ad se ipsum
1839
ad se ipsum
Jan. 1. The same miracle which astonished all those present at the marriage feast in Cana repeats itself in the life of every Christian: Thou hast served the bad wine first and last of all the good, people will agree in saying, particularly those who have felt how the world serves the good first and afterwards the bad.
Jan. 3. In truth I feel at this moment the terrible truth of the words Psalm 82, 6 : I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.
Jan. 6. Father in Heaven! When the thought of thee wakes in our hearts let it not awaken like a frightened bird that flies about in dismay, but like a child waking from its sleep with a heavenly smile.
Jan. 7. What is so confusing about us is that we are at once the pharisee and the publican.
Feb. 2. Thou sovereign of my heart (“Regina”) treasured in the deepest fastness of my breast, in the fullness of my thought, there, where it is equally far to heaven and to hell,—unknown divinity! Oh, can I really believe the poet’s tales, that when one first sees the object of one’s love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual, its types, its myths, its Old Testament. Everywhere, in the face of every girl I see traces of your beauty, but it seems to me that I should have to possess the beauty of all of them in order to draw out a beauty equal to yours; that I should have to circumnavigate the world in order to find the place I lack and which the deepest mystery of my whole being points towards—and at the next moment you are so near to me, so present, filling my spirit so powerfully that I am transfigured for myself, and feel that it is good to be here.
Thou blind god of love! Wilt thou reveal to me what thou seest in secret? Shall I find what I am seeking, here in this world, shall I experience the conclusion of all my life’s eccentric premises, shall I fold you in my arms—or :
are the orders “FURTHER”?
Hast thou gone before me, thou my yearning, dost thou beckon to me, transformed, from another world? Oh, I will cast everything from me in order to be light enough to follow thee.
May 12. I can say of my sorrow what the Englishman says of his house : my sorrow is my castle.
May 13. I can only presume that it is God’s will that I should read for my exam and that it is more pleasing to him that I should do so than by burying myself in some research or other, I should reach a clearer understanding of something or other; for obedience is dearer to him than the fat of rams.
May 14. God in heaven, let me really feel my nothingness, not in order to despair over it, but in order to feel the more powerfully the greatness of thy goodness.
(That wish is not, as the scoffer in me would say, an epicureanism, as when the gourmand starves so that the food will taste all the better.)
May 21. At the present time my existence is like that of a piece on the chess board, of which the opponent says : that piece cannot move—like a deserted spectator, for my time is not yet come.
July 20. What in certain cases we call “spleen,” the mystics know under the name tristitia and the Middle Ages under the name acedia (ακηδια, dullness). Gregor moralia in Job xiii, p. 435 : virum solitarium ubique comitatur acedia . . . est animi remissio, mentis enervatio, neglectus religiosae exercitationis, odium professionis, laudatrix rerum secularium. That Gregory should pick out the virum solitarium shows a wide experience, for it is a sickness to which the isolated man at his highest degree is exposed to and the sickness is most correctly described and the odium professionis is rightly emphasised, and if we take that symptom in a slightly more general sense (not about the confession of sins in church, which would also oblige us to take solitarius to mean an indifferent member of the church) as an unburdening of oneself, experience would not leave us in the lurch were we to ask for examples. And it shows a deep knowledge of human nature that the old moralists should have included “tristitia ” among the septem vitia principalis. That is what my father called : a silent despair.
And now for a year’s time, for a mile’s distance in time, I will dive below ground like the Guadalquivir;—but I shall come up again !
July 21. Now that I have read his latest handiwork with its political notions I understand why Herz was so anxious to talk with me.8 Only it is a pity that he has left out The Translator’s satirical ideas which he certainly thinks he can do without spoiling the general lines; but I think that they were the best things in it, and ought certainly not to be left out, if only on account of the dramatic interest of The Translator’s character, but there are presumably good reasons for doing so; Herz is not the man for that.
Aug. 8. If only I could finish my examination soon so that I could once again be a quodlibetarius.
I am always accused of using long parentheses. Reading for my examination is the longest parenthesis I have known.