Then the Church turns to the single individual and addresses some questions to him. This may again prompt a reflection: “Why such questions? Love has in itself its own assurance.” But the Church, after all, does not ask these questions in order to shake but to firm up—and to allow what is already firm to express itself. Here, then, the difficulty arises that in its question the Church does not seem to take account of the erotic at all. It asks: Have you counseled with God and your conscience, then with friends and acquaintances? I shall not stress here the great advantage in the profoundly earnest asking of this kind of question by the Church. The Church—to use one of your own phrases—is not a matchmaker. Can this, then, disturb the ones involved? In their gratitude, they have indeed taken their love to God and in this way counseled with him, for, even though indirect, it certainly is taking counsel with God when I thank him. Thus when the Church does not ask [II 86] them whether they love each other, it is by no means because it wants to do away with earthly love but because it presupposes it.

Then the Church administers a vow. We saw previously how love admirably lets itself be taken up into a higher concentricity. The intention makes the individual free, but, as already explained, the freer the individual is, the more esthetically beautiful is the marriage.

Thus I believe it has become apparent that, insofar as one seeks the esthetic in first love in its present tense, in its immediate infinity, marriage must be regarded as its transfiguration and even more beautiful than first love. I trust that this has been made clear in what I have written previously and also that we have seen in what I have just written that all the talk about the Church’s disparagement is baseless and is carried on only by one for whom the religious has caused offense.

But if the situation is as described, the rest follows by itself. The question, namely, is this: Can this love be actualized? After having conceded everything up to this point, you perhaps will say: Well, it is just as difficult to actualize marriage as to actualize first love. To that I must respond: No, for in marriage there is a law of motion. First love remains an unreal an-sich [in itself] that never acquires inner substance because it moves only in an external medium. In the ethical and religious intention, marital love has the possibility of an inner history and is as different from first love as the historical is from the unhistorical. This love is strong, stronger than the whole world, but the moment it doubts it is annihilated; it is like a sleepwalker who is able to walk the most dangerous places with complete security but plunges down when someone calls his name. Marital love is armed, for in the intention not only is attentiveness directed to the surrounding world but the will is directed toward itself, toward the inner world.

And now I turn everything around and say: The esthetic is not in the immediate but in the acquired; but marriage is precisely that immediacy which contains mediacy, that infinity which contains finitude, that eternity which contains temporality. Thus, marriage proves to be ideal in a double sense, both in the classical and in the romantic sense.111 When I say that the esthetic consists in the acquired, it does not at all mean that it lies in the mere striving as such. This is indeed negative, but the merely negative is never esthetic. When, however, it is [II 87] a striving that in itself has content, a struggle that in itself has the victory, then in this duplexity I have the esthetic.

This, I believe, ought to be borne in mind in regard to the enthusiasm of despair with which our age hears the acquired recommended in contrast to the immediate, as if it were this it depended upon to destroy everything lock, stock, and barrel in order to build anew. It has really made me uneasy to hear the jubilation with which younger men, just like the terrorists in the French Revolution, shout: de omnibus dubitandum.112 Perhaps I am prejudiced. But I do believe, however, that we must distinguish between personal and scientific doubt.113 Personal doubt is always a special matter, and such an enthusiasm for destruction, which we hear so much about, has at best the result that a goodly number of men venture out but do not have the power114 to doubt, and they succumb or become irresolute, which is likewise certain destruction. But if an individual’s wrestling in doubt develops the power that in turn overcomes the doubt, such a sight is elevating, since it shows the quality of person, but it is not really beautiful, because to be that requires that it have immediacy within itself. Such a development produced in the highest degree through doubt aims at what in an extreme expression is called: making one into a completely different person. Beauty, however, consists in this, that immediacy is acquired in and with the doubt. I must emphasize this in opposition to the abstraction in which doubt has been affirmed, the idolatry with which people have engaged in it, the rashness with which people have plunged into it, the blind trust with which people have hoped for a glorious result from it.

Then, too, the more spiritual the hoped-for gain, the more doubt can be praised; but love always belongs to a realm in which it is not so much a question of something acquired as of something given, and something given that is acquired. I cannot conceive at all what kind of doubt this would be. Would it be the right pattern for a married man to have had sorry experiences, to have learned to doubt, and would the marriage that ensued be truly beautiful if by virtue of this doubt he married with tremendous moral earnestness and was faithful and constant as a husband? We will praise him but not commend [II 88] his marriage except as an example of what a person is able to do. Or, in order to be a complete doubter, should he also doubt her love and the possibility of maintaining the beauty of this relationship and still have the stoicism to will it? I know it very well; you false teachers are very willing to praise such a thing precisely in order that your false teaching may find favor more easily. You praise it when it serves your purpose and say: Look, this is the true marriage. But you know very well that this praise conceals a criticism, and that the woman especially is not served thereby, and in this way you do all you can to tempt her. Therefore, you divide and separate by the old rule: divide et impera [divide and rule].115 You eulogize first love. When you have your way, it becomes an element that lies outside time, a mysterious something about which any lie can be told. Marriage cannot hide itself in this way, it takes days and years to blossom—what an easy opportunity to tear down or to build up with such traitorous observations that a desperate resignation is required to endure it.

This much stands established between us: considered as an element, marital love [Kjærlighed] is not only just as beautiful as the first but even more beautiful, because in its immediacy it contains a unity in several contrasts. Thus it is not true that marriage is an exceedingly respectable but tiresomely moral role and that erotic love [Elskov] is poetry; no, marriage is really the poetic. And if the world has often witnessed with pain that a first love cannot be sustained, I shall grieve along with the world but shall also bring to mind that the defect was not so much in what happened later as in its not beginning rightly. What the first love lacks, then, is the second esthetic ideal, the historical.116 It does not have the law of motion in itself. If I were to regard faith in personal life as equally immediate, first love would correspond to a faith that in the power of the promise would believe itself capable of moving mountains117 and would then go around and perform miracles. Perhaps it would succeed, but this faith would have no history, for a recitation of all its miracles is not its history, whereas the appropriation of faith in personal life is faith’s history. This motion marital love does have, for in the intention the motion is directed inward. In the religious, it lets God, so to speak, take care of the whole world; in the intention, it will [II 89] fight together with God for itself, will gain itself in patience.118 In the consciousness of sin, a conception of human frailty is a component, but in the intention it is perceived as surmounted. I cannot emphasize this enough with regard to marital love. I surely have done full justice to first love, and I believe I am even a better extoller of it than you are, but its defect lies in its abstract character.

Marital love, therefore, has something more in it, as you can see also from the fact that it is able to relinquish itself. Suppose that the first love could not be actualized; then, if it was truly a marital love, the individuals would be able to relinquish it and still possess its sweetness, even though in another sense. First love can never do this. But from this it by no means follows that it was doubt that provided marital love with its resignation, as if it were a belittlement of first love. If that was the case, then it was indeed no resignation, and yet perhaps no one knows better how sweet it is than the person who resigns it and yet has the power for it; but in turn this power is just as great when it is a matter of holding on to the love, of actualizing it in life. It takes the same power to relinquish it as to hold on to it, and the true holding on is the power that was capable of relinquishing and now expresses itself in holding on, and only in this lies the true freedom in holding on, the true, secure soaring.

Marital love manifests itself as historical by being a process of assimilation; it tries its hand at what is experienced and refers what it has experienced to itself. Consequently, it is not an uninterested witness to what happens but is essentially participative—in short, it experiences its own development. Romantic love, to be sure, also refers to itself what it experienced—for example, when the knight sends to his beloved the banners etc. won in battle; but even if romantic love could imagine all the time involved in such conquests, it still could never occur to it that love should have a history. The prosaic view goes to the opposite extreme. It can well imagine that love gains a history,119 but as a rule it is a brief history, and this history is so common and pedestrian that love may soon acquire [II 90] feet on which to walk. Experimenting love certainly does acquire a kind of history also, but, just as it has no true apriority, it also has no continuity and is confined to the arbitrariness of the experimenting individual who is simultaneously his own world and his own fate in it. Experimenting love is therefore much inclined to inquire into the state of love and so has a double delight—on the one hand, when the outcome corresponds to the reckoning, and on the other, when it appears that something completely different has come out of it. When this happens, it is also satisfied, since it has a task for its inexhaustible composing.

Marital love, however, has not only apriority in itself but also constancy in itself, and the energizing power in this constancy is the same as the law of motion—it is the intention. In the intention, something else is posited, but this something else is also posited as something surmounted; in the intention, this something else is posited as an internal something else, inasmuch as even the external is seen in its reflection in the internal. The historical consists in the emergence of this something else and the acquiring of its validity, but precisely in its validity it is seen as something that should not have validity. Thus love, tested and purified, issues from this movement and assimilates what is experienced. How this something else emerges does not lie within the power of the individual, who is not related by way of experimenting; but in its apriority love has still been victorious also over all this without knowing it.

To be sure, somewhere in the New Testament it reads: Every gift is good if it is received with thanksgiving.120 The majority of people are willing to be grateful when they receive a good gift, but then they demand that it be left to them to decide which gift is good. This proves their shallowness; but that other thankfulness is truly triumphant and a priori, because it has an intrinsic eternal soundness that is undismayed even by a bad gift—not because one knows how to spurn it, but because of the boldness, the high personal courage, that dares to thank for it. So it also is with love. At this point it would never enter my head to respond to all the jeremiads you always jocosely have ready for the edification of worried husbands, and I hope that this time you will restrain yourself, inasmuch as you are dealing with a married man who simply cannot tempt you to have the fun of making him even more confused.

But while I am thus tracing love from its cryptogamous [II 91] concealment to its phanerogamous life, I encounter along the way a difficulty that you surely will say has no slight significance. Posito, I assume,121 that I managed to convince you that the religious and ethical, which in marital love joins first love, by no means detracts from it, and that you deeply convinced yourself of this in your innermost being and now by no means would reject a religious point of departure. Then, alone with her whom you loved, you would humble yourself and your love under God. You are really gripped and moved, but now watch out—I say just one word, “the congregation,” and at once, as it says in the ballad, everything vanishes again.122 I do not think you will ever be able to ignore the category of inwardness. “The congregation, the blessed parish, which despite its plurality still is a moral character—yes, even if it had, just as it has all the boring qualities of moral characters, also the good quality of having only one head on one neck123 . . . . . I know very well what I would do.”

You no doubt know of the insane man who had the fixed idea that his apartment was full of flies124 so that he was in danger of being smothered by them. In the anxiety of despair and with the rage of despair, he fought for his life. In the same way you, too, seem to be fighting for your life against a similar imaginary swarm of flies, against what you call “the congregation.” The matter, however, is not so dangerous; nevertheless I shall first of all go through the most important point of contact with the congregation. Before doing so, may I recall that first love simply does not dare reckon to its advantage that it does not know such difficulties, for this is due to its keeping itself fixedly abstract and not coming into contact with actuality at all. You know very well how to distinguish among the abstract relationships to the surrounding world, the abstraction of which cancels the relationships. You can even put up with having to pay the clergyman, the parish clerk, and a government official, for money is an excellent means of distancing every relationship. That is also why you let me in on your plan never to do anything and never to accept anything, not the least little thing, without giving or receiving money. By implication, if you ever do get married, you are capable of paying a douceur [tip] to everyone who comes to witness to his joy [II 92] over this step. In that case, it must not surprise you that the congregation increases in number, or if what the man with the flies feared actually does happen to you. What you fear, then, is the personal relationships that by way of inquiries, congratulations, compliments, yes, even through the giving of presents, lay claim to entering into a relationship to you that is incommensurable with money and seek to manifest all possible sharing, although especially on this occasion you would rather be without it for the sake of both you and your beloved. “With money one can avoid a host of ludicrous situations. With money a person can stop the mouth of the church trumpeter who otherwise would trumpet in the national assembly for one; with money he can avoid being proclaimed a married man before the whole congregation, an upright married man, and that despite one’s wishing in casu [in this case] to limit oneself to being that for one single person.”

This is not my invention, this sketch; it is yours. Can you remember how you fumed one time on the occasion of a church wedding? You wished, just as at ordination services all the clergymen present come up and lay their hands upon the ordinand, that similarly all the tenderly participating fraternity present would kiss the bride and bridegroom with a congregational kiss. Indeed, you declared that it was impossible for you to speak the words “bride and bridegroom” without thinking of that impressive moment when a fond father or an old friend rises with his glass to utter with deep emotion those beautiful words: bride and bridegroom. For just as you found the whole church ceremony superbly designed to stifle the erotic, so the subsequent worldliness was as improper as the church ceremony was all too proper, “for it was improper, ludicrous, insipid to place a quasi husband and wife together at a dinner table and thereby prompt the biased and untrue and unbeautiful reflection about whether it is the Church’s decree that makes them a married couple.” Consequently, you seem to prefer a quiet wedding. I have nothing against that but merely inform you that here you will be pronounced just as fully to be a proper married man. Perhaps you are better able to tolerate the words when no one else hears them. Moreover, may I remind you that the marriage service does not say “before the whole congregation” but 125“before God and this congregation,” a phrase that neither dismays by its limitation nor lacks boldness.

