My Autobiography

 

 

Born August 22, 1878, in Domažlice. Father, a clerk, mildly “well-off.” Two brothers, two sisters; all died in childhood. I disliked them all to the point of revulsion, not because they were revolting, but because they had become too close to me. I disliked my parents almost to the point of hatred, although I couldn’t complain about them, because they had the audacity to be even closer to me – that is, paradoxically, infamously closer. As a child I hated everyone, every caress made me want to vomit; this idiosyncrasy was especially developed toward all men. It was based on an inborn contempt. If I analyze my memories – it was already in the first few years of my young life that I felt myself and humanity to be like two warring powers; already in my first few years I instinctively belittled the enemy, considering him a zero. Even then, my will was my basic, powerful characteristic, its flickering brightness penetrating everywhere like the early morning light, ever self-embracing, commanding absolutely everything. It’s hard for an adult to live with this, still harder for a child ... I think it was more developed in my siblings than in myself – that’s why they died ... Of course, with my destiny, I couldn’t make a good impression – until I had done a better job of getting my bearings – in the delightful milieu of human society. From the beginning I appeared decidedly ridiculous, funny, bashful, anyone not like this is just ordinary merchandise. At the same time, I was infernally “self-willed” (“self-will,” converse of “other-will,” is nothing other than a dark manifestation of the Absolute in the animal kingdom), disobedient, “criminal.” I stole for the sake of stealing, and made sport out of breaking windows late at night on the edge of Domažlice, putting rocks on the train tracks, setting sheaves of grain on fire. But as an adult I didn’t commit any crimes, because when not required by practical necessity, it’s just petty hooliganism – war included. Yet I also had praiseworthy inclinations: once late at night, for example, as a 12-year-old boy, I remembered I had forgotten to give some earthworms I had readied to a baby bird that I, instead of its parents, had been feeding regularly for some time; I had built a home for it under a bush out in the fields; I slipped out and walked for a quarter of an hour with the earthworms – the bird was dead ... and I thought I would die over this. Or (tiger) ... Eh, how stupid childhood is, with all that rubbing your eyes early in the morning! And whoever was “young in their youth” is a fool, a sheep who follows the herd in circles ... Music gave me my most powerful childhood feelings. If a brass band struck up near me, chills would run through me until my body went numb, my eyes would grow dim, and I would grab something to keep myself from falling. Once as a 14-year-old boy I walked for an hour and a half through deep snowdrifts to a village where I knew there would be a funeral with music. From the time I was 10, I would spend whole afternoons by myself in the forests and the fields – and a little later, whole nights. In all my life I have never known boredom – at most, its analogue – and that always in society ... That herd-like idiocy called school robbed me of at least 30% of my mental powers – that has to be expected, a person will be left with only a fragment ... I’m ashamed to say that up to the very end I always studied with distinction and always got the highest mark for moral conduct.

At 15, one fateful afternoon, my inner nature, until then sleeping, dreaming, suddenly and terrifyingly awoke under one of its forms: violently forced to think the unthinkable. The rest of the day and the whole night long I writhed in convulsions of thought about ten-thousandths of a millimeter – the necessary consequence of basic “instinct”: I am omnipotent – it was impossible to stop my will until my blessed body put an end to it. Since that time it has not left me completely for even a minute; countless times I thought that I – God’s most appalling hireling – would submit, for no apparent reason, to 18-hour days of the toughest kind of work. Only after I turned 19 did I celebrate a great victory. My convulsions of thought – which I had long considered an illness, as all, at least European, humankind did – were pushed so far to the ground, after unbelievable machinations, they were no longer threatening ... The point of my 19 years of permanent writhing, suffocation, and horror was so they would bear sweet fruit ... Only in this way does humankind, does everything in our small universe, progress.

