Sunday, September 10:
‘Everything in life repeats itself.’ — Old proverb. Awareness of this grows clearer and clearer the longer one lives. On the one hand it is the basis of bad conscience, and on the other, of despair, of satiety with life. — Even this separation together with many of its torments I have lived through before — a year ago. I shall live through it again. In a year’s time Cos will have forgotten it all, what sufferings she has inflicted on me now, what torments of inner strife she has made for herself, and she will suddenly find that there is absolutely nothing for it but once again to obey some new decision of her father’s, and — it will be the same all over again! —
One ought therefore to get used to it!! —
In the end, a life art form will emerge. This tendency of life is expressed incredibly positively and meaningfully by music. — The common life of the ordinary person is represented in the ‘canon’: a theme, unaltered, constantly repeated, complementary to itself solely through itself: a character that remains ever constant, so keeping all around it constant. But now comes the ‘fugue’: the theme remains basically always the same; but it has free contrapuntal counterparts which cause it to appear always in a new light: the theme itself shortens and extends itself, and modulates; the course of the fugue does not let itself be determined in advance, as that of the immutable canon does — and ends only on the pedal note of death. The great, rich character does not take it beyond the theme of a fine Bach fugue: and at best, as far as a splendid counter theme; that is then the triumph, and if the double fugue always shows both themes equally recognizably and significantly then life’s finest course has been achieved. They interlace, part and unite; like a dance. But the piece remains always the same: it becomes highly varied but always repeats itself. — We two are living in just such a fine Bach double fugue. —
Your father’s life’s course is stated for me in the ‘variation’. Here one has before one nothing except the theme, repeated ever anew, but always somewhat altered, adorned, decorated, in different clothes, now virtuoso, now diplomat, now martial, now spiritual, always amiable, always him, at bottom incomparable and for that reason presented to the world only in variation form; personality ever to the fore, noticeable above all, always so placed that the latter is shown to advantage, as under a prism, — ever unique, repeatedly astonishing, but always the same, and — following each variation, it goes without saying, applause. Then comes the peroration, the apotheosis — the coda of the variations. — I have nothing against this form: I think Beethoven has wrested great things from it: the adagios of his quartets, the Fourth Movement of The Eroica, the Andante of the C Minor Symphony are all built on variation form. For that sort of thing I am absolutely useless: I cannot produce even one variation on a theme! — (Today in front of St Marks’s! —
Even Ferry, the good fellow, is here and plaguing me, and that too is fine and part of the fugue.)