As for anything else you have to say on this, even if said [II 93] with your customary indiscretion, I can better forgive you because you are still attacking only the social aspects. As far as they are concerned, everyone may have his own opinion, and even though I am a long way from sanctioning your Sprødigkeit [coyness], I shall nevertheless be as tolerant as possible. Presumably we will always disagree on them. I regard it as important to live within them, to bring something beautiful out of them if one is capable of it, to submit to them and put up with them if one is incapable of that. I see no danger at all to a person’s love in having the banns read from the pulpit; neither do I believe that such an announcement is harmful to the audience, as you with your exaggerated rigidity once made out when you insisted that reading the banns ought to be abolished because so many people, especially women, went to church only to hear them and thus the impact of the sermon was destroyed. There is something untrue in the basis of your apprehensiveness, as if all such trifles could disturb a sound and strong love. With regard to this, it is by no means my intention to come to the defense of every nuisance that is prevalent. When I stand up firmly for the congregation, I do not identify this with an “esteemed public,” which, to recall a line by Goethe, “is sufficiently shameless to believe that everything a person undertakes he does in order to provide material for conversation.”126

Another observation, one that for me also accounts for your excessive anxiety about all sociality and commotion, is that you are afraid you will miss out on the erotic moment. You know how to keep your soul as apathetic and motionless as a bird of prey pausing motionless before it plunges down; you know that the moment is not in one’s power, and that nevertheless the most beautiful lies in the moment; this is why you understand how to keep watch, do not wish to anticipate anything with the restlessness in which you await the moment. But when such an event is assigned to a specific time that one knows long in advance, when one is perpetually reminded of it by the preparations, then there is the danger of “missing the point.” This shows that you have not grasped the nature of marital love and that you harbor a heretical and superstitious belief in first love.

Now let us ponder whether this matter of the congregation is actually so dangerous when it, please note, is not permitted to assume such a terrifying shape as it momentarily assumes in [II 94] your sick brain. Your life certainly has brought you not merely into contact, no, into intimate connection, with a few individuals, remembrance of whom does not disquiet you, does not disturb the ideality in you, whose names you say aloud to yourself when you want to encourage yourself to the good, whose presence expands your soul, whose personalities are for you a disclosure of the noble and the sublime. Should it now disturb you to have such associates? It is almost as if a person were to declare with regard to religion, “I wish with all my heart to maintain my fellowship with God and Christ, but I cannot bear to have him confess me before all the holy angels.”127

On the other hand, your life, the outer circumstances of your life, has certainly brought you into contact with others to whom joys and beautiful, significant interruptions are only sparsely allotted in the humdrum routine of daily life. Does not every family know some people like that among its acquaintances, perhaps even in its midst, and is it not beautiful that these people, almost forsaken in their loneliness, have a place of resort in a family. For them a marriage would be a significant event, a little poetic island in their everyday life, something they can look forward to long in advance and remember long afterwards. In a family I visit, I frequently see an old spinster who is contemporary with the mistress of the house. She still remembers very vividly the wedding day, alas, perhaps more vividly than the wife herself—how the bride was adorned, every little incidental circumstance. Would you then rob all such people of the opportunity for happiness that you could provide them?

Let us deal lovingly with the frail. Many a marriage has been entered into in all secrecy in order to relish its joy properly, and time perhaps brought something different, so little joy that one could be tempted to say: Well, it still might have had the significance of giving a number of people some joy—then it would nevertheless have been something. You know that I hate, just as much as you, all impertinences about families, but for one thing I know how to keep them out of my life, and, for another, how to rise above them, and you with your bitterness, your polemics, your fire—should you not understand how to clear the area? You do, indeed, but it disturbs you nonetheless. I will not dictate restrictions to you; toss out what disturbs you, but do not forget altogether my principle, do not forget to actualize, if it is possible for you, the even more beautiful; remember that the art is to save such people if it can be [II 95] done, not to defend yourself. I could enjoin this upon you as a prudential rule, for you know full well that the more a person isolates himself the more almost obtrusive he makes all these idle, gossipy people, you who so often have played your game with them by making them curious and then letting the whole thing dissolve into nothing! I could enjoin this as a prudential rule but shall not, for I have too much respect for the truth of what I am saying to want to degrade it.

Every coming into existence [Tilblivelse], the sounder it is, always has an element of the polemic, all the more so the sounder it is, and in the same way every marriage tie also has this. You know very well that I despise laxity in the family, the vapid communio bonorum [joint ownership of property] that can give a marriage the appearance of one’s having married the whole family.128 If the marital love is a true first love, then there is also some concealment about it; it has no desire to make a display of itself, does not devote its life to appearing on all festive occasions, does not draw its nourishment from congratulations and compliments or from a divine worship as it can be arranged in the family. You know that very well; just let your wit make a game of all this. In many ways, I can agree with you, and I believe that it would not hurt you and the good cause if you were to let me, like the experienced, kind forester, point out the decayed trees to be chopped down, but then mark a cross in other places also.

I have no hesitation at all in declaring secretiveness to be the absolute condition for preserving the esthetic in marriage, not in the sense that one should aim at it, pursue it, take it in vain, let the only real enjoyment be in the enjoyment of secretiveness. One of the favorite fancies of first love is that it will take flight to an uninhabited island. Now this has often enough been made ludicrous, and I shall not take part in the iconoclastic ferocity of our age. The defect in it is that first love believes it cannot be actualized in any other way than by taking flight. This is a misunderstanding that is rooted in its unhistorical character. The art is to remain in the multiplicity and still preserve the secret. Here again I could enjoin it as a prudential rule that only by remaining among people does the secretiveness [II 96] acquire its true energy; only by this opposition does its point drill in more and more deeply. I shall refrain from doing it for the same reason as before, and also because I always recognize a relationship to other people as something that has reality [Realitet]. But this is why it takes artistry, and marital love does not shun these difficulties but preserves and gains itself in them. Then, too, marital love has so much else to think about that it does not have time to become bogged down in a polemic against particulars.

129Inwardly this primary condition is as follows: frankness, uprightness, openness on the largest scale possible; this is the life-principle of love, and secretiveness here is its death. But this is not so easily done as said, and it truly takes courage to carry it out consistently, for you presumably do see that in this I am thinking of something more than the frivolous babbling that prevails in complex family-marriages. Of course, there can be the possibility of openness only where there is secretiveness; but to the same degree that this is present, that also becomes more difficult. It takes courage to be willing to appear as one really is; it takes courage not to want to buy oneself off from a little humiliation when one can do this by a certain secretiveness, not to want to buy a little more stature when one can do it by being inclosedly reserved [indesluttet]. It takes courage to will to be sound, honestly and sincerely to will the true.

But let us begin with something of lesser significance. A newly married couple who considered themselves obliged “to circumscribe their love within the narrow boundaries of three small rooms” provided you with the occasion for taking a little trip into the kingdom of fantasy, which lies so near to your daily place of sojourn that it is doubtful whether one should call it an excursion. You devoted yourself to decorating, with the greatest solicitude and elegance, a future such as you could wish for yourself. You know that I am not an unwilling participant in little imaginary constructions130 like that, and, God be praised, I am sufficiently a child so that when a princely carriage with four snorting horses drives by me I can imagine that I am sitting inside it, sufficiently innocent so that when I have convinced myself that this is not the case I am able to be happy that someone else is doing it, sufficiently unspoiled not to want the maximum to be to keep one horse that is both a driving horse and a riding horse because my circumstances allow me only that.

So in your thought you were married, happily married, had kept your love unimpaired in all adversities, and now planned how you could arrange everything in your home so that your love could preserve its fragrance as long as possible. To that [II 97] end, you needed more than three rooms. I agreed with you on that, since as a bachelor you use five rooms. It would be unpleasant for you if you should be obliged to hand over one of your rooms to your wife; as far as that goes, you would prefer to hand over the four to her and yourself live in the fifth rather than to have one in common. Having considered these inconveniences, you went on to say: Consequently, I proceed from [gaa ud fra]131 the three rooms in question, not in the philosophical sense, for I have no intention of coming back to them again, but, on the contrary, of going as far away from them as possible. Indeed, you had such a loathing for three small rooms that if you could not have more than that you would prefer to live like a tramp under the open sky, which at last would be so poetic that it would take a fairly large suite of rooms to compensate for it. By cautioning you that this was one of the common heresies of unhistorical first love, I tried to call you to order and thereupon was really pleased to walk with you through the many spacious, cool, high-ceilinged drawing rooms of your castle in the air, the secret, half-lighted private chambers, the many dining rooms illuminated even in the most remote corners by candles, chandeliers, and mirrors, the little room with folding doors opening out to the balcony, where the morning sun streamed in and the scent of flowers, which exuded only for you and your love, flowed to meet us.

I shall not pursue your bold steps further as you leap from peak to peak like a mountain antelope hunter. I shall discuss in a bit more detail only the principle on which your plan was founded. Obviously the principle was secretiveness, mystification, subtle coquetry. Not only the walls in your great rooms were to be framed in glass,132 but even your world of consciousness was to be multiplied by similar refractions; you would meet her and yourself, yourself and her, not only everywhere in the room but also in your consciousness.

“But for this to be done, the wealth of the whole world is not adequate; it takes spirit for that, a sagacious moderation by means of which the powers of the spirit are disposed. Therefore they must be such strangers to each other that the intimacy becomes interesting, so intimate that the strangeness becomes a stimulating resistance. Married life must not be a houserobe in which one relaxes, but neither should it be a corset that hinders movement; it must not be a task that requires exhausting preparation, but neither should it be a dissolute indolence. It must have the stamp of the accidental, and yet one must have a remote intimation of an artistry; one should not become quite hypnotized by hooking, day and night, a carpet that can hide the floor in the great drawing room, but, on the contrary, the most insignificant attention must have a secret [II 98] little mark in the corner; one will not quite have one’s monogram on the cake every day they eat together, but yet there can very well be a little telegraphic signal. It is a matter of staying as far as possible from the point where one has an intimation of a circular motion, the point where repetition begins; and since it cannot be avoided entirely, it is a matter of planning in such a way that a variation is possible. There is only a set number of texts, and if a person preaches himself out the very first Sunday, he has nothing to preach about not only the rest of the year but not even on the first Sunday in the next year. As long as possible, they ought to remain somewhat mysterious to each other, and insofar as one gradually discloses oneself, this must occur through the use of accidental events as much as possible, so that it becomes so relative that it can be viewed again from many other sides. One must guard against any surfeit and aftertaste.”

You would reside on the first floor of this noble castle, which would be located in a beautiful region, yet close to the capital city. Your wife, your consort, would reside in the left wing of the second floor. That was something you had always envied people of nobility—the husband and wife had separate quarters. But then again there was something that took away the esthetic in this court life, a ceremonial formality that insisted on being ranked above love. One is announced, one waits a moment, one is received. It was something that in and by itself was not unbeautiful but acquired its true beauty only when it became a play in the divine game of love, when it was credited with validity in such a way that it could just as well be deprived of validity. Erotic love itself must have many boundaries, but every boundary must also be a voluptuous temptation to step over the boundary.

So you lived on the first floor, where you had your library, your billiard room, reception room, study, and bedroom. Your wife lived on the second floor. Here, too, was your toral conjugale [conjugal couch], a large room with two small rooms, one on each side. Nothing must remind you or your wife that you are married, and yet again everything must be such that no unmarried person could have it this way. You did not know what your wife was doing, and she did not know what occupied you; but this was not at all in order to be inactive or to forget each other but in order that every contact could be significant, in order to postpone that deadly moment [II 99] when you would look at each other, and behold—you were bored. You would not trudge around arm in arm in a conjugal procession; with youthful infatuation, you would even watch her for a long time from your window as she walked in the garden, sharpen your eyes in order to follow her, relapse into contemplation of her image when it disappeared from your sight. You would steal after her; yes, at times she would even rest on your arm, for there was indeed always something beautiful in what has become established among people as an expression of a special feeling. You would walk with her on your arm, half doing justice to the beauty in this custom, half joking that you two were walking as proper married folk. But how would I be able to come to an end if I were to follow the shrewd refinements of your ingenious head in this Asiatic luxuriance that almost exhausts me and makes me wish myself back in the three small rooms you so proudly rejected.

Now, if there is otherwise some esthetic beauty in this whole view, no doubt it would be found partly in the erotic shyness of which you permitted an intimation, partly in your wanting at no moment to possess the beloved as acquired but perpetually to acquire her. In and by itself the latter is true and correct, but the task is by no means posed with erotic earnestness and consequently to that extent is not carried out either. You clung continually to an immediacy as such, to a natural disposition, and did not dare let it be transfigured in a shared consciousness, for this is what I have expressed by “sincerity” and “openness.” You are afraid that love will cease when the mystery is gone; I think, however, that it does not begin until that is gone. You are afraid that one does not dare to know completely what one loves, you rely upon the incommensurable as an absolutely important ingredient; I maintain that a person does not truly love until he knows what he loves. Furthermore, all your happiness lacks a blessing, for it lacks adversities, and just as this is a defect, insofar as you actually were to instruct anyone with your theory, so it is also fortunate that it is not true.