To sit at a school desk and be seized by something like this every second – that’s not so great. I still didn’t have the energy to put an end to that school crap – fate did it for me. In the space of 8 months my mother died, along with my grandmother, aunt, and remaining sister; I systematically disgraced the crosses in the city’s environs, caused scandals in church, for lack of bombs threw anarchist leaflets all over the place, etc. –, – until, in the first semester of the seventh form, I was thrown out of all the schools in Cisleithania – because, out of ignorance of history, in a school assignment I called the Habsburgs – I think – a dynasty of swine. The deceased principal of the gymnasium, who prosecuted the whole affair so energetically, thus became one of the greatest benefactors I have ever had in my life. I did nothing for half a year, and then I consented to rot further on the benches of a gymnasium in Zagreb. Never was I closer to death than there. After finishing one semester I immediately left for Bohemia, determined not to set foot in any school ever again and not to pursue any kind of career. Two minutes of conversation with my wise father were enough for us to agree on the matter, and since then there has never been any discussion of it between us. I remained in Modřany, where he had bought himself a homestead, for about three years – the ravines and the forests were more my home than my father’s house; mostly I was struggling with the primitive question of free will, in preparation for life and death. As soon as I reached the age of 18, I was legally an adult, and received a small inheritance from my mother and sister. I calculated for myself that I could live on it tolerably well for 8 years – I was off by one year – I left, at the age of 21, my father, along with his 24-year-old second wife, who naturally had a tough time getting along with a man in his sixties. I lived alternately in Plzeň, Eisenstein, Zurich, and Landeck in the Tyrol until I was 26. Since Mrs. Klíma looked after everything necessary for the household, I didn’t have to deal with people at all. My only companions were lots of cats. Among visible beings, those I love the most are mountains, clouds, and cats – maybe women, too. My main activities during the years when others acquire experience and start their careers were endless walks deep in the forests, searching for nymphs and hallucinatory chateaux, rolling around naked on the moss and in the snow, and terrible battles with God, Who had decided to live the conscious life of a man ... In the Tyrol, I achieved a whole series of necessary preliminary victories – partly since it was there that I got into the habit of smoking. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t be alive today. I decided to publish, in as concise a form as possible, the main results of my thinking up to then – mostly for financial reasons and against my principle, known to the pre-Socratic philosophers and today paradoxical: to live only for my own self-perfection and, when the circumstances are right, in my old age, to impart to humanity in a single work the outcome of my life. I moved to Smíchov and wrote Svět jako vědomí a nic [The World as Consciousness and Nothing] – when I was 26. As I moved to Záběhlice near Zbraslav right after the book came out in ’04 and didn’t read any newspapers or speak with anyone, to this day I don’t know if even a dog so much as barked at it. Only about half a year later did Emanuel Chalupný give it attention, which had tremendous and favorable consequences for me later. I began to be a little sociable only later on in Zbraslav, at least in the pubs in the evening – what unbelievable things a person’s guardian angel pulls on him! Moved to Vinohrady in ’06. I helped myself out by furiously writing aphorisms so I wouldn’t suffocate – no company at all. The money ran out. I accepted my father’s offer to move back to Modřany (1906). For a year and a half I wrote furiously, only fiction – 2-3 printer sheets every single day, with inexpressible happiness – the deepest part of me would stay asleep for several days at a time, almost as it had slept until I was fifteen; but it was the most pleasant time of my life – in the spring of 1908 I recognized that I was straying from the path, and only then – I’m ashamed to say – did I throw myself completely and full steam into systematic, practical philosophy. The results were enormously delightful, still greater than in my fiction-mongering, but also more difficult and more burning. My father died in the winter of 1909 – just as I was settling up the last debts I owed him – I inherited his buildings. They hadn’t been paid off yet, but I could have netted 10-12,000 thousand florins from the sale if I’d only tried. But that very year, and the following, I reached the pinnacle of my life thus far: I found and partially took possession of my Deoessence. Anyone who thinks it possible in this state to devote even five minutes to practical hogwash has no idea what higher spiritual life is. Anaxagoras – who never reached this state – simply neglected his estate. When others advised him to devote at least a little of his time to practical matters if he didn’t want to go to the dogs, he said: How could I possibly do that, I, to whom a drop of wisdom is dearer than a mound of gold! – I got about 3,500 florins from the sale. In the winter of ’10 moved to Vršovice. Resolution: by the absolute mastery of the intellect to attain fully the Highest ... 2 years of unprecedented violation of my mental processes – for instance, I would lie in the snow for many hours, numb and in convulsions – A goal that seemed so close, just within reach – it was worth the risk of any catastrophe. Unreached; at that time I descended, mainly physically, as low as I ever had till then. Alcohol saved me, rum and undiluted spirits; to this day I’ve remained faithful to my rescuers. The second half of ’12 and all of ’13 didn’t see me sober even for a minute. But at that time I still managed to keep myself busy with everything possible – I was a novice. At the end of 1913, moved to Horoušánky with Mrs. Klíma and the excellent Mr. Vaniš, whom she married after the war broke out. After that, with quite empty pockets, moved in the summer of 1915 to Vysočany, where to this day, with two short breaks, I have lived in the Hotel Krása, run by the distinguished Mr. and Mrs. Pučálka. After a month’s stay in Vysočany, through the offices of Antonín and the engineer Jaroslav Kříž, I became the operator of a steam machine that pumped water from the Cidlina River in Žiželice, and I was running it in no time, although I knew absolutely nothing about it. It went quite well for about two months, then I gave notice and went back to Vysočany. Over a year of unemployment – although you wouldn’t have known it – from my outward activity – writing and constant boozing, mostly with that admirable citizen of the German Empire, Franz Böhler. For the first time in my life I began to keep company with certain people every day – mostly with Germans – and later with Jews. In November, became the caretaker for a small factory, completely abandoned. My caretaking consisted only of nonstop drinking. The entire time I was there, the thought never even entered my mind to look after the factory. Life was good, I had the biggest apartment in Prague, always had my paycheck all to myself, and electricity and heating on top of that. The fact that I didn’t guard anything was my prerogative, for although I could have stolen a lot of valuable things and sold them, very easily, I didn’t steal anything at all, idiot, apart from drinking a bottle of their ether – Absolutely all my jobs till then had been pure farce. A landlord who completely neglected his buildings, a machine operator who didn’t have the foggiest idea about the apparatus he was running – seeing to it when it suited him only because he liked to caress it – and then my subsequent role: the partner and foreman of an ersatz tobacco manufacturer – limited to boozing with the aforementioned Böhler, my partner. In August 1917, I gave notice at the factory, and three months later “production” began, which lasted till the summer of ’18 and brought in about 500 cr., having eaten up about 20,000. After the end of that little war I wrote a bit for the newspapers – thanks to Mr. Kodíček ... Another farce, just like my two philosophical works and the two Matthews. In the summer of ’19, a decisive victory both in practice and in theory, since then nothing essential (my opinion) has changed or will change in me; physiognomy incomplete, but it’s more or less like in the last 3 dictates of Traktáty a diktáty [Tractates and Dictates]. Since then, Dionysius has reigned – which in my case, naturally, has meant that God’s god, scilicet Ego, had made him viceroy in me – – It went so far that I suffered the only injury of my life: a fracturam radius sinistris, when I was drunk, running at midnight along the icy roads from Smíchov to Vysočany – November of ’19 (October 31). I had more friends than before ... There would’ve been no need to write for the newspapers if this born hermit had seen fit to accept an invitation here and there, if he had answered important letters sooner than six months after they arrived – as in the case of the inheritance from my father. – How did I spend 1920? ... Just beautifully, in a state of Self-Embrace, heightened by alcohol and girls, married and unmarried. In May 1921, Böhler moved back to Germany – I mention him so often because, in my worst period, he was like Vorsehung fallen from heaven – and maybe my only real friend thus far (next to him, my precious father, who understood me somewhat, was in every respect my enemy. The same goes for his wife). – The summer of that year Dr. Dvořák and I worked on the celebrated Matthew. The drinking wasn’t as intensive as it was with Böhler, but more extensive – every day until the early hours of the morning and beyond, for months. (I boozed the most intensively and extensively always alone – so no idiot could ever say that Mr. X. Y. had corrupted me.) Matěj Poctivý [Matthew the Honest] came out on 22.2.1922 – Tractates and Dictates about a month afterward. At least Matthew the Honest made me some money; Tractates and Dictates, except for Chalupný’s 1,000 crown advance – nothing. The boozing, thank the gods! had peaked. Hibernated all winter. The end of ’22 – my first battle against it – was grim. The crux of ’23 (intimissimi aside) was a battle against my life-saver, alcohol, which was then threatening to destroy my life. The battle continues, albeit barely. Otherwise: filled (that year) with collaborations (for the most part) with Dvořák. And from the start of ’24 until today (February 21), a convulsively heroic struggle against everything – such as I’ve experienced 5-6 times in my life. And on the outside, always the same situation. –

