FELICE: All right, now I am sitting.
21 August. Today I got Kierkegaard’s Buch des Richters. As I suspected, his case, despite essential differences, is very similar to mine, at least he is on the same side
of the world. He bears me out like a friend. I drafted the following letter to her father, which, if I have the strength, I will send off tomorrow.
You hesitate to amswer my request, that is quite understandable, every father would do the same in the case of any suitor. Hence your hesitation is not the reason for
this letter, at most it increases my hope for a calm and correct judgment of it. I am writing this letter because I fear that your hesitation or your considerations are
caused by more general reflections, rather than by that single passage in my first letter which indeed makes them necessary and which might have given me away. That
is the passage concerning the unbearableness of my job.
You will perhaps pass over what I say, but you shouldn’t, you should rather inquire into it very carefully, in which case I should carefully and briefly have to answer you
as follows. My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and
want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility. Nervous states of
the worst sort control me without pause, and this year of worry and torment about my and your daughter’s future has revealed to the full my inability to resist. You
might ask why I do not give up this job and—I have no money—do not try to support myself by literary work. To this I can make only the miserable reply that I don’t
have the strength for it, and that, as far as I can see, I shall instead be destroyed by this job, and destroyed quickly.
And now compare me to your daughter, this healthy, gay, natural, strong girl. As often as I have repeated it to her in perhaps five hundred letters, and as often as she
has calmed me with a “no” that to be sure has no very convincing basis—it nevertheless remains true that she must be unhappy with me, so far as I can see. I am, not
only because of my external circumstances but even much more because of my essential nature, a reserved, silent, unsocial, dissatisfied person, but without being able to
call this my misfortune, for it is only the reflection of my goal. Conclusions can at least be drawn from the sort of life I lead at home. Well, I live in my family, among
the best and most lovable people, more strange than a stranger. I have not spoken an average of twenty words a day to my mother these last years, hardly ever said
more than hello to my father. I do not speak at all to my married sisters and my brothers-in-law, and not because I have anything against them. The reason for it is
simply this, that I have not the slightest thing to talk to them about. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it, for it disturbs me or delays me, if only because
I think it does. I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer. I have no family feeling and visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously
being attacked.
A marriage could not change me, just as my job cannot change me.
30 August. Where am I to find salvation? How many untruths I no longer even knew about will be brought to the surface. If they are going to pervade our marriage as
they pervaded the good-bye, then I have certainly done the right thing. In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. The limited circle is pure.
14 October. The little street began with the wall of a graveyard on the one side and a low house with a balcony on the other. In the house lived the pensioned official,