Part One — Youth and Growth
Chapter 2PreludeVORSPIEL
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
These pages are perhaps not to appear until I am dead. How strange that sounds! Only a few years ago it seemed impossible to me that a hearth of flame like my soul could ever go out! Utterly impossible it seemed! And now the recognition slowly dawns on me that life and death are really quite the same as waking and sleeping, quite the same, only another phase of our existence in being, and that in the end it is hardly worth wasting many words on. For we are one with the infinite, one way or another. Only that, at best, perhaps in the twilight-state of the soul after death, if it does not wholly dissolve — all our former pains and joys are pushed infinitely far away, seeming only like a dull dream-consciousness. Our whole life — like the tangled dream of a single night!
How long ago it is that I still believed, in foolish childish delusion, that I could force the world to me, to my feet. Before my “genius” it was to bow, to admire it —, to be swept away by it. Ah, the delusion has died away, the dream has blown off! Now I want to give people something precious, all those who come after me and love and suffer and long, as once I did. I want to show them an honest artist's heart, ruthlessly true, far from all the mendacity of false conventions. I want to help all artist-souls, in their eternal confusion and their dull urging, in all their dark “cravings,” to find within themselves the great line, from the very beginning, on beyond themselves. The great line, which alone can save us from the chaos of life and from the chaos of our own self.
When I now think back over my life, much already becomes clear to me that once lay only dark and wild in my blood.
“It is all a matter of temperament”, this seemingly so banal sentence is just as true as the other, that only character determines the victory of genius. For a genius without strength of character goes irredeemably to ruin, world history proves it to us. And softness has ever been ground down against hardness — pliant goodness and the longing for love lie forever at odds with all the cruelties of life. How much pain life would have spared me, had I become clear about this sooner. Did I not believe, again and again, that a harder lot than mine — a crueller suffering — no human soul before me had ever borne? Now I know it: human souls are like moths that forever flutter past one another in the dark — flutter themselves almost to death and can never find what perhaps, close at hand, struggles in the same longing. They find nothing, neither without nor within — neither in themselves nor in others.
So then many give up the seeking and the struggle and every possibility of growth — and only fatten their bodies — and in the daily fight for bread they bury their ideals. These are, in truth, the “dead” amid the living; and the greatest cemetery is that of those still alive.
But woe to them, “when we dead awaken1.” —
I want to show you all, you too, you living dead, my naked soul, — it need not hide itself, for pettiness is foreign to it. Sub specie aeternitatis2 you shall be able to look upon and judge everything in my life. In doing so, human measures and human misgivings fall away. And only what is genuine remains, — sifts itself from the chaff of all counterfeit feelings and thoughts. —
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑when we dead awaken — The title of Ibsen's last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899). (Ibsen, When We Dead Awaken)
- ↑Sub specie aeternitatis — Latin, “under the aspect of eternity” (Spinoza) — to view one's life as if from the standpoint of eternity. (Sub specie aeternitatis)