My life has been characterized by – on the outside: independence, no “career,” the possibility of living for myself in all circumstances; – I really have always been a hermit ... Three phases – on the outside – in my life: first 17 years of crap in school obviously just can’t be avoided if you don’t have Nietzsche for a father, “elevated” to the throne – but except for school, I was unusually free, thanks to both my wise parents, who somehow understood, surprisingly, what my intimissimum needed; then: about 17 more years – a time when young men toil away and scramble after patronage, stinking in slavery at various office jobs – I was “financially independent,” entirely free to live the life of a hermit – (A certain analogue: Schopenhauer; too bad I didn’t inherit 30,000 Rhenish florins instead of 11,000 Austrian ones); the third phase: lasting until today: “financial independence” while possessing absolutely insufficient means – totally indifferent to getting it, constant “negligence,” leaving everything to “fate” or Providence (never asked anyone for money who previously hadn’t told me himself his cashbox was always open to me; didn’t accept anything from women, in spite of numerous promising offers and my being extremely hard up for cash – I often acted like a millionaire, not knowing if I would be completely tapped out in four days). And so it went and so it does still – how, the devil knows ... A number of my friends (more or less) were the main reason – and foremost among them are (alphabetically): Bittermann, Böhler, Březina, Chalupný, Dvořák, Fiedler, (Dr.) Kříž, Kodíček, Pavel, Srb, Zlámal – but – but – of course, I earned something on my own – but mostly my farcical, scandalous “career” amounted to nothing.^* Otherwise, in my opinion all “earned” money stinks absolutely to high heaven, and all social work is an absolute disgrace – a necessary consequence of what I’ve related from my childhood, of antagonism, of people loathing one another ... I could see myself living like Robinson Crusoe – or obtaining money by stealing, but before I accept any golden handshake on retirement – it’s ten times more honest to take gifts from small benefactors. Well, maybe I’ve even stolen – stealing is the only pure form of purchase among humans.

