I open the telegram and look first at the signature—my wife's. What does she want?
"Gnekker married Liza secretly yesterday. Return."
I read the telegram. For a long while I am not startled. Not Gnekker's or Liza's action frightens me, but the indifference with which I receive the news of their marriage. Men say that philosophers and true savants are indifferent. It is untrue. Indifference is the paralysis of the soul, premature death.
I go to bed again and begin to ponder with what thoughts I can occupy myself. What on earth shall I think of? I seem to have thought over everything, and now there is nothing powerful enough to rouse my thought.
When the day begins to dawn, I sit in bed clasping my knees and, for want of occupation I try to know myself. "Know yourself" is good, useful advice; but it is a pity that the ancients did not think of showing us the way to avail ourselves of it.
Before, when I had the desire to understand somebody else, or myself, I used not to take into consideration actions, wherein everything is conditional, but desires. Tell me what you want, and I will tell you what you are.
And now I examine myself. What do I want?
I want our wives, children, friends, and pupils to love in us, not the name or the firm or the label, but the ordinary human beings. What besides? I should like to have assistants and successors. What more? I should like to wake in a hundred years' time, and take a look, if only with one eye, at what has happened to science. I should like to live ten years more.... What further?
Nothing further. I think, think a long while and cannot make out anything else. However much I were to think, wherever my thoughts should stray, it is clear to me that the chief, all-important something is lacking in my desires. In my infatuation for science, my desire to live, my sitting here on a strange bed, my yearning to know myself, in all the thoughts, feelings, and ideas I form about anything, there is wanting the something universal which could bind all these together in one whole. Each feeling and thought lives detached in me, and in all my opinions about science, the theatre, literature, and my pupils, and in all the little pictures which my imagination paints, not even the most cunning analyst will discover what is called the general idea, or the god of the living man.
And if this is not there, then nothing is there.