Soul of the Age (13 page)

And then there's another difference, the main thing, really. There used to be a huge difference between the manuscript and the printed page; pieces often looked a lot longer or shorter than they were. And, unfortunately, they didn't object to the flattery! Skimming through the familiar handwriting in that sort of manuscript, one would judge it in a rather flattering light, seeing it the way the mirror sees the bride, and everything would seem very well done, or at least tolerably so, even if there were terrible flaws in the piece. Whereas the cold, printlike type almost seems like galley proof; it looks at you critically and severely, in an ironic and almost hostile manner; it's no longer familiar and can be properly evaluated. It's always refreshing to see dyed-in-the-wool habits being discarded, and this is temporarily true of typing. The shift from hoe to plow or pen to typewriter is really stimulating. And I'm not at all bothered by the clatter that I had dreaded.

So progress exists after all! You may laugh if you wish. But it's only a modest, technical advance, and perhaps it'll soon be superseded by other, more significant developments. Ten years from now I shan't be quite so proud of this 1908 machine. I have a few relics that I really cherish even though they're also a source of amusement; among them is a heavily worn goose-feather quill, which the late Eduard Mörike
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sharpened and split with his clever, light hands before sitting down to write. Now, he is a person who never would have bought a typewriter, even if he had been able to afford one. It's impossible to calculate exactly how much of his potential he wasted in the course of his long and idle life; he spent ages cutting quills, doing calligraphy, painting Easter eggs, and if he had only focused a minuscule portion of his energy, he could easily have written three times as much, and we would all be pleased. But the lazybones did nothing of the sort. Those knick-knacks were just as important to him as the future of German literature.

I think life behaves in much the same way. It doesn't ask itself how things will turn out later on; it has no interest in goals or prospects, and likes to hover aimlessly in the present. Only thus can the present aspire to eternity.

TO HIS FAMILY IN CALW

Gaienhofen, February 29, 1908

[ … ] I'm looking forward to Father's new book
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and was wondering whether I could have an inscribed copy. I like browsing around in
The Pagans and Us;
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I like listening to Papa, and pick up a lot.

Having recently renovated and fortified the foundations of my philosophy of life, I'm more receptive to religious writings of all kinds. There is one point on which all serious, critical philosophies agree: our minds, and even logic itself, are incapable of resolving the issues most crucial for our spiritual well-being. I'm very fond of the teachings of Jesus and find them indispensable as a source of consolation and as a guide for practical ethics. The notion that life on this earth is brief and heavenly existence eternal is a bit too skimpy in mythological terms; it completely fails to address the issue of previous existences. I need a mythology, an explanation of the universe, that is more complex and graphic, and often borrow material from Buddha and the Vedic legends. Perhaps this issue of previous existences is ethically insignificant, but I have always felt it was attractive, mysterious, and not in the least bit oppressive. In our heart of hearts, when we think of immortality, we think of the individual, since immortality of a nonindividual nature is quite inconceivable; we then ask ourselves repeatedly what that personal soul might have looked like prior to our present existence. At that point the Indian doctrine of reincarnation affords me some satisfaction—even though I don't actually “believe” in it—insofar as it conveys nonconceptual truths in a splendidly graphic manner. However, aside from that, the Indians aren't of much use to me since they rank knowledge above faith. They accept as beyond doubt an almost modern form of determinism, except that for reasons of dogma, they create a loophole for free will on the way to nirvana. But that's enough, I cannot do justice to the subject in a letter.[ … ]

TO RECTOR OTTO KIMMIG

Gaienhofen, March 10, 1908

Many thanks for your friendly note. I liked what you wrote, and not just because I'm looking forward to the arrival of the Zosimus volume. Now, I don't wish to make you feel you ought to write again; I myself cannot write forced letters, and today I'm just replying out of gratitude, since I sensed from your card that we really understand each other, and that's not exactly an everyday occurrence.