My whole life has been such a consistent divergence from all that’s human, from the very beginning living only for myself, and since I turned 31, only for my Self, that I don’t know if anyone could find in all of history (leaving aside the long forgotten) such an example. I’ve always followed a single path – and my life has had a truly singular character. I couldn’t diverge from it even if I wanted to – the idea of Heracles’ crossroads is incomprehensible to me. How small Heracles was if mere temptation could bowl him over! how small Christ, tempted so modestly! by the devil! One needs to leave such affairs millennia behind. After all, as I’ve said to myself many times when practical life was getting rough: quit clowning around, live at least a little while like every other instinctive herd animal, as you lived – most of the time, that is – when you were 7 – for just a little while – I would even try it for a moment (once it even lasted 2 days) to see if it’d work – absurdity of absurdities! as if a hawk wanted to live underwater like a carp! Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t, and even if I could, I wouldn’t want to ... “Retreat,” says Grabbe’s Wellington, “is impossible for two reasons: first, our honor would not permit it, and second, because of the Soignée Forest.” But then, it does make me wonder; I have been able to say of myself, since I was 15, the same as Nietzsche: “Ich bin immer am Abgrund.” And the idea of sui occisionis is still my sweet companion, reliable as a cane – This has stayed true for 30 years, and I haven’t tired of it yet. – During this time, of course, all my practical affairs have just gone straight to hell – and if I had thought seriously even for a minute of “practical experience,” by which here I mean dung, whether it was a career or Napoleonic ambition, it would have been an unprecedented lack of energy on my part. My Superenergy consists of an exemplary lack of what folks call energy. I have enough energy to get myself out of bed at midnight, for no particular reason, as the pecus says, to walk for an hour and a half late at night in the cold just to see what it’s like at night around the monument to the heroic Schwerin at Štěrboholy; but until I was 34 I didn’t have enough energy to say to someone I met walking: Where does this or that path go? ... Naturally, I did ask often enough, but I always felt like I was chewing turds. That’s characteristic of childhood ... That feeling has grown stronger right up to the present; in part I’ve become more apathetic, in part more reasonable. Thus far humankind has never known such an Umwertungen der Werte. (My main service: a caretaker, slave to cats ...)

