The Great Earthquake
THE GREAT EARTHQUAKE
CHILDHOOD
Halb Kinderspiel,
Halb Gott im Herzen.
Goethe
II
[1835]
Then it was that the great earthquake occurred, the terrible revolution which suddenly forced upon me a new and infallible law of interpretation of all the facts. Then I suspected that my father’s great age was not a divine blessing but rather a curse; that the outstanding intellectual gifts of our family were only given to us in order that we should rend each other to pieces : then I felt the stillness of death grow around me when I saw my father, an unhappy man who was to outlive us all, a cross on the tomb of all his hopes. There must be a guilt upon the whole family, the punishment of God must be on it; it was to disappear, wiped out by the powerful hand of God, obliterated like an unsuccessful attempt, and only at times did I find a little alleviation in the thought that my father had been allotted the heavy task of calming us with the consolation of religion, of ministering to us so that a better world should be open to us even though we lost everything in this world, even though we were overtaken by the punishment which the Jews always called down upon their enemies: that all recollection of us should be utterly wiped out, that we should no longer be found.
III
YOUTH
[1835-6]
Begging—that’s not for us!
Youth on the road of life
Forcefully seizes the prize.
Christian Winter
IV
[1836-7]
Inwardly torn asunder as I was, without any expectation of leading a happy earthly life (“that I should prosper and live long in the land”), without hope of a happy and comfortable future—as it naturally springs from and lies in the historical continuity of family life—what wonder then that in desperate despair I grasped at nought but the intellectual side in man and clung fast to it, so that the thought of my own considerable powers of mind was my only consolation, ideas my one joy, and mankind indifferent to me.
V
25 YEARS OLD
[1838]
So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news : and we’ll talk with them too
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies : and we’ll wear out
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and .flow by the moon.
King Lear
VI
[1838]
What I have often suffered from was that all the doubt, trouble, and anguish which my real self wanted to forget in order to achieve a view of life, my reflective self sought equally to impress and preserve, partly as a necessary, partly as an interesting stage, out of fear that I should have falsely ascribed a result to myself.
Thus, for example when I have so arranged my life that it seems to me as though it were my lot to read for the examination in perpetuum, and that my life however long it might otherwise be, is not to reach beyond the point at which I myself once freely broke off, just as one sees feeble-minded people who only remember their childhood and forget all their life that lies in between, or forget everything except one particular moment in their lives—that I should thus, at the thought of being a theological student, be all at once reminded of that happy period of possibility (what might be called one’s pre-existence) and my pause therein, more or less like a child who has been given alcohol and so prevented from growing must be. When, now, my active self tries to forget it in order to act, my reflective self would like so much to cling to it because it seems interesting, and would abstract itself from the control of my personal consciousness by raising itself to the power of a universal consciousness.