So let us turn to the way things really are in life. Now, in my insisting that adversity is part of marriage, I by no means permit you to identify marriage with a retinue of adversities. It is already implicit in the resignation contained in the resolution, as previously explained, that there will be accompanying adversities, except that these have not as yet assumed a definite shape and are not alarming, since on the contrary they are already seen as overcome in the resolution. Furthermore, adversity is not seen externally but internally in its reflexion in the [II 100] individual, but this belongs to the shared history of marital love. Secretiveness itself, as explained above, becomes a contradiction when it has nothing to keep secret, a childishness when it is only amorous bric-à-brac that constitutes its deposit. Not until the individual’s love has truly opened his heart, made him eloquent in a much profounder sense than that in which one usually says that love makes one eloquent (for even the seducer may have that kind of eloquence), not until the individual has deposited everything in the shared consciousness, not until then does secretiveness gain its strength, life, and meaning.

But a decisive step is required for this, and consequently courage is also required; yet marital love collapses into nothing if this does not take place, for only thereby does one show that one loves not oneself but another. And how is one to show this except by being only for the other; but how is one to be only for another except by not being for oneself; but to be for oneself is almost the most common expression for the secretiveness that the individual life has when it remains in itself. Love is self-giving, but self-giving is only possible by my going out of myself—how then can this be united with the hiddenness that wants expressly to remain in itself?

“But one loses by disclosing oneself this way.” Yes, of course, the person who profits by being secretive always loses. But if you want to be consistent, you must work this out much further than this. Then you must advise not only against marriage but against every approach and then see how far your shrewd head would be able to push this in telegraphic signals. The most interesting reading is that in which the reader himself is to a certain degree productive. The true erotic feat would be to make an impression at a distance, which would be very dangerous to the person concerned because she herself would create the object of her love out of nothing and now would love her own creation—nevertheless this is not love but the coquetry of seduction. The person who loves, however, has lost himself in another, but in losing and forgetting himself in the other he is open to the other, and in forgetting himself in another he is remembered in the other. The person who loves will not wish to be confused with another, neither someone better nor inferior, and the person who does not have this respect for himself and for the beloved does not love. Ordinarily, secretiveness is rooted in a small-mindedness that wants to add a cubit to its stature.133 The person who has not learned to reject such things has never loved, for then he [II 101] would have sensed that even if he added ten cubits to his stature he would still be too small.

This humility of love is generally believed to belong only in comedies and novels or must be assigned to the convenient lies of the courting days. But this is not at all the case; this humility is a true and helpful and constant disciplinarian whenever anyone wants to measure love with anything else but love. Even though it were the lowliest and most unimportant person in the world who loved the most richly endowed person in the world, the latter, if he had any truth in him, would nevertheless feel that all his gifts still left a chasmic abyss, and that the only way he could satisfy the demand implicit in the other’s love would be to love in return. Let us never forget that one cannot reckon with heterogeneous quantities. Therefore, the person who has truly sensed this has loved, but he certainly has not been afraid of depriving himself of something that as such has no value for him. Only the person who has become poor in the world has won the true assurance of ownership, and only the person who has lost everything has gained everything.134 Hence I say with Fenelon: “Believe in love—it takes everything, it gives everything.”135 Truly it is a beautiful, an uplifting, an indescribably blissful feeling to let all the particulars disappear beneath one, to let them fade and float away like fog images before the infinite power of love. It is an arithmetical process that is just as beautiful in the infinite now in which it happens in one stroke as in the sequence in which one delights in putting out one’s hand and letting them disappear one by one. Yes, this is true love’s true enthusiasm for annihilation, when it could wish for the whole world—not to score a success thereby but to let it perish as a jest in the diversion of love. In fact, as soon as the door is opened to finite things, then wanting to be loved because one has the best head, the most talent, the highest artistic genius in his generation is just as obtuse and ludicrous as wanting to be loved because one maintains the most beautiful goatee on one’s chin. But these manifestations and moods quite naturally belong just as much to first love, and it is only the amazingly unstable attitude you always assume that makes it necessary for me to touch on this again here.

First love can wish with supranatural pathos, but this wishing easily turns into an “if without content, and we do not live in such a paradise that our Lord gives each and every married couple the whole world with which to wheel and deal as they like. Marital love knows better; its movements are not outward but inward, and here it quickly perceives that it has a wide world before it, but also that every little subjugation of [II 102] itself has a completely different commensurability with the infinity of love. And even if it feels the pain of having so much with which to struggle, it also feels the courage for this battle. Indeed, it has sufficient boldness to outbid you in paradoxes when it is almost able to rejoice that sin has entered into the world; but also in another sense it has the boldness to outbid you in paradoxes, for it has the courage to resolve them. Marital love, just as first love, knows full well that all these obstacles are conquered in the infinite moment of love. But it also knows, and this is precisely the historical in it, that this victory wills to be gained, and that this gaining is not just a game but also a struggle, yet also not just a struggle but also a game, just as the battle in Valhalla136 was a struggle to the death, and yet a game, for the warriors always rose up again, rejuvenated by death. And it likewise knows that this skirmish is not a capricious duel but a struggle under divine auspices; it feels no need to love more than one but feels a blessedness in this; and it feels no need to love more than once but feels an eternity in this. And do you think that this love that has no secrets would miss out on something beautiful? Or that it would be unable to withstand time and would necessarily be dulled through daily association? Or that boredom would come more swiftly, as if marital love did not possess an eternal substance of which one never grows weary, an eternal substance that it sometimes gains with a kiss and jest, sometimes with anxiety and trembling, and continually gains?

“But it must renounce all these lovely little surprises.” I see no necessity of that at all. It is certainly not my idea that marital love must always stand with open mouth or even talk in its sleep; on the contrary, all these little surprises acquire their significance precisely when there is total openness. This gives, namely, a security and a confidence in which this byplay is seen to best advantage. If, however, one believes that the essence of love and true bliss consists of such a chain of little surprises, that the wretched, refined softness, the restlessness, in which one is prepared at every moment for a little surprise and thinks one up oneself, is something beautiful, then I shall permit myself to say that it is very unbeautiful, and that it is a very dubious sign when a marriage has no other trophies to display than a display cabinet full of bonbons, bottles, cups, embroidered house slippers, trinkets, etc.

It is not uncommon, however, to see marriages in which the [II 103] secrecy system is in effect. I have never seen a happy marriage in which that was the case. But since this could be purely accidental, I shall run through the reasons for it that are usually given. This is important to me at this point, for an esthetically beautiful marriage is always a happy marriage. Now, if a happy marriage can be built on that basis, my theory will have to be changed. I shall not disregard any outward forms and with all possible justice shall describe every one and dwell especially on one that, in the home where I have seen it realized, has been carried through with a virtuosity that was really imposing.

The secrecy system, I think you will admit, generally comes from the men, and although it is always wrong, it nevertheless is more tolerable than the intolerability of having the woman exercise such a dominium. The worst form, of course, is the sheer despotism in which the wife is a slave, the maid-of-all-work in domestic affairs. Such a marriage is never happy, even though the years produce a lethargy that puts up with it. A more beautiful form is the extreme of this—a misplaced solicitude. “Woman is weak,” it is said. “She cannot bear troubles and cares—the frail and the weak must be dealt with in love.” Falsehood! Falsehood! Woman is just as strong as man, perhaps stronger. And do you really deal with her in love when you humiliate her in this way? Or who gave you permission to humiliate her, or how can your soul be so blind that you regard yourself as a creature superior to her? Just confide everything to her. If she is weak, if she cannot bear it—well, then she can lean on you; after all, you have strength enough. But you cannot tolerate that; you do not have the stamina for that. Therefore, it is you who are lacking in strength and not she. Perhaps she had more strength than you; perhaps she shamed you, and you do not have the strength to bear that. Or have you not promised to share good and evil with her? Is it not unfair to her not to let her in on the evil? Is it not crushing what is most noble in her? Perhaps she is weak; perhaps her grief will make everything harder—eh bien, then share this evil with her. But this in turn will save her, and do you have the right to deprive her of a way to salvation, do you have the right to sneak her through the world? And where do you gain your strength—is she not just as close to God as you? Do you want to rob her of the opportunity to find God in the deepest and innermost way—through pain and suffering? Do you know so [II 104] surely, then, that she has no inkling at all of your secretiveness? Do you know if she does not grieve and sigh in silence, if her soul is not being damaged? Perhaps her weakness is humility; perhaps she believes that it is her duty to bear all this. To be sure, you thereby have been the occasion for developing strength in her, but it was nevertheless not in the way you wished or had promised. Or are you treating her, to put it strongly, like an extra wife—for it is of no help to her that you do not have more. And is it not doubly humiliating to her to discern that you love her not because you are a proud tyrant but because she is a frail creature?

For some time, I was guest in a home where I had opportunity to observe a more skillful and refined practice of the silent system. The husband was a rather young man, unusually gifted, very intelligent, poetic by nature, too lazy to bring himself to produce, yet with an extraordinary perceptiveness and aliveness in making everyday life poetic. His wife was young, not without intellect, but with an unusual character. This captivated him. It was so absolutely amazing how he knew all the ways to awaken and encourage everything youthfully visionary in her. Her whole existence, their married life, was interlaced with poetic magic. He kept his eye on everything; when she looked around, it was not there. He had his finger in everything, but just as figuratively and in the finite sense as unsubstantially as God’s finger is in history. Wherever her thoughts might want to turn, he had already been there, had everything ready; like Potemkin,137 he knew how to conjure up a setting, and precisely one that, after an initial surprise and a little resistance, inevitably pleased her. His domestic life was a little creation story, and just as in the great creation story mankind is that toward which everything strives, so she was the center of a magic circle in which she still enjoyed all her freedom, for the circle conformed to her and had no boundary that might announce: Here and no further.138 She could rush as fast as she wished and in any direction she wished—the circle adapted itself but nevertheless was there. She walked as if she were in a toddler-walker, but this one was not woven out of willows but was an intertwining of her hopes, dreams, longings, wishes, anxieties—in short, it was formed out of the whole content of her soul. He himself moved in this dream [II 105] world with consummate assurance, surrendered none of his dignity, asserted and upheld his authority as husband and master. It would have made her uneasy if he had not; it perhaps would have awakened in her a frightening presentiment that might have led her to a dissolution of the secrecy. He did not seem to be so very attentive to the world or even to her, and yet he was secretly aware that she had not received any impressions from him other than those he wanted her to receive, and he knew that he had it in his power to break the spell with a single word. Everything that could have an unpleasant effect on her had been removed; if anything like that came along, she received from him in the form of a forthright communication, either after letting her question him closely or by approaching her frankly, an interpretation that he himself had more or less edited according to the impression he wanted to make. He was proud, fearfully consistent; he loved her but could not abandon, in the deepest stillness of the night or in the moment that lay outside time, the proud thought of presuming to say to himself: Yet she owes everything to me.

Is it not true that you have followed my description with interest, however imperfect my achievement is, because it evokes for your soul a picture that you find congenial, that you perhaps would try to put into practice if you were to be married? This marriage, was it then a happy marriage? Yes, if that is the way you want it—but nevertheless a dark fate hovered over this happiness. Suppose that something went wrong for him, suppose that she suddenly suspected something—I believe that she could never forgive him, for her proud soul was too proud to have it said that he had done it out of love for her.

Here I wish to call to mind an old-fashioned saying about the relation between married people (on the whole I am always happy to support the revolution, or rather the holy war, in which the plain and simple but true and rich expressions of legitimate marriage strive to conquer the kingdom from which the novel has displaced them). It is said of married folk that they should live in good understanding with each other. Most frequently one hears it expressed negatively. A married couple is not living in good understanding with each other, and then ordinarily one supposes that they cannot stand each other, that they fight and bite etc. Now take the positive version. The married couple we are talking about living in good understanding—yes, that is what the world would say, but you presumably would not, for how could they live in good understanding when they do not understand each other? But is it not part and parcel of understanding for the one party to know how solicitous and affectionate the other is toward him? Or [II 106] even if he did not deprive her of anything else, he deprived her of the occasion to have the degree of gratitude her soul needed before she could find rest. Is it not a beautiful, a beautiful and simple phrase: to live in good understanding? It presupposes that they understand each other clearly and distinctly (you see, this marital terminology is very well informed and does not make a big commotion about what nowadays must often be precisely insisted upon) and assumes this as something self-evident, as we see from the assignment of an adjective with a special emphasis, for otherwise it would have been sufficient to say that they should live in understanding. “Good understanding”—what else does it mean but that they should find their joy, peace, rest, their lives, in this understanding?

