The duty of living had conquered, and I found myself again amid the tumult of human life, and of my and its weak efforts and faulty deeds. A feeling of horror came over me, as when a person suddenly finds himself alone in the midst of immeasurable mountains of ice. Everything about me and in me was cold and strange, and even my tears froze.
Wonderful worlds appeared and vanished before me in my uneasy dream. I was sick and suffered great pain, but I loved my sickness and welcomed the suffering. I hated everything earthly and was glad to see it all punished and destroyed. I felt so alone and so strangely. And as a delicate spirit often grows melancholy in the very lap of happiness over its own joy, and at the very acme of its existence becomes conscious of the futility of it all, so did I regard my suffering with mysterious pleasure. I regarded it as the symbol of life in general; I believed that I was seeing and feeling the everlasting discord by means of which all things come into being and exist, and the lovely forms of refined culture seemed dead and trivial to me in comparison with this monstrous world of infinite strength and of unending struggle and warfare, even into the most hidden depths of existence.
On account of this remarkable feeling sickness acquired the character of a peculiar world complete in itself. I felt that its mysterious life was richer and deeper than the vulgar health of the dreaming sleep-walkers all around me. And with the sickliness, which was not at all unpleasant, this feeling also clung to me and completely separated me from other men, just as I was sundered from the earth by the thought that your nature and my love had been too sacred not to take speedy flight from earth and its coarse ties. It seemed to me that all was right so, and that your unavoidable death was nothing more than a gentle awakening after a light sleep.
I too thought that I was awake when I saw your picture, which evermore transfigured itself into a cheerful diffused purity. Serious and yet charming, quite you and yet no longer you, the divine form irradiated by a wonderful light! Now it was like the terrible gleam of visible omnipotence, now like a soft ray of golden childhood. With long, still drafts my spirit drank from the cool spring of pure passion and became secretly intoxicated with it. And in this blissful drunkenness I felt a spiritual worthiness of a peculiar kind, because every earthly sentiment was entirely strange to me, and the feeling never left me that I was consecrated to death.
The years passed slowly by, and deeds and works advanced laboriously to their goal, one after the other—a goal that seemed as little mine as the deeds and works seemed to be what they are called. To me they were merely holy symbols, and everything brought me back to my one Beloved, who was the mediatrix between my dismembered ego and the one eternal and indivisible humanity; all existence was an uninterrupted divine service of solitary love.
Finally I became conscious that it was now nearly over. The brow was no longer smooth and the locks were becoming gray. My career was ended, but not completed. The best strength of life was gone, and still Art and Virtue stood ever unattainable before me. I should have despaired, had I not perceived and idolized both in you, gracious Madonna, and you and your gentle godliness in myself.
Then you appeared to me, beckoning with the summons of Death. An earnest longing for you and for freedom seized me; I yearned for my dear old fatherland, and was about to shake off the dust of travel, when I was suddenly called back to life by the promise and reassurance of your recovery.
Then I became conscious that I had been dreaming; I shuddered at all the significant suggestions and similarities, and stood anxiously by the boundless deep of this inward truth.
Do you know what has become most obvious to me as a result of it all? First, that I idolize you, and that it is a good thing that I do so. We two are one, and only in that way does a human being become one and a complete entity, that is, by regarding and poetically conceiving himself as the centre of everything and the spirit of the world. But why poetically conceive, since we find the germ of everything in ourselves, and yet remain forever only a fragment of ourselves?
And then I now know that death can also be felt as beautiful and sweet. I understand how the free creature can quietly long in the bloom of all its strength for dissolution and freedom, and can joyfully entertain the thought of return as a morning sun of hope.