(A page torn from the Journal)
1843
Berlin, May 10, 1843.
The day after my arrival I was very bad, ready to sink at the knees.
In Stralsund I almost went mad hearing a young girl playing the pianoforte, among other things Weber’s last waltz over and over again. The last time I was in Berlin it was the first piece I heard in the Thiergarten, played by a blind man on the harp.19
It seems as though everything were intended to remind me of the past; my apothecary, who was a confirmed bachelor is married. On that point he explained several things to me : one only lives once; one must have someone to whom one can explain oneself. I was struck by how much there was in what he said, particularly when it is said without affectation.
In the Hotel Saxen I have a room giving on to the water, where the baths are. Good Lord, how it reminds of the past.—In the background is the church—and when it strikes the sound penetrates to the very marrow of my bones.
Berlin, May 17, 1843.
Had I had faith I should have remained with Regine. Thanks and praise be to God, I now see that. I was near to losing my mind in those days. Humanly speaking I behaved rightly towards her, I ought perhaps never to have got engaged, but from that moment I behaved honestly towards her. From an æsthetic and chivalrous point of view I loved her in a far higher sense than she loved me; for otherwise she would never have treated me proudly or afterwards frightened me with her cries. I have just begun a story called Guilty—Not Guilty, it could of course contain things which would astonish the world; for I have experienced more poetry in the last year and a half than all the novels put together, but it is impossible for me, and I do not wish my relation to her to be volatilised into poetry, it has quite a different reality. She has not become a fairy princess and if possible she shall be my wife. Oh God, that was my one desire and I have had to relinquish it.
(A page torn from the Journal)
. . . it would certainly have happened. But where marriage is concerned everything is not sold as it stands when the hammer falls, and the point, here, is a little honesty about the past. Here again my chivalry is clear.
Had I not honoured her above myself, as my future wife, had I not been prouder of her honour than of mine, then I should have remained silent and have fulfilled her desire and mine, and have been married to her—there are so many marriages that conceal their little tale. That I did not want; in that way she would have become my concubine ; I would rather have murdered her.—But if I had had to explain myself then I would have had to initiate her into terrible things: my relation to my father, his melancholy, the eternal darkness that broods deep within, my going astray, pleasures and excesses which in the eyes of God are not perhaps so terrible, for it was dread that drove me to excess, and where was I to look for something to hold on to when I knew, or suspected that the one man I revered for his power and strength had wavered.—
I must take up my Antigone again. The problem will be to develop and motivate the foreboding of guilt psychologically. To that end I have been thinking of Solomon and David,20 Solomon’s youthful relationship to David; for it is quite certain that both Solomon’s intelligence (that which was paramount in it) and his sensuality are consequences of David’s greatness. Earlier he had suspected David’s tremendous agitation, not knowing what guilt there could be upon him, and yet saw that profoundly God-fearing man give his repentance so ethical an expression; for it would have been another thing had David been a mystic. These conceptions, these suspicions kill all energy (except in the form of imagination), awaken the intelligence and that combination of imagination and intelligence, where the factor of the will is lacking, is really sensuality.
It is really curious about my little secretary Hr. Christensen. I bet it is he who is scribbling in various forms in the papers and in the supplements; for I often hear an echo of my ideas, not as I am in the habit of writing them, but as I throw them out in conversation. And I who treated him so kindly, paid him well, talked to him hours together, for which I paid him, simply in order that he should not feel hurt and humiliated because his poverty made it necessary for him to be a copyist; I initiated him into the whole thing, cast a veil of mystification over everything, made the time as agreeable for him as possible.—The little article in the supplement which appeared several days before Either-Or is certainly by him. It was really not very nice of him. He could have confided in me and told me he wanted to write; but his authorship has a bad conscience. He notices that I have changed a little, though I was just as polite and kind to him. On the other hand I have put a stop to his curiosity and his sniffing about my room; one must keep him at a distance; how I loath plagiarists.
I could perhaps reproduce the tragedy of my childhood, the terrifying, mysterious explanation of religion which a frightful foreboding played into my hands, which my imagination worked upon, and the scandal which religion became to me—all in a novel called “the mysterious family.” It would begin on a completely idyllic, patriarchal note so that no one suspected anything until suddenly.the word sounded which translated everything into terror.
Nullum exstitit magnum ingenium sine aliqua dementia is the worldly expression of the religious proposition : whom God blesses in a religious sense he eo ipso curses in a worldly sense. It has to be so, the reason being firstly, the limitations of existence, and secondly the duplicity of existence.
It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time simply because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting-place from which to understand it—backwards.