You see, therefore, that in no way does the secrecy system lead to a happy marriage and thus neither to an esthetically beautiful marriage. No, my friend, honesty, frankness, openness, understanding—this is the life principle in marriage. Without this understanding, marriage is unbeautiful and actually immoral, for then the sensuous and the spiritual, which love unites, are separated. Only when the being with whom I live in the most tender union in earthly life is just as close to me in the spiritual sense, only then is my marriage moral and therefore also esthetically beautiful. And you proud husbands, who perhaps secretly gloat in this conquest over woman, you forget that in the first place it is a sorry conquest when one triumphs over the weaker, and that the husband honors himself in his wife, and he who does not do so holds himself in contempt.

Understanding, then, is the life principle in marriage. We frequently hear experienced people discussing under what circumstances a person ought to be dissuaded from marrying. Let them discuss the particulars as thoroughly and ruminantly as they wish—what they ordinarily say is of no great significance. For my part, I shall mention only one circumstance— that is, when the individual life is so entangled that it cannot disclose itself. If the history of your inner life has something unspeakable in it or if your life has initiated you into secrets— in short, if in some way or another you have swallowed a secret that cannot be dragged out of you without costing your life—then never marry. Either you will feel bound to a being who has no intimation of what is going on inside you, and in that case your marriage is an unbeautiful misalliance, or you attach yourself to a being who perceives it in frightened anxiety, at every moment sees these silhouettes on the wall. She perhaps will decide never to question you closely, never to come too close to you; she will renounce the curiosity of anxiety [II 107] that tempts her, but she will never be happy, and you will not either. Whether there are such secrets, whether there is any truth to the inclosing reserve the lock of which not even love can pick, I shall not say; I am carrying through my principle, and as far as I am concerned I have no secrets from my wife. One would think that it would never occur to a person like that to marry, a person who in addition to everything else he had to do also had this daily preoccupation with his painful secret. 139 But still it does happen occasionally, and a person like that is perhaps most dangerously fascinating to a woman.

But since I have now mentioned secretiveness and understanding as the two aspects of the same issue, but this one issue as the most important thing in love, as the absolute condition for preserving the esthetic in marriage, I may very well fear that you will now object that I seem to forget “what I ordinarily adhere to closely like the refrain in a ballad,” the historical character of marriage. You still hope, however, to protract the time by means of your secretiveness and your shrewdly calculated relativizing declaration: “But as soon as married people really begin a thorough telling of their more or less short or long histories, then very soon the moment comes to say: ‘Pitty, patty, pat, and that’s the end of that.’ ” My young friend, you do not perceive that if you can make a charge like that, it is because you are incorrectly situated. Because of your secretiveness, you have a time-category within you, and it actually is a matter of protracting the time, whereas love with its disclosure has an eternity-category within itself, and thus all competition becomes impossible. Indeed, it is an arbitrary misunderstanding to interpret this disclosure as if married people would take a dozen or so days to relate their life story, and thereupon would follow the silence of the grave, broken just once by the fairly familiar story: “As it says about the mill somewhere in a fairy tale, ‘And while all this was happening the mill went klip klap, klip klap.’ ”140 The historical character of marriage makes this understanding something that is all at once just as much as it continually becomes. It is the same here as in individual life. When a person has arrived at an understanding of himself, has had the courage to be willing to see himself, it by no means thereby follows that the story is now past history, for now it begins, now for the first time it gains its real meaning, in that every single experienced moment is led back to this total view. So it is also in marriage. In this disclosure, [II 108] the immediacy of first love founders, yet it is not lost but is caught up in the joint marital consciousness, and with this the history begins, and to this joint marital consciousness the particular detail is led back, and therein lies its happiness [Salighed], a term in which the historical character of marriage is preserved and which corresponds to the joy of life or what the Germans call Heiterkeit [serenity], which the first love has.

To become historical, then, belongs essentially to marital love, and since the individuals now have the right attitude, the command “to eat their bread in the sweat of their brow”141 is no terrible and unexpected message, and the courage and power it feels it has is the complement to and the truth in knightly love’s incredible need for incredible deeds. Just as the knight is without fear, so also is marital love, although the enemies it has to fight against are often far more dangerous. This opens a wide range for contemplation, but one in which I do not plan to set foot; but if the knight has the right to say that the person who does not defy the whole world to save his beloved does not know knightly love, then the married man has the right to say the same. But I must always remind you that every such victory that marital love wins is more esthetically beautiful than the victory the knight wins, for in winning this victory he also wins his love glorified in it. Marital love fears nothing, not even minor mistakes; it does not fear little infatuations—in fact, these, too, only nourish the divine soundness of marital love. Even in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften,142 Ottilia is plowed under, as a faint possibility, by the earnest marital love—how much more power, then, a marriage with a deep religious and ethical foundation should have for that. Indeed, Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften demonstrates precisely what secretiveness leads to. That love would not have gained the power if it had not been permitted to grow in stillness. If Edward had had the courage to be open to his wife, it would have been prevented, and the whole story would have become a divertissement in the drama of marriage. The fatefulness was due to both Edward’s and his wife’s becoming infatuated at the same time, but this again was because of silence. The married man who has the courage to confide to his wife that he loves someone else is saved, and so is the wife. But if he does not have it, he loses confidence in himself and thus what he seeks in another’s love is oblivion, just as it is frequently just as much pangs about not having resisted in time as it is genuine love for the other woman that makes a husband surrender. He [II 109] feels that he has lost himself, and once this is the case, strong opiates are needed as a depressant.

The difficulties with which marital love must struggle I shall discuss only in general in order to show that they are not of such significance that love has anything to fear from them with respect to preserving the esthetic. The objections usually stem from a misunderstanding of the esthetic significance of the historical or from the common practice of having only the classical ideal within romanticism and not the romantic ideal also. The basis of many other objections is that, while people always like to think of the first love as dancing on roses, they are pleased that marital love is cheated in every way and struggles with the most wretched and discouraging difficulties. Then, too, they secretly think that these difficulties are insurmountable, and so they are quickly finished with marriage.

When one is dealing with you, one must always be somewhat cautious. I am not speaking about any particular marriage and thus am free to portray it as I wish; but even if I have no desire to make myself guilty of any arbitrariness, it does not mean that you will renounce this urge. If, for example, poverty is cited as a difficulty with which marriage may have to struggle, I answer: Work, and then everything will be all right. Since you and I are moving in a poetic world, it perhaps will please you to assert your poetic license and answer, “They cannot find work. The decline in business and shipping has put many people out of work.” Or you will permit them to have a little work, but it is not enough. If I now am of the opinion that with prudent thriftiness they will manage, you fabricate the excuse that precisely because of the alarming complex of circumstances the grain prices are so high that it is utterly impossible to manage with what otherwise would have been enough for them to pull through. I know you too well. You take great delight in fabricating the counterthrust, and when that has amused you long enough, on the basis of some remark you engage the person with whom you are talking or someone else present in a long-winded chat that has nothing at all to do with the original subject. You relish suddenly turning a poetic caprice into a kind of actuality and then enlarging upon it. If you had been talking with anyone else but me (for you usually [II 110] spare me) in the way described, you probably would have added to the comment on the high grain prices, “Such high prices! To think that a pound loaf of bread would cost eight shillings!” If, as good luck would have it, someone was present who answered that it was utterly unthinkable, you would inform him that under Olaf Hunger143 a pound loaf of bread— and bark bread at that—cost eight and a half shillings in old Danish currency, and if one considered that people at that time did not have much money, one would readily perceive etc. Then if you drew out the one to whom you were talking, you would be beside yourself with joy. The one who had originally started the conversation would try in vain to bring you back to reason; everything would be confused, and you would have made a married couple in the world of poetry unhappy.

That is what makes it so difficult to become involved with you. If I were to venture out on what for me certainly could be called thin ice and try to describe fictionally a marriage that victoriously endured in the struggle with a host of such adversities, you would answer very calmly: Well, that is just poetry, and in the world of poetry it is easy to make people happy; that is the least one can do for them. If I took you by the arm and walked around and showed you a real-life marriage that had fought the good fight,144 then—if you were in the mood—you would answer, “Well, that’s all very fine; the outer aspects of temptation can be substantiated, but not the inner ones, and I assume that temptation has not had inner power in them, for otherwise it would not have been endurable.” Just as if the true significance of temptation were that people must succumb to it. But enough of that. Once you have a mind to abandon yourself to this demon of arbitrariness, there is no end to it, and just as you are conscious of everything you do, so you are also conscious of this arbitrariness and really revel in shaking all the foundations.

I can divide these difficulties very generally into outer and inner difficulties and continually bear in mind the relativity of such a division with respect to marriage, where of all places everything is inner. First of all, then, the outer difficulties. I have no qualms or fears at all in mentioning all the depressing, humiliating, annoying finite troubles—in short, all those that add up to a weinerlich [tearful] drama. You and your kind are extremely arbitrary, here as everywhere. If a play such as this forces you to take such a tour through the caves of misery, you say it is unesthetic, blubbering, and boring. And in that you are right—but why? Because it makes you indignant that something noble and exalted succumbs to such things. But if you and your kind turn to the actual world and there encounter [II 111] a family that has experienced just half of the adversities that this playwright executioner, in the lascivious pleasure (reserved for tyrants) of tormenting others, thinks up, you tremble, and you think: Goodbye to all esthetic beauty. You feel pity, you are willing to help if for no other reason than to drive off these dark thoughts, but you have long since despaired as far as the unhappy family is concerned. But if it is true in life, then the poet does indeed have the right to portray it and is right in portraying it.

When you are sitting in the theater, intoxicated with esthetic pleasure, then you have the courage to require of the poet that he let the esthetic win out over all wretchedness. It is the only consolation that remains, and, what is even more unmanly, it is the consolation that you take, you to whom life has not provided the occasion to test your strength. You, then, are impoverished and unhappy, just like the hero and the heroine in the play, but you also have pathos, courage, an os rotundum [round mouth]145 from which eloquence gushes, and a vigorous arm. You and your kind conquer; you applaud the actor, and the actor is yourselves and the applause from the pit is for you, for you are indeed the hero and the actor. In dreams, in the nebulous world of esthetics, there you are heroes. I do not care very much for the theater, and as far as I am concerned you and your kind can mock as much as you like. Just let the histrionic heroes succumb or let them be victorious, sink through the floor or vanish through the ceiling—I am not greatly moved. But if it is true, as you teach and declaim in life, that it takes far fewer adversities to make a person a slave so that he walks with his head hanging down and forgets that he, too, is created in God’s image, then may it be your just punishment, God grant, that all playwrights compose nothing but tearjerking plays, full of all possible anxiety and horror that would not allow your flabbiness to rest on the cushioned theater seats and let you be perfumed with supranatural power but would horrify you until in the world of actuality you learn to believe in that which you want to believe in only in poetry.

In my own marriage, I admittedly have not experienced many adversities of that kind—that I readily concede—and therefore I cannot speak from experience, but I nevertheless have the conviction that nothing is able to crush the esthetic in a human being, a conviction so powerful, so blessed, so fervent that I thank my God for it as for a gift of grace. And when we read in the Bible about the many gifts of grace, I would actually [II 112] count this among them—the cheerful boldness, the trust, the belief in actuality and in the eternal necessity whereby the beautiful triumphs, and in the blessedness implicit in the freedom with which the individual offers God his assistance. And this conviction is a component of my whole mental disposition, and for that reason I do not let myself palpitate enervatingly and voluptuously with artificial stimulations in a theater. The one and only thing I can do is thank God for this imperturbability in my soul, but in so doing I also hope to have saved my soul from taking it in vain.

You know how I hate all imaginary constructing [Experimenteren],146 but all the same it may be true that a person can have experienced in thought much that he never comes to experience in actuality. Moments of dejection come sometimes, and if the individual does not himself evoke them in order voluntarily to test himself, this, too, is a struggle and a very earnest struggle, and through this an assurance can be gained that is very significant, even if it does not have the reality [Realitet] it would have had if acquired in a real life situation. There are occasions in life when it is a mark of something great and good in a person that he is as if mad, that he has not separated the world of poetry and the world of actuality but sees the latter sub specie poeseos [under the aspect of poetry].147 Luther says somewhere in one of his sermons, where he speaks of poverty and need: One has never heard of a Christian dying of hunger.148 And for Luther that ends the matter, and he thinks, surely with justification, that he has spoken on this with much pathos and unto true upbuilding.