I'm glad to hear that you're planning a visit, even if it's later on. You know that you're welcome. I tell everybody that I hate having visitors, but that is meant to scare off the apes who invade the house just out of curiosity, and to benefit the welcome visitors.

Much could be said about the “tragic novel.” Perhaps many such novels have already been written. In reading some good, but hardly optimistic writers, I have felt that the story they tell is no more powerful and sad than any extremely straightforward depiction of life—a narrative that doesn't rely on any preordained scheme or doctrine and in which the laughing and crying, dying and marrying occur in the same tempo, with all events being equally funny or unfunny. I find this pattern in, e.g., several of the Russians.

Yet, on the other hand, the “tragic novel” may well be an impossible feat. Tragic drama consciously portrays a truly exceptional life and fate; it's probably also possible to achieve something similar in the novella (in the older sense of the term). But it seems to me that the novel can best express the ordinary, essentially unchanging things in life that are universal.

I don't believe that literary genres exist purely for the sake of the aestheticians or poets (if that were so, there would surely be more of them); the material simply demands them so that everything human can find its own means of expression. And then there is the novel, which is a patiently formless entity, an all-purpose receptacle for everything that doesn't require a genre of its own, for the common, undistinguished, threadbare human things. And as for the attempts to narrate all of this using broad brushstrokes, without illuminating the woeful material in any way or lending a minor art form any lighthearted personal touches such as humor, etc., they were almost unbelievably depressing. The impression left by “pure” naturalism or verism is thus often unartistic, because art should turn sadness into beauty and portray terrible events in a pleasing manner. Otherwise one might just as well read biology, world history, or critical philosophy, which also leave one, ultimately, with the dark impression of a dark chain of events, whose goal and meaning remain unfathomable.

Art, also in the novel, will probably always rely on—and be inspired by—the only apparition in this arbitrary and monstrously wasteful process whose form is pleasing to us—i.e., life as form. The reason being that each form and each individual—not just the beautiful ones—is a source of wonder, the only object in the flow of events that truly exists, or is at least perceptible. In short, the artist will always find that, even though he has no problem believing in the earth's motion and basing his
thought
on that assumption, to live and be creative he has to stand like a savage on secure ground and see the sun going around in a circle. Anybody who believes fervently that objects do not exist or even subscribes to a determinist point of view—which, of course, logically implies absolute predetermination—would not write novels, or anything else, for that matter.

This has remained very fragmentary, but there is a ratio in rebus, also in the fact that I'm running out of paper. More orally at some point!

OPEN LETTER
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Badenau,
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July 9, 1909

My dear friend,

I'm a little ashamed to confess my whereabouts and present condition, but I have owed you a letter for a long time, and besides, there's so little to do here—I haven't felt like this since the long Sundays during my vacations as a youth. I have learned how terrible boredom can be, even thinking about it can give me the shudders; it's worse than all the other illnesses, even seasickness.

The situation is as follows: I've been a guest here at the spa in Badenau for the past two weeks! You'll be astonished and may even laugh, which is what I do whenever I get a chance to reflect on my situation. I shall be released in three weeks' time; till then there is no escape. A clever, sensitive physician has taken charge of my nerves, and a well-to-do friend—you can guess his identity—is paying the hefty hotel bill; I wouldn't be here otherwise. This is how my day goes: After getting up, I take a thermal bath, have breakfast, and must then go on a so-called promenade until one o'clock. Lunch is at one, then I'm supposed to rest until four; from then until early in the night I'm permitted to read and write, and thus engage in what my physician politely calls work. Then, at half past nine, a young attendant in white linen comes to my room; he soaks a large linen towel in cold water, wraps me in it, and then beats it with his flattened hands until he is exhausted. It's quite amusing, and the fellow must have no trouble sleeping soundly afterward, but I certainly can't.

As you know, I'm a native of the Black Forest; when I was a small boy, I used to feel a mixture of amazement and contempt at the sight of the numerous spa visitors, or “air grabbers” as we called them, who came to our region in the summer. Now I myself am an air grabber. My days are spent climbing the clean forest paths, cautiously and in decent attire, lying for hours on the wicker chaise longue in the hotel garden, staring in a bored and envious manner at the farmers working in the fields, exhibiting on my face perhaps a faint, somewhat helpless expression, which I interpreted in my youth as a sign that all air grabbers were idiots.

