, womanly weak in the bold infatuations of the imagination and in amazing fabrications, ingenious in the explanation of ideas. But there was a split in his being, and Solomon was like the invalid who cannot carry his own body. He sat in his harem like a decrepit old man, until desire awakened and he shouted: Strike up the tambourines; dance before me, you women. But when the Queen of the East came to visit him, lured by his wisdom, his soul was rich, and the wise answers flowed from his lips like the precious myrrh that flows down the trees in Arabia.138
[VI 238] March 7. Midnight.
139On Wednesday I did not see her. Presumably she has now received the confidential communication; confidential it certainly was—it was entrusted to frailty and dishonesty. Or perhaps she came a bit earlier or a bit later—I do not know, for I always come on the dot, not a minute before, not a minute after, not a tempo faster one time than the other—I do not dare. Only someone who has an idea of the sagacity and cunning involved in utilizing what is most insignificant will grasp what such an ascetic renunciation of the most insignificant means.
My head is tired. Oh, if only I dared to surrender to rest and sing myself to sleep in sad recollection! If only I dared, like a deceased person, to take away the pain and recall what was beautiful. But I dare not do that, for I promptly would be deceiving her. I dare not do that, for I am alive; after all, I am still in the middle of the action, the play is far from over. Is the play not over? For me it certainly is not over, for the recent past is so far from being an epilogue that the engagement was rather a prologue and the play began when it was broken. And yet there is no action; nothing happens. Nothing happens visibly and externally, and all my efforts go to keep me from acting and yet keep me personally acting ϰατὰ δύναμιν [according to potentiality]. What is all this for? Why do I do it? Because I cannot do otherwise. I do it for the sake of the idea, for the sake of meaning, for I cannot live without an idea; I cannot bear that my life should have no meaning at all. The nothing I am doing still does provide a little meaning. Any other attempt to forget, to begin all over again, to clink glasses with a friend and drink dus140 with a congenial person is impossible for me, although I well realize that my life would then be regarded as having deep meaning. Perhaps there is something wrong with my eyes, but I have never seen a friendship in which the one fired up the other to risk the utmost for an idea that has a bearing on personal existence. But I certainly have seen that—because the other (ὁ ἕτεϱоς) does not have the modesty about oneself that everyone has in his innermost being for a period—I have seen that their association taught them both to haggle and not to take the world too seriously. Only a relationship with God is the true idealizing friendship, for the thought of God penetrates to the point of separating mind and thoughts141 and does not arrive at an understanding through chatter.
I am doing this nothing and this everything because it is the [VI 239] highest passion of my freedom and the deepest necessity of my being. If Simon Stylites142 in any way was able to relate the idea of God to standing on a tall pillar and bending himself into the most difficult positions and frightening away sleep and searching for terror in the crises of balance, then in my opinion he did well to do that. His mistake was that he did it in the eyes of men, that he was nevertheless a ballerina, that he, just as she, bending in the most difficult positions on the floor, seeks public applause. This I have never done, but I certainly am doing as he did—I am frightening away sleep and wrenching my soul.
This is not morbid reflection on my part, for during this whole affair my principal idea has been as clear as day to me: to do everything to work her loose and to keep myself at the pinnacle of my wish. I do not think up a new purpose every day, but my reflection certainly can think up something new in connection with my purpose. I wonder if the man who wants to be rich in this world is morbidly reflective when he sticks firmly to his resolve but in the form of calculation reckons everything without changing his first plan; I wonder if he is morbidly reflective when he sticks firmly to his resolve but when he sees that it will not work with one method then chooses another? If I had been morbidly reflective, I would have acted externally long ago and broken my intention to remain absolutely still and yet absolutely alert. Indeed, it would be much easier if I only had to stay awake like one of the bridesmaids,143 only keep my lamp lit, and otherwise be able to let my soul be without passion, but I do not dare to do that, for then I would be imperceptibly changed and would not hold myself entirely unchanged on the pinnacle of my wish with the flexibility of passion. This is what I really want; if I am changed, then it is against my will; praise God, to date this has not happened.
March 9. Morning.
A year ago today. No new symptom. Where we are, I do not know, and I shall not be in a great hurry with any exploration.
March 15. Midnight.
144I did not see her yesterday, either. Perhaps that meeting on [VI 240] Hauser Square was just accidental, or perhaps it was an attempt she wanted to make out of concern for me. Perhaps she has received my confidential communication; perhaps it did not have a stimulating but merely a depressing effect; perhaps she chooses finally to pine away, to be drugged in the analgesic relief of quiet sorrow. Suppose she were to move to the country, suppose she did not wish to live in the old surroundings, could not stand it but preferred to have a strong, decisive way to express that she was offended; suppose she became a lady’s companion in a noble family or a governess.145 Good God, to have a creditor like that who has the power of life and death over me! And not to dare to discharge the debt, and that not daring to do it must be precisely one’s humiliation! She probably does not dream what a powerful force she is for me, that she determines the course of my life, that by a step such as the one feared she can plunge me into the deepest despair. So this is the situation: if I manage to work her loose or she works herself loose—in short, if she becomes herself again—I shall have arrived at the very point where, concerned about my own pain, I can work for my own cause. My life before I was joined to her was like my being subject to the painful third degree; then I was interrupted and called out into the most appalling decisions, and when I am through, if I ever am through, then I can begin with myself again where I left off. Of course, I have learned what is even more painful. And if this does not happen, if she remains as she is, then I am a beggar, a pauper, yes, a slave in the outermost darkness.
And yet she did remark that she might wish to be located in the country. And such a remark, a word from her, a whim, a comment of which she perhaps was no more aware than one is aware of what one says while sleeping, such a word is sufficient for me. I myself seem to be like a child just beginning school and trying his hand at his first exercises in the practice of his mother tongue: forming a sentence from a given word.
Stages on Life’s Way Page 29