The fact that I haven’t croaked in the last 11 years – and even before that, as I’ve said, I could have easily – at any minute (the worst was in 1911, when I was living carefree – I did nothing but stagger around for a couple of months), is for 3 reasons in addition to the above: 1) the art of associating with people; 2) my singularly healthy body, – which not even the most awful, the most “unhealthy” attacks of the mind^** could really damage ... ; and 3) my guardian angel – or “genius,” etc. – And also, in fact, in the fourth place, my philosophical ossification.

Ad primum: I found a modus vivendi with all people – based on a kind of (indulgent) love, stemming from utter contempt – the consequence: in 10 years – although outwardly a rascal dealing with rascals – I had not the least little dispute with people – except for one trifling case when I was in an altogether abnormal and obviously drunken state (immediately after getting soused with methylated spirits). Everyone loves me ... and I know why – they are all, without knowing it, metaphysicians – and I am a metaphysician kat’ exochen. –

Ad secundum: Emerson says of Napoleon: “Such a body was necessary and such a one was created: a body that could sit 36 (?) hours straight in the saddle, in the heat and cold, without food, drink, sleep” (quoted loosely). Napol. often – if mildly – got sick; me, never; had the flu once, when I was around 12, for about 2 days – I wouldn’t have gotten it if I’d been able to do everything my instincts commanded me at the time: – and since then, nothing! ordinary congestion (even hay fever) and toothache don’t really count as illness. Once in a while I would try to make myself ill – doesn’t work – unless a person takes cyanide – spending the whole night in the 20-below cold, in a gale – wearing a summer outfit – nothing – (by the way: the cold has always bothered me, the worst heat – never; the steamier it is, the easier I find it – like a cat who crawls onto a stove in the worst heat, I’ll lie out in the sun when it’s 34^oC in the shade, happy as a cannibal, and wish: hotter, hotter! Never felt sapped of energy in the worst Central European swelter and when walking record distances). I would glug down bathwater from people with smallpox – scarf down sausages that were all wormy, drink water that would’ve made a normal person at the very least seriously ill – I’d just have to contend with two days of diarrhea – Doctors would croak from hunger if all their patients were like me, just like lawyers, bureaucrats, and other offices of that ilk, needless for healthy and wise people – of which there are hardly 5 in all of Europe ... My body’s been pretty robust the last 10 years, thanks to my thriftiness: since 1915 I’ve slept in unheated rooms – dressed any old way, I don’t give a damn, health-wise or aesthetically, and 4 crowns is enough for any person for food: eating it only raw: it does as much for your wallet as for your health. Cooking is just a waste of time, deprives foods of important “vitaminous” components, ruins their taste, and costs two to twenty times as much. – For some time I’ve eaten only: raw flour (if necessary, wheat or peas soaked in water), raw meat, raw eggs, milk, lemons, and raw vegetables; and my health has been ideal – and no millionaire gourmand ever puked while eating his oysters and other crap like that with as much pleasure as I when tearing into a kilo of raw horse meat ... To detest something – unknown to me. Once I stole a bitten-into mouse from a cat and gobbled it down, just like it was, with the fur and bones – as if I were eating a dumpling. – I covered 98 km in the Tyrol in 21 hours, and could’ve kept going for the other 3 hours (of that day) without stopping ... Etc. – Lots could be said about it – I’m obliged to give thanks to my body, which has always performed wonders as the victim of a reprobate mind. Over the last year, while drinking a great deal of alcohol, I haven’t felt any bodily pains at all – just my shoes pinching. I haven’t even had a cold over the last few years. I’ve never been a soldier, in spite of 7 call-ups, although I’m one of the healthiest people in Austria, and my one physical defect is that although I’m 175 cm tall I’ve weighed only 62-65 kg. – Whoever believes in mens sana in corpore sano cannot call me a psychopath.