Now insofar as marriage involves outer trials of this nature, the thing to do, of course, is to make them inner trials. I say “of course” and speak rather boldly about the whole matter, but I am addressing this only to you, after all, and we two are more or less equally experienced in this kind of adversity. If one wishes to preserve the esthetic, it is a matter of transforming the outer into an inner trial. Or does it disturb you that I still use the word “esthetic”; or do you think it is almost a kind of childishness on my part to want to look for the esthetic among the poor and the suffering; or have you demeaned yourself with that scandalous division that gives the esthetic to the aristocratic and powerful, the wealthy, the cultured, and [II 113] gives, at most, the religious to the poor? Well, I do not happen to believe that the poor suffer by this division, and do you not perceive that the poor, if they truly possess the religious, also have the esthetic, while the rich, insofar as they do not have the religious, do not have the esthetic either? Then, too, I have mentioned only the extreme here, and it probably is not rare that those who cannot be classified as poor have trouble making ends meet. Moreover, other temporal cares, illness, for example, are common to all classes. But I am convinced that the person who has the courage to transform the outer trial into an inner trial has already virtually surmounted it, since by faith a transubstantiation takes place even in the moment of suffering.

The married man who has enough memory for his love and enough courage in the time of need to say, “The primary question is not one of where I am going to find the money and at what percent but first and foremost is of my love, whether I have kept a pure and faithful covenant of love with her to whom I am united.” The man who forces himself to do this in his not too numerous inner struggles, who either in the youthful vigor of his first love or in the assurance gained by experience, makes this movement—that person has triumphed; he has preserved the esthetic in his marriage, even if he did not have three small rooms in which to live. It is by no means denied (something your sly intellect will soon light upon) that the very internalizing of the outer spiritual trial can make it even harder, but then, too, the gods do not sell greatness for nothing,149 and precisely therein lies the educative and the idealizing aspects of marriage.

So often it is said that it is easier to bear all such things if one stands alone in the world. It is probably true, up to a point, but in this kind of talk a huge falsehood is often hidden, for why can a person bear it more easily—because he can throw himself away more easily, can do damage to his soul without involving anyone else, can forget God, can let the storms of despair drown out the shrieks of pain, can become dulled within, can almost take pleasure in living among human beings as a ghost. To be sure, everyone, even if he stands alone, ought to pay attention to himself; but only the person who loves has the proper conception of who he is and what he can do, and only marriage gives the historical faithfulness that is every bit as beautiful as the knightly kind. In other words, a married man can never conduct himself this way, and no matter how much the world goes against him, even if he momentarily forgets himself and already feels so light because despair is about to set him adrift, feels so strong because he has sipped the anesthetizing [II 114] drink blended by defiance and despondency, cowardice and pride, feels so free because the bond that binds him to truth and justice seems to be loosened and he now experiences the speed that is the transition from good to evil—he nevertheless will soon turn back to the old paths and as a married man [Ægtemand] prove himself to be an authentic [ægte] man.

So much, then, for these outer trials. I write briefly about them because I do not feel the authority to discuss them and because to do so adequately would require a complicated development. But this is my conclusion: If love can be preserved—and that it can, so help me God!—then the esthetic can be preserved also, for love itself is the esthetic.

The other objections are due primarily to a misunderstanding of the significance of time and of the esthetic validity of the historical. Consequently, they touch every marriage and may be discussed in general. This I shall now do, and in my generalizing I shall try not to overlook the point in the attack and the point in the defense.

The first thing you will name is “habit, the unavoidable habit, this dreadful monotony, the everlasting Einerlei [sameness] in the alarming still life of marital domesticity. I love nature, but I am a hater of the second nature.” It must be granted that you know how to describe with seductive fervor and sadness the happy time when one is still making discoveries and how to paint with anxiety and horror the time when it is over. You know how to elaborate to the point of ridiculousness and loathsomeness a marital uniformity that not even nature can match, “for here, as Leibniz has already shown, nothing is exactly the same; such uniformity is reserved only for rational creatures, either as the fruit of their lassitude or of their pedantry.”150 I have no intention whatsoever of denying that it is a beautiful time, an eternally unforgettable time (please note in what sense I am able to say this), when the individual is astounded and made happy in the world of erotic love by things long since discovered, of which, of course, he probably has often heard and read, but which he now for the first time appropriates with the total enthusiasm of surprise and the full depth of inwardness. It is a beautiful time, from the very first [II 115] intimation of love, the first glimpse and the first disappearance of the beloved object, the first chord of this voice, the first glance, the first handshake, the first kiss—right up to the first perfect assurance of its possession. It is a beautiful time—the first restlessness, the first longing, the first pain because she did not come, the first joy because she came unexpectedly—but this by no means implies that the ensuing time is not just as beautiful. You who fancy yourself to have such a knightly mentality—examine yourself. When you say that the first kiss is the sweetest, the most beautiful, you are insulting the beloved, for then it is time and its qualification that give the kiss absolute worth.

But now, lest harm be done to the cause I am defending, you must first give me a little accounting. That is, if you do not wish to proceed altogether arbitrarily, you must attack the first love in the same way as you attack marriage. That is, if it is to last in life, it must be exposed to the same calamities and will be far from having the resources to combat them that marital love has in the ethical and the religious. To be consistent, you must therefore hate all love that wants to be an eternal love. You must therefore stop with the first love as a moment. But in order for this to have its true meaning, it must have an intrinsic naive eternity. Once you have learned that it was an illusion, it is all over for you, except insofar as you work to enter into the same illusion once again, which is a self-contradiction. Or could it be that your brilliant intellect has conspired with your lust to such a degree that you could completely forget what you owe to others? Even if it can never be repeated like the first time, do you think that there would still be a tolerable way of escape, that one would be rejuvenated by experiencing the illusion in others, so that one would enjoy the infinity and novelty in the originality of the individual whose virginal girdle of illusion was not as yet undone? Such things betray just as much desperation as corruption, and since they betray desperation, it will indeed be impossible to find any enlightenment about life here.

The first thing I must now protest against is your right to use the word “habit” for the recurring that characterizes all life and therefore love also. “Habit” is properly used only of evil, in such a way that by it one designates either a continuance in something that in itself is evil or such a stubborn repetition of something in itself innocent that it becomes somewhat evil because of this repetition. Thus habit always designates something [II 116] unfree. But just as one cannot do the good except in freedom, so also one cannot remain in it except in freedom, and therefore we can never speak of habit in relation to the good.

Next I must also protest against your declaration, in your characterization of marital uniformity, that nothing like it is to be found in nature. That is indeed quite true, but that uniformity can be precisely the expression of something beautiful, and to that extent man can be very proud of being the inventor of it; thus in music the uniform rhythm can be very beautiful and of great effect.

Finally, I would like to say that if a monotony like that were unavoidable in the life together in marriage, then you must perceive, if you are honest, that the task would be to surmount it, that is, to preserve love [Kjærlighed] in the midst of it, not to despair, for that can never be a task; it is an easy way out, seized upon, I readily admit, only by those who perceive the task.

But now let us examine more closely the case of this much publicized uniformity. Your mistake, and also your misfortune, is that you think too abstractly about everything and thus also with regard to love. You think of a little summation of the elements of love; you think, as you yourself perhaps would say, of the categories of love. In that respect, I readily concede to you an unusual categorical completeness. You think every category concretely in one element, and this is the poetic. Then when you think of the long duration of marriage alongside this, there is for you an alarming disparity. Your mistake is that you do not think historically. If a systematician were to think of the category of interaction and elaborate it fully and with expert logic, but if he were also to add, “It will take an eternity before the world can complete its eternal interaction,” you surely cannot deny that one would have the right to laugh at him. Well, this is indeed the meaning of time, and it is the fate of humankind and of individuals to live in it. So if you have nothing else to say than that it is unendurable, then you had better look for another audience. Now, this would be a perfectly adequate response, but lest you find occasion to say, “Basically you agree with me but deem it best to [II 117] submit to what cannot be changed,” I shall try to show that it is not only best to submit to it since it is a duty, but that to submit to it is truly the best.

But let us begin with a point that can be regarded as a point of contact. You certainly do not fear the time that precedes the culmination; on the contrary, you love it and by a multiplicity of reflections you often strive to make the moments of reproduction even longer than they were originally, and if someone at this point wanted to reduce life for you to a category, you would be most indignant. In that time preceding the culmination, it is not just the major, momentous encounters that interest you, but every little triviality, and then you know how to speak beautifully enough about the secret that remains hidden from the wise151—that the least is the greatest. But once the point of culmination has been reached, then, indeed, everything changes, then everything shrivels together into an impoverished and unrefreshing abbreviation. Well, so be it; this is supposed to be rooted in your nature, which is merely conquestive and cannot possess anything. Now, if you do not, in all arbitrariness and one-sidedness, insist that, after all, this is the way you are, then you really will have to declare a temporary armistice and open the ranks so that I can come and see to what extent it is true and, if that is the case, to what extent there is truth in it. If you are unwilling, then I shall, without troubling myself about you, imagine a person just like you and now calmly proceed with my vivisection. But I do hope, nevertheless, that you will have sufficient courage to submit personally to the operation, sufficient courage actually to let yourself be executed—and not merely in effigie.

By persisting that this, after all, is the way you are, you do thereby admit that others could be different. More I do not yet dare to assert, for it might be possible that you are the normal human being, although the anxiety with which you cling to yourself as that which, after all, you now are does not seem to indicate it. But how do you conceive of others? When you see a married couple whose life together, so it seems to you, drags on in the most dreadful boredom, “in the most insipid repetition of the sacred institutions and sacraments of erotic love,” then, yes, then a fire rages within you, a fire that wants to consume them. And this is not something arbitrary on your part; you are indeed justified; you are indeed entitled to let the lightning of irony strike them and the thunder of anger terrify them. As a matter of fact, you do destroy them not because you have a liking for it but because they have deserved it. You pass judgment on them, but what does it mean “to judge” except to require something of them; and if you cannot require it [II 118] and it is a contradiction to require the impossible, then it certainly is a contradiction to pass judgment on them. Is it not true that you have blundered, that you have suggested a law that you do not wish to acknowledge and that you nevertheless have enforced against others? Yet you are not devoid of composure; you say, “I do not censure them, do not reproach them, do not judge them—I feel sorry for them.”

But suppose that those involved did not find it at all boring. A self-contented smile crosses your lips; a bright idea has taken you by surprise and no doubt will certainly also surprise the person you are talking with: “As I said, I feel sorry for them, for either they feel the full weight of boredom, and in that case I feel sorry for them, or they are not aware of it, and in that case I also feel sorry for them, for then they are in a very regrettable illusion.” This is approximately the way you would answer me, and if there were several people present, your self-confidence would not fail in its effect. But no one is listening to us now, and consequently I can continue this exploration. So you feel sorry for them in both instances.

Now there is only a third possibility, namely, that one knows that this is the way it is with marriage and fortunately has not entered into it. But this situation is clearly just as regrettable for the person who has felt love and then understands that it cannot be realized. And, finally, the situation of the person who has done his best to extricate himself from this shipwreck by the egotistical means described above is also regrettable, for he has indeed cast himself in the role of a robber and bully. Consequently it seems that just as a marriage has become a universal expression for a happy ending to something, so the ending of marriage itself is not very happy. This brings us to a universal regret as the true result of this whole exploration, but such a result is a self-contradiction and is equivalent to saying that the result of the development of life is that one is going backward. Ordinarily you are not afraid of going along and perhaps will say here, “Well, it does happen sometimes; when the going is slippery and the wind is against you, the result of going forward is often a going backward.”

But I return to the consideration of your psychical [aandelig] disposition. You say that you have a conquering nature and cannot possess. In saying this, you presumably do not think you have said anything disparaging about yourself; on the contrary, you feel superior to others instead. Let us scrutinize this more closely. What takes more strength—to ascend or to descend a hill? Assuming the same steepness, it obviously [II 119] takes more strength to do the latter. Almost everyone is born with a penchant for climbing a hill, whereas most people have a certain anxiety about going down a hill. Similarly, I believe also that there are far more conquering natures than possessing ones, and if you feel superior to many married people and “their dull brutish contentment,” that certainly can be true up to a point, but of course you are not supposed to learn from your inferiors. For the most part, true art goes in the direction opposite to that of nature, without therefore annihilating it, and likewise true art manifests itself in possessing and not in making a conquest; in other words, possessing is an inverse conquering. In this phrase you already perceive to what extent art and nature struggle against each other. The person who possesses has indeed also something that has been taken in conquest—in fact, if the expressions are to be used strictly, one can say that only he who possesses makes a conquest. Now, very likely you also suppose that you do have possession, for you indeed have the moment of possession, but that is no possession, for that is not appropriation in the deeper sense. For example, if I imagine a conqueror who subjugated kingdoms and countries, he would indeed possess these subjugated provinces, he would have great possessions, and yet one would call such a prince a conquering and not a possessing prince. Only when he guided these countries with wisdom to what was best for them, only then would he possess them. This is rarely found in a conquering nature; ordinarily such a person lacks the humility, the religiousness, the genuine humanity needed in order to possess. That, you see, was why I stressed the religious factor when I explained the relation of marriage to first love, because the religious factor will dethrone the conqueror and allow the possessor to come forth; that was why I commended the marital pattern as designed precisely for the highest, for lasting possession.

