To poets it is a familiar world. The ordinary mortal wanders about in its wonderful gardens as if he were blind; he lives in it without knowing it. He does not know where the real world stops and where the fantasy world begins. In the treadmill of grey day the invisible boundaries between these two worlds escape him.
The second world! What would our life be without it? What a vale of tears would this globe be were it not for this heaven on earth!
The reader probably guesses what I mean. All of us, the poorest and the richest, the smallest and biggest, rarely or never find contentment in our daily routine. We need a second sphere, a richer life, in which we may dream of everything that is denied us in the first sphere. Ibsen called this “The Great Life-Lie.” But is it always a lie? Did not Ibsen go too far with this characterization? Who could doubt that the lie is not one of those eternal truths that is so incorporeal that we cannot grasp it, so colourless that we cannot see it, so formless that we cannot describe it.
The child finds its second world in play. The little duties of everyday life are for it only unnecessary interruptions in its play in the second world. Here the child’s fantasy has ample room. It is a soldier, king, and robber, cook, and princess; it rides through a wide world on steaming express trains, it battles courageously with dragons and giants, it snatches the treasures of the earth from their guardian dwarfs, and even the stars in the heavens are not beyond its reach in its play. Then comes the powerful dictum called education and snatches the child out of its beloved second world and compels it to give heed to the first world and to learn things necessary to it in its actual life. The child learns of obligations and submits unwillingly to the dictates of its teachers. The first world is made up of duties. The second world knows no duties; it knows only freedom and unrestrained freedom of thought. This is the root of the subsequent great conflict between feelings and duties. In our childhood we find duties a troublemaker who interferes with our playing; this childish hostility continues with us all through life. Our vocation, the sphere of our duties, can never wholly satisfy us. It is our first world; and even though we seem to accept it wholly, a little remnant of this hostility remains and this constitutes a part of our second world.
Primitive people find their second world in religion. From their primitive fears for the preservation of their lives they flee to their gods, whom they love and fear, punish and reward. The same thing is true of all those simple souls whom culture has not robbed of their religious belief. To them religion is the second world which gives them rich consolation and solace for the pains of the first world. In his book “Seelenkunde,” Benedict attributes anarchism to an absence of consolatory life-lies. He says: “Our free-thinking times have stopped up this source and it is the duty of society to create a consoling life-truth, otherwise that psychic inner life which hoards up bitter hatred will not cease.”
The more highly developed a person’s mind is, the more complicated is his second world. People often express surprise at the fact that so many physicians devote themselves passionately to music or the other fine arts. To me it seems very simple. All day long they see life in its most disagreeable aspects. They see the innocent sufferings, the frightful tortures which they cannot relieve. They look behind the curtain of the “happy family”; they wade through all the repellant and disgusting filthiness of this petty world, and they would have to become dull and non-partisan animals did they not have their second world.
There is first of all music, which is so dear to all of us because it is an all-embracing mother which absorbs all the emotions of hatred, anger, love, envy, fear, and despair, and fuses them all into one great rhythm, into one great vibrating emotion of pleasure. On its trembling waves the thoughts of the poor tortured human soul are borne out into the darkness of uncomprehended eternity and the eternally incomprehensible.
Then there is literature. We open a book and at once we are transported into the second world of another ego, a world which in a few minutes becomes our own. Happy poets, who have been endowed with the gift of saying what they see, of giving form to what they dream, of freeing themselves from their energies, of abreacting their secret sufferings and of making others happy by opening up to them a second world!
Then there are the thousand and one forms of play; sports and in fact everything that tears us away from our daily grind. What is the lottery ticket to the poor wage-earner but an instalment on the pleasures of the second world, or the purchased right of joyous hope?
There is the devotion to clubs and fraternal associations. The henpecked husband flees wrathfully to his club where he can freely and fearlessly launch all those fine argumentative speeches which he has to suppress at home. Here he can rule, here he can play the role of the independent master. For many thousands the club is nothing more than an opportunity to work off their energies, to get rid of unused emotions and to play that role which life in the first sphere has denied them.