3) My basic rationality, strengthened by the uninterrupted 16-year practice of philosophy. It’s taught me to be more forbearing and act more purposefully, without prejudices and emotions and scruples; I consider whatever I do in my practical life to be of no importance, and if I have a hypertrophic social pride, I have a still greater ability to squelch it altogether. Everything practical is dishonorable. – My avid, passionate practice of philosophy has not been in vain – True, until I was 40, I told myself that, in this respect, I’d failed – not having attained, when it was just within reach, the Goal of Goals: eternal, peaceful, invulnerable Joy and Radiance – by not having attained all, I thought, I had attained nothing. Well, maybe not all, but still much. I have just as much right to call myself a philosopher as Xenocrates, Diogenes, Epictetus – And I live in incomparably worse conditions – When I told Böhler that I had simply failed to achieve the Goal, when he answered: “Since the dawn of humanity, who has if not you?!” I laughed at him. But later I understood more and more that in a way he was right. Absoluteness (which I am to the core) scorns all forms of relativism. The Self leads itself to self-deprecation. – I am nothing other than the steady (often, quite often, in my dreams as well) cracking of the whip of my Absolute Will, commanding absolutely and awash in Itself until the end of time, and the frantic, “irrational,” but always more or less obedient, whirl of thoughts and mental states – my life, the greatest buffoonery and quixotism imaginable – because it is at the same time maximally rational – because I’m still alive, a “moon creature” come to Earth, whose sole activity, not letting up for even a minute, has been persistent laboring against the conditions of animal life. – There is no emotion that would have even a 2% power over me. By nature I’m given to fits of anger – I haven’t felt anger for years – apart from swearing when I can’t button a collar around my neck; I’m sweetness and mildness personified to all folks. I’ve almost completely forgotten the sensation of fear – at most I get a whiff of it if I think I’ll find an affable guy in the pub who might, out of habit, draw me into conversation. Yet even before, fear, real fear, was unknown to me; I don’t remember ever shaking or going pale from fear – while too often I would turn white with anger. During my late-night walks through deserted places, it never even occurred to me to pay attention if someone was walking toward me or behind me – as a rule I walked right past, and only when I heard the footsteps receding did I sometimes become aware that I had encountered someone; – but it is instructive to watch people, late at night, walking in the fields – as soon as they enter the forest: almost all of them start acting like rabbits – it may be observed here that humankind is made up, on the whole, of total milksops. – I have hardly any desires, aspirations, or appetites – except for those momentary ones that die as soon as they’re born; the same goes for worries. Sorrow, “pangs of conscience,” the feeling of guilt, envy, jealousy – have all been unknown to me, for as long as I can remember; they’re fitting only for cattle; my sympathy for animals, enormous and awkward, but 90% overcome; for people – almost none; but I am no misanthrope – quite the opposite, I’m fond of people in a special way – as I like lice. If I could destroy all of humankind with one blow – gladly, without anger, just out of “Übermuth”; I wouldn’t hesitate, even for a second – knowing that in All-Being they mean infinitely less than one bacterium does to all the rest of Earth’s creatures – and that even All-Being is – Nihil; that’s what is called knowing how to observe – the act of knowing how to observe everything sub specie aeternitatis – of which Masaryk, among others, is so fond. – Few people have as many unpleasant emotions as I; but I want them, and they are, if not dear, at least bearable to me. Pleasant ones, about the same number, now – before, sometimes, even more – such moments of pure delight, summonable at any time I felt like it, and then growing like an avalanche until I feared they would kill me ... But everything, every little thing, is subject to Will alone. There is no mental state that would not disappear in 3 seconds if I wanted it to. I have become – and am, even in my present highly alcoholic condition – a machine. A “mental petrifact” – is what Böhler called me, and I take that as perhaps the greatest compliment I have ever received – in contrast to all modern ways of looking at things.