Here I may remind you of a phrase you fling around often enough: “It is not the given that is great, but the acquired,” for the conquering nature in a man and his making conquests are actually the given, but his possessing and wanting to possess are the acquired. To conquer takes pride, to possess takes humility; to conquer takes violence, to possess, patience; to conquer—greed, to possess—contentment with little; to conquer requires eating and drinking, to possess, prayer and fasting. But all the predicates I have used here, and indeed justifiably, to describe the conquering nature can all be applied to and are absolutely appropriate to the natural man, but the natural man [II 120] is not the highest. To be specific, a possessing is not a spiritually dead and invalid Schein [appearance], even though with legal status, but a constant acquiring. Here you see again that the possessing nature has the conquering nature intrinsically. In other words, he conquers like a farmer who does not place himself at the head of his hired men and drives his neighbor away but conquers by digging in the earth. Thus true greatness is not in making conquest but in possessing. Now, if at this point you say: “I am not about to decide which is greater, but I readily admit that there are two large classes of people; each one must decide for himself to which he belongs and take care not to let himself be radically converted by some proselyting apostle.” I certainly feel that with this last remark you have your eye on me a little. In response to that, however, I say that the one is not only greater than the other, but there is meaning in the one that is not in the other. The one has both a subordinate clause and a main clause; the other is only a subordinate clause and instead of a main clause has a problematic dash, the significance of which I shall explain to you some other time if you do not already know it.

Now, if you keep on declaring that you, for better or for worse, are indeed conquestive by nature, it makes no difference to me, for you must nevertheless grant me that it is greater to possess than to conquer. When a person conquers, he is continually forgetting himself; when he possesses, he recollects himself—not as a futile pastime but in all possible earnestness. When he goes up a hill, he just keeps his eye on the goal, but when he goes down a hill he has to keep watch on himself, on the proper relationship between the center of gravity and the point of support.

But to go on. You perhaps will admit that it is more difficult to possess than to conquer and that to possess is greater than to conquer: “If only I am permitted to conquer, I will not be so stingy but, on the contrary, very generous with my compliments to those who have the patience to possess, especially if they turn out to be willing to work hand in hand with me by being willing to possess my conquests. All right, it is greater, but more beautiful it is not; more ethical it is, all honor to ethics, but it is also less esthetic.”

Let us try to achieve a little more mutual understanding on this point. It is quite true that there is a misunderstanding among many people that confuses what is esthetically beautiful with what can be presented with esthetic beauty. This is very easily explained by the fact that most people seek esthetic satisfaction, which the soul needs, in reading, in viewing works of art, etc.; whereas there are relatively few who themselves [II 121] see the esthetic as it is in existence, who themselves see existence in an esthetic light and do not enjoy only the poetic reproduction.

But an esthetic representation always requires a concentration in the moment [Moment], and the richer this concentration is, the greater the esthetic effect. In this way, and only in this way, the happy, the indescribable, the infinitely rich moment—in short, the moment—gains its validity. Either this is a predestined moment, as it were, that sends a shudder through the consciousness by awakening the idea of the divineness of existence, or the moment presupposes a history. In the first case, it takes hold by surprising one; in the second case, it certainly is a history, but the artistic representation cannot linger on this, at best can only suggest it and then hasten on to the moment. The more it can put into it, the more artistic it becomes. Nature, as some philosopher has said, takes the shortest path;152 it could be said that it takes no path at all, that in one stroke it is all there at once, and if I want to lose myself in gazing at the arch of heaven, I do not need to wait for the countless heavenly bodies to form, for they are all there at once. But the way of history, just like the way of the law, is very long153 and arduous. So art and poetry intervene and shorten the way for us and delight us in the moment of consummation; they concentrate the extensive in the intensive. But the greater the significance of that which is to advance, the slower the course of history; but the more significant also the course itself, the more it will be evident that all that is the goal is also the way.

With respect to individual life, there are two kinds of history—the outer and the inner. It has two currents that flow in opposite directions. The first, in turn, has two sides. The individual does not have that for which he strives, and history is the struggle in which he acquires it. Or the individual has it but nevertheless cannot take possession of it, because there is continually something external that prevents him. History, then, is the struggle in which he overcomes these obstacles. The other kind of history begins with possession, and history is the process by which he acquires it. Since in the first case the history is external and what it strives for lies outside, history does not have true reality [Realitet],154 and the poetic and artistic representation consists altogether properly in foreshortening it and hastening on to the intensive moment.

To hold to the subject we are most concerned with, let us imagine a romantic love. Imagine, then, a knight who has slain five wild boars, four dwarfs, has freed three princes [II 122] from a spell, brothers of the princess he adores. To the romantic mentality, this has its perfect reality. But to the artist and poet it is of no importance whatever whether there are five or only four. On the whole, the artist is more limited than the poet, but even the latter has no interest in punctiliously describing what happened in the slaying of each particular wild boar. He hastens on to the moment. Perhaps he curtails the number, focuses the hardships and dangers in poetic intensity, and speeds on to the moment, the moment of possession. To him the entire historical sequence is of minor importance.

But when it is a matter of inner history, every single little moment is of utmost importance. Inner history is the only true history, but the true history struggles with that which is the life principle in history—with time—but when one struggles with time, the temporal and every single little moment thereby has its great reality. Wherever the individuality’s inner blossoming has not yet begun, wherever the individuality is still closed up, it is a matter of outer history. As soon, however, as this bursts into leaf, so to speak, inner history begins.

Think now of our point of departure, the difference between the conquering and the possessing natures. The conquering nature is continually outside itself, the possessing nature is within itself; therefore the first gains an outer history, and the second an inner history. But since outer history can be concentrated without any damage, it is natural for art and poetry to choose it and thus in turn choose for representation the unopened individuality and what pertains to him. To be sure, it is said that love opens the individuality, but not if love is understood as it is in romanticism, since it is brought only to a point where he is supposed to open, and there it ends, or he is about to open but is interrupted. But just as outer history and the closed individuality, if anything, will be the most immediate subject of artistic and poetic portrayal, so everything that constitutes the content of such an individuality will also be their subject. But all this is basically what belongs to the natural man.

A few examples. Pride can be portrayed very well, because what is essential in pride is not sequence but intensity in the moment. Humility is hard to portray precisely because it is sequence, and whereas the observer needs to see pride only at its climax, in the second case he really needs to see something that poetry and art cannot provide, to see its continuous coming into existence, for it is essential to humility to come into existence continuously, and if this is shown to him in its ideal moment, [II 123] he misses something, for he senses that its true ideality consists not in its being ideal at the moment but in its being continuous. Romantic love can be portrayed very well in the moment; marital love cannot, for an ideal husband is not one who is ideal once in his life but one who is that every day. If I wish to portray a hero who conquers kingdoms and countries, this can be done very well in the moment, but a cross-bearer who takes up his cross every day can never be portrayed in either poetry or art, for the point is that he does it every day. If I imagine a hero who loses his life, this can be concentrated very well in the moment, but the daily dying cannot, because the point is that it goes on every day. Courage can be concentrated very well in the moment; patience cannot, precisely because patience contends against time. You will say that art nevertheless has portrayed Christ as the image of patience, as bearing all the sin of the world, that religious poems have concentrated all the bitterness of life in one cup and had one individual empty it at one moment. That is true, but that is because they have concentrated it almost spatially. But anyone who knows anything about patience knows very well that its real opposite is not intensity of suffering (for then it more approximates courage) but time, and that true patience [Taalmod] is that which contends against time or is essentially long-suffering [Langmod]; but long-suffering cannot be portrayed artistically, for the point of it is incommensurable with art; neither can it be poetized, for it requires the protraction of time.

What more I want to say here you may regard as a poor married man’s trivial offering on the altar of esthetics, and if you and all the priests of esthetics disdain it, I certainly know how to console myself, and so much more so because what I bring is not shew-bread, which only the priests can eat,155 but homemade bread, which like all homemade food is plain and unspiced but healthful and nourishing.

If one traces dialectically and just as much historically the development of the esthetically beautiful, one will find that the direction of this movement is from spatial categories to temporal categories, and that the perfecting of art is contingent upon the possibility of gradually detaching itself more and more from space and aiming toward time. This constitutes the [II 124] transition and the significance of the transition from sculpture to painting, as Schelling early pointed out.156 Music has time as its element but has no continuance in time; its significance is the continual vanishing in time; it sounds in time, but it also fades and has no continuance. Ultimately poetry is the highest of all the arts and therefore also the art that best knows how to affirm the meaning of time. It does not need to limit itself to the moment in the sense that painting does; neither does it disappear without a trace in the sense that music does. But despite all this, it, too, is compelled, as we have seen, to concentrate in the moment. It has, therefore, its limitation and cannot, as shown above, portray that of which the truth is precisely the temporal sequence. And yet this, that time is affirmed, is not a disparagement of the esthetic; on the contrary, the more this occurs, the richer and fuller the esthetic ideal becomes.

How, then, can the esthetic, which is incommensurable even for portrayal in poetry, be represented? Answer: by being lived.157 It thereby has a similarity to music, which is only because it is continually repeated, is only in the moment of being performed. That is why in the foregoing I called attention to the ruinous confusing of the esthetic and that which can be esthetically portrayed in poetic reproduction. Everything I am talking about here certainly can be portrayed esthetically, but not in poetic reproduction, but only by living it, by realizing it in the life of actuality. In this way the esthetic elevates itself and reconciles itself with life, for just as poetry and art in one sense are precisely a reconciliation with life, yet in another sense they are enmity to life, because they reconcile only one side of the soul.

Here I am at the summit of the esthetic. And in truth, he who has humility and courage enough to let himself be esthetically transformed, he who feels himself present as a character in a drama158 the deity is writing, in which the poet and the prompter are not different persons, in which the individual, as the experienced actor who has lived into his character and his lines is not disturbed by the prompter but feels that he himself wants to say what is being whispered to him, so that it almost becomes a question whether he is putting the words in the prompter’s mouth or the prompter in his, he who in the most profound sense feels himself creating and created, who in the moment he feels himself creating has the original pathos of the [II 125] lines, and in the moment he feels himself created has the erotic ear that picks up every sound—he and he alone has brought into actual existence the highest in esthetics.

But this history that proves to be incommensurable even for poetry is the inner history. This has the idea within itself and precisely therefore is the esthetic. Therefore it begins, as I expressed it, with the possession, and its progress is the acquiring of this possession. It is an eternity in which the temporal has not disappeared as an ideal element, but in which it is continually present as a real element. Thus, when patience acquires itself in patience,159 it is inner history.160

Let us now consider the relation between romantic and marital love, for the relation between the conquering and the possessing natures presents no difficulties at all. Romantic love continually remains abstract in itself, and if it can find no outer history, death is already lying in wait for it, because its eternity is illusory. Marital love begins with possession and gains an inner history. It is faithful—and so also is romantic love, but now mark the difference.

The faithful romantic lover waits, let us say for fifteen years; then comes the moment [Øieblikke] that rewards him. Here poetry very properly perceives that the fifteen years can easily be concentrated; now it hastens to the moment [Moment]. A married man is faithful for fifteen years, and yet during these fifteen years he has had possession; therefore in this long succession he has continually acquired the faithfulness he possessed, since marital love has in itself the first love and thereby the faithfulness of the first love. But an ideal married man of this sort cannot be portrayed, for the point is time in its extension. At the end of the fifteen years, he seems to have come no further than he was in the beginning, and yet to a high degree he has been living esthetically. For him his possession has not been inert property, but he has been continually acquiring its possession. He has not fought with lions and trolls but with the most dangerous enemy, which is time. But now eternity does not come afterward, as for the knight, but he has had eternity in time, has preserved eternity in time. Therefore only he has been victorious over time, for it may be said of the knight that he has killed time, just as one to whom time has no reality always wishes to kill time, but this is never the right victory. Like a true victor, the married man has not killed time but has rescued and preserved it in eternity. The married man [II 126] who does this is truly living poetically;161 he solves the great riddle, to live in eternity and yet to hear the cabinet clock strike in such a way that its striking does not shorten but lengthens his eternity, a contradiction that is just as profound as, but far more glorious than, the one in the familiar situation described in a story from the Middle Ages about a poor wretch who woke up in hell and shouted, “What time is it?”—whereupon the devil answered, “Eternity!”162 And although this cannot be portrayed artistically, then let your consolation be, as it is mine, that we are not to read about or listen to or look at what is the highest and the most beautiful in life, but are, if you please, to live it.

Therefore, when I readily admit that romantic love lends itself much better to artistic portrayal than marital love, this does not at all mean that it is less esthetic than the other—on the contrary, it is more esthetic. In one of the most brilliant stories from the romantic school,163 there is a character who, unlike the others with whom he is living, has no desire to write poetry, because it is a waste of time and deprives him of genuine pleasure; he, on the contrary, wants to live. Now, if he had had a more valid idea of what it is to live, he would have been my man.

