My Dear Son:
I have always told you it is difficult to live with you. The more I get to know you, the more I feel this difficulty increase. I will not hide it from you: as long as you are what you are, I would rather bring any sacrifice than consent to be near you. I do not undervalue your good points, and that which repels me does not lie in your heart; it is in your outer, not your inner being; in your ideas, your judgment, your habits; in a word, there is nothing concerning the outer world in which we agree. Your ill-humor, your complaints of things inevitable, your sullen looks, the extraordinary opinions you utter, like oracles, none may presume to contradict; all this depresses me and troubles me, without helping you. Your eternal quibbles, your laments over the stupid world and human misery, give me bad nights and unpleasant dreams....
Your Dear Mother, etc.,
Johanna Schopenhauer
The young man took lodgings at Weimar, at a goodly distance from his mother. Goethe held out a friendly hand, as he did to Mendelssohn, and all bright young men. They talked much, and Goethe read to Arthur his essay on the theory of colors (for Wolfgang Goethe was human and dearly loved the sound of his own voice). The reasoning so impressed the youth that he devised a chromatic theory of his own—almost as peculiar. Theories are for the theorizer, so all theories are useful.
At the earnest importunity of his mother, who starved him to it, Arthur went back to his clerkship, but soon returned and made terms, agreeing not to call on his mother, in consideration of a pound a week. He took lessons in Greek and Latin of a retired professor, attended lectures, fell in love with an actress—vowed he would marry her, but, luckily for her, he didn't.
When he was twenty-one, his mother turned over to him his patrimony, amounting to about fourteen thousand dollars; and suggested that he leave Weimar and make his fortune elsewhere—the world was wide.
His money was invested so it brought him an income of seven hundred dollars a year. And here seems a good place to say that Schopenhauer's income was never over a thousand dollars a year until after he was fifty-six years of age. Although he could not make money, yet he had inherited from his father an ability to care for it. Throughout his life he kept exact books of account, never ran in debt, and never allowed his expenditures to outrun his income, thus complying with Charles Dickens' recipe for happiness.
In still another way he revealed that he could apply philosophy to daily life: he exercised regularly in the open air, took long walks, was absurdly exact about his cold baths, and like Kant, served the neighbors as a chronometer, so they set their clocks at three when they saw him going forth for a walk. And in the interests of truth, we will have to make the embarrassing admission that the great Apostle of Pessimism was neither a dyspeptic nor an invalid—if he was ever aware that he had a stomach we do not hear of it.