Ad 4) I would like to prove, on the basis of my own life, that there is a “transcendent deliberateness in All That Happens” (Schopen.) – no less conclusively than any dissertation – Empirically – I’m not talking about theoretical proofs. So far this plan has been friendly in dealing with me – it must expect something great from me, otherwise it wouldn’t have done so many evidently unnecessary little things (it maliciously leads many people to a certain point and then, like a virtuoso, breaks their neck). It has saved me many times – my having been dazzled – from death’s door – in the Alps, my eye on the peak and practically running, I got as far as the edge of an abyss – I know that I couldn’t see it, and yet some kind of sudden shock threw me backward – a beautiful feeling: one more step – and 500 m downward in flight –... I climbed cliffs in the darkest nights – when I looked at them in the daytime, I felt queasy – I wouldn’t have wanted to go clambering over them in daylight. And my whole life is like that. Fortuna has smiled on me – and I am proudest of that – like Sulla. And by all indications she has other plans for me still. – The passing showers of gloom, now alcohol, for example, do nothing to dampen her favor toward me ... And it isn’t a good idea for anyone to stand in my way ... There are plenty of examples, starting with the deaths of my relatives – I’m altogether a dangerous person ... “Unlucky city,” says my Argestea, “destined for destruction, innocent – except for its mystical guilt in standing by during the humiliation of the Exalted (the hero Fabio, who was a professor of philosophy there). Woe to him who merely witnessed the great humiliation, twice to him who stood by without acting – thrice to him who came to his aid. It would have been better for him had he never been born ...”

I could easily end this dream – I’ve done all that is essential, and a myriad of years has now begun to limp slowly after what I have thought (not written – which is peripheral). I have created everything I wanted (within myself – which is the essential thing) – but not really. I’m a tree in winter, finished – yet I can still dress myself in leaves, flowers, and fruit – now in this dream (again: mainly for myself – only secondarily in literature). By all indications, fate still has something in store for me. It could happen – Although without spring there is no verdure. If it’s a long time in coming – fine; an early spring isn’t good; and whoever lives in eternity is not impatient. –

 

Finis

 

P.S. Forgot about one very important thing: sex. Except for a few visits to bordellos and encounters late at night in the fields, “nothing serious”: not that I wouldn’t have liked it, but I didn’t have time for it – just like for my “career.” Apart from that, I’ve consistently given any woman I’ve met a little pat ... without ever getting slapped by a one of them or by any husband who happened to notice. I don’t even do this because it pleases me, but because I consider it a matter of good manners and etiquette – instinctively; as my Queen of the Nymphs says: “You uncultured lout, you see 30 beautiful women here and don’t have enough sense of honor to pat even one of them on the ass.” – Otherwise, I intend to enrich sexual “pathology” by discovering about 20 “perversities” unknown until now: that is, erotically I’ve lived – an awful lot – almost only in fantasies.

 

Written in February 1924