During my first few days here everything irritated me. A spa such as this can destroy the magic and ravish the beauty of the most beautiful valley in the Black Forest. The buildings are outrageously large and garish; there are hundreds of completely unnecessary signposts painted in all sorts of colors; tiny artificial ponds with decrepit swans and idiotic goldfish, and equally tiny artificial waterfalls with tin gnomes or deer, and little walls with water trickling down. Moreover, a gang of musicians fills the peaceful valley with the sound of an absolutely diabolical brass band, for an hour and a half, three times a day, from which there is no escape. Although the audience here is large, elegant, and cosmopolitan, it not only puts up with this stuff but actually seems to enjoy it. It's enough to make one weep.

Those first few days, I was so tired and the weather was so wet that all I got to see of Badenau was those splendid spa monuments. But, of course, I soon noticed that this elegant spa is tiny and rather laughable; it's a ridiculous little kindergarten in which the guests disport themselves in a very odd, apelike manner. The spa is surrounded by a dark, mighty hundred-year-old forest and soft blue-black mountains, which seem to smile wryly at the colorful and quite childish antics occurring at their feet. These are the fir-tree groves, forests of silver fir, fast, transparent, trout-filled streams, and the old, forsaken mills and sawmills of my youth; they greet me again, and in spite of all that has since transpired, I can hear the old, familiar sounds in my ears and in my heart. Something emerges from deep within my soul, the muffled clamor of my youth, the remnants in my heart of my childhood sensibility; the waves may have submerged that part of me, but they have left it unscathed.

During the four or five hours I spend outside each day, this entire world belongs to me alone, with all its mountains and wide, high plateaus, its wild spots covered with ferns, its strawberries and lizards, its ravines and quiet, sleepy, brown-gold water wagtails amid the alders.

For, strange as this may seem, the guests aren't in the least bit interested in nature. They know nothing about it, and just reject it out of hand. They traipse around aimlessly on a few level paths at the spa, and then sit around on one of the many benches, looking either satiated and happy or yellow and out of sorts, and not one of them ever ventures more than a thousand meters from the pump room. Lots of shimmering white dresses can be seen in this restricted area; costly ladies' hats and hairdresses flit about; all sorts of flowers and perfumes release their fragrance; mouths buzz with the sounds of ten languages—but beyond the perimeter there isn't a trace of a single guest, even though that's where there is a real forest and genuine mountain air. They're paying the high spa fees for all those swans, tiny ponds, tin gnomes, signposts, and concerts. One encounters only a few fat gentlemen outside this Holy of Holies, and they run panting along the forest paths, trying to lose weight. It's not as if the thousand-odd spa guests were weak or ill, and thus incapable of going on hikes—whenever there are evening dances, they all seem astonishingly healthy and agile. But they're all afraid of nature, and can tolerate only the extremely adulterated form of nature they see during their “promenades.” They're dimly aware that their narrow, self-imposed regulations no longer apply in the woods, and also that their vain demands and petty worries and ailments would seem just as ridiculous there. If they were somewhere in the mountains a couple of hours away, old Pan might suddenly sneak up on them, gaze into their unliberated eyes, and give them a well-deserved shock. The ravines and wolves are not what frightens people “out there”; it's the solitude, and that's something which none of the guests at the spa can tolerate. So they stay down below in their narrow little garden and, on the rare occasions when they venture out into the very enticing countryside, they venture forth only on group outings in carriages full of merrymakers. On the other hand, some are so stir-crazy that they show up for the morning concert in the park, wearing sports clothes and loden hats, which they take off as quickly as possible afterward. If somebody is known to head off occasionally for distant summits, even if he has only been away for one day on a serious hike, he is treated with diffident awe, partly as a hero, partly as a madman.