Marital love, then, has its enemy in time, its victory in time, its eternity in time—therefore, even if I were to imagine away all its so-called outer and inner trials, it would always have its task. Ordinarily it does have them, but if one is to view them properly one must pay attention to two things: that they are always inner qualifications and that they always have in them the qualification of time. For this reason, too, it is obvious that this love cannot be portrayed. It always moves inward and spends itself (in the good sense) in time, but that which is to be portrayed by reproduction must be lured forth, and its time must be foreshortened. You will be further persuaded of this by pondering the adjectives used to describe marital love. It is faithful, constant, humble, patient, long-suffering, tolerant, honest, content with little, alert, persevering, willing, happy. All these virtues have the characteristic that they are qualifications within the individual. The individual is not fighting against external enemies but is struggling with himself, struggling to bring his love out of himself. And these virtues have the qualification of time, for their veracity consists not in this, that they are once and for all, but that they are continually. And by means of these virtues nothing else is acquired; only they themselves are acquired. Therefore, marital love is simultaneously commonplace—as you have often mockingly [II 127] called it—and also divine (in the Greek sense), and it is divine by virtue of being commonplace. Marital love does not come with external signs, not like that bird of fortune with rustling and bustling,164 but is the inviolable nature of a quiet spirit.165

Of the latter, you and all conquering natures have no idea. You are never in yourselves but continually outside. Indeed, as long as every one of your nerves is palpitating, whether you are stealthily reconnoitering or you are advancing and internal Janizary music drowns out your consciousness, well, then it seems to you that you are living. But when the battle is won, when the last echo of the last shot has died away, when the swift thoughts, like orderly officers rushing back to G.H.Q. to report that the victory is yours—yes, then you are at a loss, then you do not know how to begin, for now for the first time you are standing at the real beginning.

Therefore, what you abhor under the name of habit as inescapable in marriage is simply its historical quality, which to your perverse eyes takes on such a terrifying look.

But what is it that you are accustomed to regard as being not only destroyed but, worse yet, profaned by the habit that is inseparable from marital life? Ordinarily you mean “the visible, sacred symbols of the erotic, which, like all visible symbols, in and by themselves certainly do not have meaning, but whose meaning depends on the energy, the artistic bravura and virtuosity—which are indeed also a natural genius—with which they are executed. How disgusting it is to see the dullness with which all such things are done in marital life, how superficially, how apathetically they take place, almost on the stroke of a clock, much as in the tribe the Jesuits discovered in Paraguay, a tribe so apathetic that the Jesuits found it necessary to have a bell rung at midnight as a pleasant reminder to all married men to attend to their marital duties. In this way, because of discipline, everything takes place at the right time.”

Let us now agree that in our consideration we shall not allow ourselves to be at all disturbed by the presence of ever so much that is ludicrous and wrong in the world but only see whether it is necessary and, if so, learn from you deliverance. In this respect, I certainly dare not expect much from you, because you are continually fighting, even though in quite another sense, yet just like that Spanish knight,166 for a bygone time. Since you are in fact fighting for the moment against [II 128] time, you actually are always fighting for what has disappeared.

Let us take an idea, an expression from your world of poetry, or from the actual world of first love. The lovers “see” one another. This word “s e e”—you are very adept at spacing167 it, at endowing it with an infinite reality, an eternity. Now, a married couple who have lived together for ten years and have seen each other daily may not see each other in that sense, but should they not be able to look upon each other lovingly? Here again I come to your old heresy. You happen to restrict your love to a certain age, and love for one person to a very brief time, and thereupon, like all conquering natures, you have to recruit in order to carry out your experiment, but this is the very deepest profaning of the eternal power of erotic love. It is indeed despair. However you twist and turn at this point, you must admit that the task is to preserve love in time. If this is impossible, then love is an impossibility. The source of your unhappiness is that you locate the essence of love simply and solely in these visible symbols. If these are to be repeated again and again and, please note, in the morbid thought whether they continually have the reality they had through the accidental circumstance that it was the first time, then it is no wonder that you are uneasy and that you classify these symbols and “gesticulations” with the things about which one does not dare to say: decies repetita placebunt [they will please even when repeated ten times],168 for if what gave them validity was the condition of being the first time, then a repetition is indeed an impossibility. But true love has an utterly different value; it does its work in time and therefore will be able to renew itself in these external signs and has—this is my main point—a completely different idea of time and of the meaning of repetition.

In the foregoing, I have developed the idea that marital love has its struggle in time, its victory in time, its benediction in time. There I considered time merely as simple progression; now it will become evident that it is not just a simple progression in which the original is preserved but is a growing progression in which the original is increased. You, with your capacity for observation, will certainly agree with me in the general remark that people are divided into two great classes: those who live predominantly in hope and those who live predominantly [II 129] in recollection.169 Both indicate an improper relation to time.

The healthy individual lives simultaneously in hope and in recollection, and only thereby does his life gain true and substantive continuity. Thus he has hope and therefore does not wish to go backward in time, as do those who live only in recollection. What, then, does recollection do for him, for it certainly must have some influence? It places a sharp on the note of the moment; the further back it goes, the more often the repetition, the more sharps there are. For example, if in the present year he experiences an erotic moment, this is augmented by his recollection of it in the previous year etc.

This has also found expression in a very beautiful way in marital life. I do not know what age the world happens to be in at present, but you know as well as I do that we customarily say that first came the Golden Age, then the Silver Age, then the Copper Age, then the Iron Age.170 In marriage it is the reverse—first the silver wedding, and then the golden wedding. Or is recollection not the real point in such a wedding—and yet the terminology of marriage declares them to be even more beautiful than the first wedding. But this must not be misinterpreted, as would be the case if you were inclined to say, “Then it would be best to be married in the cradle in order to begin at once with one’s silver wedding and have a chance to be the first to coin a brand new term in the dictionary of marital life.” You yourself probably perceive what constitutes the falsity in your jest, and I will not linger further on it. What I do wish to call to mind, however, is that the individuals do not live only in hope; at all times they have hope and recollection together in the present. At the first wedding, hope has the same effect as recollection at the last. Hope hovers over it as a hope of eternity that fills out the moment. You, too, will perceive the justification of this if you consider that if a person married only in the hope of a silver wedding and consequently hoped and hoped again for twenty-five years, when the twenty-fifth year came around he would have no right to celebrate a silver wedding, for he would have nothing to remember, since everything would have fallen apart in this continual hoping. Incidentally, I have frequently wondered why it is that, according to the common way of speaking and thinking, the single state has no such prospects at all, that on the contrary a bachelor who celebrates an anniversary is held up to ridicule instead. The reason surely must be that it is ordinarily assumed that the single state can never really comprehend the truly present time, which is a unity of hope and recollection, and therefore is usually based on hope or on recollection. But this [II 130] in turn suggests the right relation to time that marital love has, also as commonly understood.

But there is also something else in marital life you designate with the word “habit”: “its uniformity, its complete lack of events, its continuance in emptiness, which is death and worse than death.” You know that there are neurotic people who are upset by the least noise, who are unable to think if someone is tiptoeing across the floor. Have you noticed that there is also another kind of neuroticism? There are people who are so enervated that they need loud noise and diverting surroundings in order to work. What is the reason for this if it is not that they lack self-control, except in the inverse sense? When they are alone, their thoughts wander into the wild blue yonder; when, however, there is noise and confusion around them, they are required to set their wills in opposition. This is why you are afraid of peace and quiet and rest. You are inside yourself only when there is opposition, but therefore you actually are never inside yourself but always outside yourself. In other words, the moment you assimilate the opposition there is quiet again. Therefore you dare not do so, but then the result will be that you and the opposition stand there face to face, and consequently you are not inside yourself.

Here, of course, the same thing holds as earlier with regard to time. You are outside yourself and therefore cannot do without the other as opposition; you believe that only a restless spirit is alive, and all who are experienced believe that only a quiet spirit is truly alive. For you, a turbulent sea is a symbol of life; for me it is the quiet, deep water. I have often sat beside a little running stream. It is always the same, the same gentle melody, on the bottom the same green vegetation that undulates with the quiet ripples, the same tiny creatures that move down there, a little fish that slips in under the cover of the flowers, spreads its fins against the current, hides under a stone. How uniform, and yet how rich in change! So it is with the domestic life of marriage—quiet, modest, humming. It does not have many changements [variations], and yet it is like that water, running, and yet, like that water, it has melody, dear to the one who knows it, dear to him precisely because he knows it. It is not showy, and yet at times it has a sheen that nevertheless does not interrupt its usual course, just as when the moon shines on that water and displays the instrument on which it plays its melody.

So it is with the domestic life of marriage. But to be perceived in this way and to be lived in this way, it presupposes a [II 131] quality to which I shall now refer. There is a poem by Oehlenschläger that I know you, at least at one time, prized very highly. For the sake of completeness I will copy it:

To guarantee the zest complete of love,
How many things must be on earth combined!
First, two hearts which a mutual passion prove:
Then grace and beauty, with a soul refined:
Then the moon shining through the beechen grove,
When the spring greets the earth with zephyrs kind:
Then meeting without danger or suspense:
Then the embrace; and with that—innocence.171

You, too, are given to praising erotic love [Elskov]. I have no desire to deprive you of what certainly is not your property, for, after all, it is the poet’s, but something you nevertheless have appropriated; but since I, too, have appropriated it, let us share it—you receive the whole poem, I the last phrase: and then innocence.

Finally, there is one more aspect of marital life that has frequently provided you with an occasion for attack. You say, “Within itself, marital love is hiding something completely different; it seems so gentle and beautiful and tender, but as soon as the door is shut on the married couple and before one can say Jack Robinson, out comes Master Erik; then the tune is changed to duty. And now you can decorate this scepter for me as much as you please, turn it into a Shrovetide birch switch; it is still a Master Erik.”172 I shall discuss this objection here because it is based essentially on a misunderstanding of the historical in marital love. You want to have either mysterious forces or caprice be the constituents in love [Kjærlighed]. As soon as an awareness enters in, this witchcraft vanishes, but marital love has this awareness. To put it quite crudely, instead of the orchestra director’s baton, the motions of which mark the time for the graceful dance positions of first love, you show us duty’s unpleasant policeman’s stick. First of all, you must concede to me that as long as the first love, which, as we have agreed, marital love does indeed have, remains unchanged, there can be no question of the rigorous necessity of duty. So you do not believe in the eternity of first love. Here, you see, we have your old heresy; it is you who so often set [II 132] yourself up as its knight, and yet you do not believe in it—indeed, you profane it. Consequently, because you do not believe in it, you do not dare become involved in a relation that will force you nolens [unwilling] to remain in it when you are no longer volens [willing]. Love is obviously not supreme for you, for otherwise you would be happy if there were a power capable of constraining you to remain in it. Perhaps you will reply that this means is no means, but to that comment I shall point out that it all depends on how one looks at the matter.

This turns out to be one of the points to which we continually return—you, seemingly against your will and without being entirely clear how it comes about, I, in full awareness—the point that the illusory or naive eternity of the first love or romantic love must cancel itself in one way or another. Precisely because you now seek to maintain it in this immediacy, seek to delude yourself that true freedom consists in being outside yourself, intoxicated with dreams, you fear this metamorphosis. And this is why it does not manifest itself as such but as something altogether alien that contains the death of the first love, and thus your abhorrence of duty. For if this has not already existed in embryo in the first love, then its appearance is naturally very disturbing. But such is not the case with marital love, which in the ethical and the religious already has duty within itself, and when duty manifests itself to them it is not a stranger, a shameless outsider, who nevertheless has such an authority that by virtue of the secrecy of love one does not dare to show him the door. No, he comes as an old intimate, as a friend, as a confidant whom the lovers both know in the deepest secrecy of their love. And when duty speaks it is not something new that he says, but something familiar, and when he has spoken the individuals humble themselves under it but are also lifted up by it, since they are assured that what he bids them to do is what they themselves wish, and that his bidding them to do it is only a more majestic, a more elevated, a divine way of expressing that their wish can be realized. To them it would not be sufficient for duty to say encouragingly, “It can [II 133] be done, love can be preserved”; but because he says: “It shall be preserved,” there is an implicit authority that corresponds to the inwardness of their wish. Love casts out fear,173 but if love nevertheless fears for itself a moment, for its own salvation, then duty is precisely the divine nourishment love needs, for duty says, “Fear not; you shall [skal] conquer”—says it not just in the future tense, for then it is only a hope, but in the imperative mood, and therein rests a conviction that nothing can shake.

So, then, you regard duty as the enemy of love, and I regard it as its friend. Perhaps you will be satisfied with this explanation and with your usual sarcasm will congratulate me on having a friend who is just as interesting as he is unusual. I am not, however, at all satisfied with that and feel free to carry the battle over into your territory. If duty, once it has entered into consciousness, is the enemy of love, then love must indeed see to conquering it, for you certainly do not want love to be such a weak thing that it cannot get the better of every opposition. Yet on the one hand you think that if duty puts in its appearance it is all over with love and also think that sooner or later duty will inevitably show up, not only in marital love but also in romantic love, and the reason you essentially fear marital love is that it has duty in it to such a degree that when it does put in its appearance you cannot run away from it. But you think it is quite in order in romantic love, for the moment duty is mentioned, love is finished and duty’s arrival is your signal to take your leave with a polite bow, or, as you once expressed yourself, that you regard it as your duty to take your leave.

Here again you see what happens with your eulogies on love. If duty is the enemy of love, and if love cannot conquer this enemy, then love is not the true triumpher. Then as a result of this you must leave love helpless. Once you have adopted the desperate idea that duty is the enemy of love, your defeat is sure, and you have disparaged love and robbed it of its majesty just as much as you have done the same with duty, and it was only the latter that you wished to do. You see, this is again despair, whether you feel the pain that is in it or in despair you try to forget it. If you cannot manage to see the esthetic, the ethical, and the religious as the three great allies, if you do not know how to preserve the unity of the different manifestations everything gains in these different spheres, [II 134] then life is without meaning and one must completely agree with your pet theory that of everything it can be said: Do it, or do not do it—you will regret it either way.174

Unlike you, I do not have the sad necessity of being obliged to begin a campaign against duty that invariably ends unhappily. For me, duty is not one climate, love another, but for me duty makes love the true temperate climate, and for me love makes duty the true temperate climate, and this unity is perfection. But in order that your false theory may become properly obvious to you, I shall pursue this a bit further and ask you to ponder the various ways in which a person could feel that duty is the enemy of love.

Imagine a person who has married without ever rightly coming to terms with the ethical, which is implicit in marriage. He loved with all the passion of youth and suddenly was prompted by an external circumstance to the doubt that the one he loved, but to whom he was also bound by the bond of duty, might possibly think that in reality he nevertheless loved her only because it was his duty. He was indeed in a situation similar to the one mentioned above; for him, too, duty seemed to manifest itself as antagonistic to love, but he did love, and for him his love was truly supreme, and consequently his efforts would be aimed at vanquishing this enemy. Consequently, he would love her—not because duty commanded it, not by the meager standard of a quantum satis [sufficient amount] that duty could provide—no, he would love her with his whole soul, with all his strength, and all his might;175 he would love her even at that moment—if that were possible—when duty permitted him to stop.

You readily perceive the confusion in his thinking. What did he do? He loved her with his whole soul, but that is precisely what duty commands, for let us not be confused by the talk of those who think that in relation to marriage one’s duty is nothing but a compendium of ritualistic stipulations. The duty is only one thing: it is to love in truth, in one’s inmost heart; and duty is just as protean as love itself and pronounces everything holy and good if it is of love and inveighs against everything, however beautiful and deceptive it is, that is not of love. You see, therefore, that he, too, had taken a wrong position; but precisely because there was truth in him, he does neither more [II 135] nor less than what duty commands, since he does not wish to do only what duty commands. Essentially, the more that he does is that he does it, for the more that I can do is always that I can do what duty commands. Duty commands; more it cannot do. The more I am capable of doing is to do what it commands, and the moment I do that I can in a certain sense say that I am doing more; I translate duty from the outer to the inner, and I am thereby beyond duty.

From this you perceive what infinite harmony and wisdom and consistency there are in the world of spirit. If one proceeds from a specific point and quite calmly pursues it with truth and energy, it must always be a disappointment if everything else seems to be in contradiction with it; and if one thinks that one is exhaustively attesting to the disharmony, one is attesting to the harmony. Therefore the married man of whom we have been speaking came out of it unscathed, and really the only punishment he had to suffer was that duty teased him a little about his little faith. Duty is always consonant with love. If you separate them as he did and want to make one part the whole, you are continually in self-contradiction. It is as if someone were to separate the letters “b” and “e” in the syllable “be” and then want to discard the “e” and insist that “b” is the whole. The moment he enunciates it, he says the “e” also. So it is with true love; it is not a dumb, abstract inexpressible something, but neither is it a weak, wavering indeterminate. It is an articulated sound, a syllable. If duty is hard, eh bien, then love pronounces it, actualizes it, and thereby does more than the duty; if love is about to become so soft that it cannot be kept stable, duty sets boundaries to it.

Now, if your position that duty is the enemy of love was like that, if it was merely an innocent misunderstanding, then it would go with you as with the man of whom we speak; but your view is a misunderstanding and also a guilty misunderstanding. That is why you disparage not only duty but also love; that is why duty appears to be an unconquerable enemy, precisely because duty loves true love and has a mortal hatred for the false kind—indeed, kills it. When the individuals are in the truth, they will see in duty only the eternal sign that the road to eternity is prepared for them and is the road they are eager to take; they are not only permitted to take it but are commanded to take it; and over this road there watches a divine providence that continually shows them the prospect and places signposts at all the danger spots. Why should the person who truly loves be unwilling to accept a divine authorization [II 136] because it expresses itself divinely and does not say only “You may” but says “You shall”? In duty the road is all cleared for the lovers, and therefore I believe that in language the expression of duty is in the future tense in order thereby to indicate the historical.

Now I have finished this little exposition. Presumably it has really made an impression upon you; you feel that everything is upside down, and yet you cannot completely steel yourself against the consistency with which I have spoken. Nevertheless, if I had expressed all this in a conversation, you would undoubtedly find it hard to refrain from the sarcastic comment that I am sermonizing. But still you cannot actually blame my presentation for suffering from this fault or for being just what it perhaps ought to be when one speaks to a hardened sinner such as you are; and as for your lecturing and your wisdom, they often remind me of Ecclesiastes [Prædikers Bog, Book of the Preacher], and one would actually think that you occasionally chose your text from it.

I shall, however, allow you yourself to give me an occasion to throw light on this matter. Ordinarily you are not disdainful of ethics, and you really have to be driven to a particular point before you throw it overboard. As long as you are in some measure able to keep it on your side, you do so. “I do not in any way hold duty in contempt”—that is how the more temperate lecture, the more subtle assassination of duty, usually begins. “Far be it from me, but above all let’s not scramble the eggs—duty is duty and love is love, and that’s that, and, above all, no commingling. Or is not marriage the only monstrosity that has this nature, this hermaphroditic equivocation? Everything else is either duty or love. I acknowledge that it is a person’s duty to seek a particular employment in life, I regard it as his duty to be faithful to his occupation; and on the other hand, when he violates his duty, then let him suffer his well-deserved punishment.

“Here is duty. I take it upon myself to do a specific something; I can stipulate exactly what it is I promise dutifully to fulfill. If I do not do it, then I am faced with an authority that can compel me. On the other hand, if I form a close friendship with another person, love is everything here. I acknowledge no duty; if love is over, then the friendship is finished. To base itself on something unreasonable like that is reserved solely for marriage. But what does it mean to commit oneself to love? Where is the boundary? When have I fulfilled my duty? In what, more closely defined, does my duty consist? In case of doubt, to what council can I apply? And if I cannot fulfill my [II 137] duty, where is the authority to compel me? State and Church have indeed set a certain limit, but even though I do not go to the extreme, can I not therefore be a bad husband? Who will punish me? Who will stand up for her who is the victim?”

Answer: you yourself. However, before I proceed to untangle the jumble into which you have lured yourself and me, I must make a comment. In your statements there is often a certain degree of ambiguity, which for you is essential and characteristic. What you say could be said equally well by the most light-minded and heavy-hearted of men. You yourself are well aware of this, for it is one of the means you use to deceive people. You say the same thing at different times, place the tonal emphasis at different points, and look—the whole thing is different. If you are accused of saying something different from before, you very calmly respond: Isn’t it literally the same?

But enough of that. Let us now analyze your division of duty and love. There is a proverb that has survived through the centuries and has been used to designate the shrewd politics of the Romans: divide et impera [divide and conquer].176 In a much more profound sense, this can be said of the process of the understanding, for its cunning politics is expressly to divide and to secure dominion by means of this division, inasmuch as the powers that in alliance are invincible, now separated and alien, cancel one another, and the understanding retains dominion. Consequently, you think that all the rest of life can be construed within the category of duty or its opposite and that it has never occurred to anyone to apply another criterion; marriage alone has made itself guilty of this self-contradiction. You cite as an example the duty to one’s occupation and think that this is a very appropriate example of a pure duty-relationship. This is by no means the case. If a person were to view his occupation merely as the sum total of assignments he carries out at specific times and places, he would demean himself, his occupation, and his duty. Or do you believe that such a view would make for a good public official? Where, then, is there room for the enthusiasm with which a person devotes himself to his occupation, where is there room for the love with which he loves it? Or what tribunal would supervise him? Or is this not required of him precisely as duty, and would not the state regard anyone who became a civil servant without this as a jobholder, as one whose drudgery it could well use and pay for, but yet who in another sense was an unworthy public servant? Now, even if the state does not [II 138] explicitly say this, it is because that which it requires is something external, something palpable, and if this is done, then it presupposes the rest. In marriage, however, the internal is primary, something that cannot be displayed or pointed to, but its expression is precisely love. Therefore, I see no contradiction in its being required as duty, for the circumstance that there is no one to supervise is irrelevant, since he can indeed supervise himself. Now, if you keep on making this demand, then it is either because you want to use it to sneak out of duty, or because you are so fearful for yourself that you would willingly be declared incapable of managing your own affairs, but that certainly is equally wrong and equally reprehensible.

If you adhere to what I have developed in the foregoing discussion, just as I have developed it here, you will readily perceive that in maintaining the inwardness of duty in love I am not doing it with the wild anxiety with which it sometimes is done by people whose prosaic prudence has first annihilated the immediate and who now in their old age have resigned themselves to duty, people who in their blindness do not know how to ridicule the purely natural violently enough, to praise duty stupidly enough, as if in this way duty were anything other than what you call it. Thank God I know no such gap. I have not fled with my love out into the wilderness and the desert, where in my solitude I could not find my way; neither have I consulted my neighbors and next-door neighbors about what I should do; such isolation and such particularism are equally wrong. In the universally valid itself, which is duty, I have continually had impressa vestiga [footprints] before me. I have also felt that there are moments when the only salvation is to let duty speak, that it is sound and healthful to let it carry its own punishment, not with the gloomy unmanliness of a heautontimoroumenos [self-tormentor],177 but in all earnestness and firmness. But I have not been afraid of duty; it has not appeared to me as an enemy that would disturb the fragment of joy and happiness I had hoped to rescue in life, but it has appeared to me as a friend, the first and only confidant in our love. But this capacity to have open prospects at all times is the benediction of duty, whereas romantic love goes astray or comes to a standstill because of its unhistorical character.

Dixi et animam meam liberavi [I have spoken and unburdened [II 139] my soul],178 not as though up to now my soul had been ensnared and just now has relief in this protracted expectoration179—no, this is merely healthy breathing in which my soul has enjoyed its freedom. As you know, the Latin for “breathing” is respiratio, a word that signifies the inhaling of what was first exhaled. In respiration the organism enjoys its freedom, and thus I, too, have enjoyed my freedom in this writing, the freedom that is mine every day.

Accept now in well-prepared anticipation what is here offered to you as well tested. If you find it far too trivial to satisfy you, then see if it is not possible to prepare yourself better, see if you have not forgotten some precautionary measure. 180 The Serbs have a legend that tells about an enormous giant who has an equally enormous appetite. He comes to a poor peasant and wants to share his noon meal. The peasant sets out the humble best his house can manage. The giant’s greedy eyes have already devoured it and have correctly surmised that he would be just as hungry if he actually had eaten it. They sit down to the table. It never occurs to the peasant that there would not be enough for both of them. The giant reaches for the dish; the peasant stops him with the words: It is the custom in my house to begin with a prayer. The giant acquiesces, and lo, there is enough for both of them.181

Dixi et animam meam liberavi, for her also, whom I still love continually with the youthfulness of first love; her also I have made free—not as though she were bound beforehand, but she has rejoiced together with me in our freedom.

In accepting my fond greeting, please accept also, as you usually do, a greeting from her, friendly and sincere as always.

It is a long time since I have seen you here with us. This I can say in both a literal and a figurative sense, for although during the two weeks I have spent my evenings on this letter instar omnium [that stands for all], I have in a way continually seen you here with me; nevertheless I have not seen you even figuratively in my house, in my room, but outside my door, from [II 140] which I have almost tried to drive you with my sweeping. I am not sorry to perform this task, and I know that you will not take offense at my behavior either. But as always I would like even more to see you, both in the literal and the figurative sense, here with us. I say this with all the pride of a husband who feels entitled to use the formal phrase “with us”; I say it with all the cordial respect any individual “with us” can always be sure of meeting. Please accept an invitation for next Sunday, not a family invitation “for ever,” that is, for a whole day. Come when you will—you are always welcome; stay as long as you want to—you are always an engaging guest; go when you please—always with our best wishes.182