Tuesday, October 24:
Vienna. The Brown Book again.
Oh Cosima! All the things I now know about! — Florence, Rome, Naples, Sicily, Spain — all is a matter of indifference to me, they will be nothing to me without you, and only by virtue of your being included in it all! — Oh foolishness still to try to seek salvation outside harbour when to run to harbour was the final salvation! — How easy death is: for me almost all is dead already. Am I the ghost, or is the world? Again I’ve grabbed at broken glass: the merest glimpse of this Vienna, and then tell myself it was her I once wanted to build my harbour! I’ll give something, my love, not to see Paris again either: I’ll have to feel hideously ashamed to tell myself there that there too I once wanted to be at home, — always with the glass-grabbing sensation! — Oh! —
My love, my love! Things really have gone nice and differently with us. There were a couple of stars which came together in constellation only every leap year: then they looked at each other in amazement, and did not know what next. Nota word they said, — they set, shone here and there, floated in broken glass — ether — and so it had to be. Then came death: they wanted to die. The spasm left hold, the crazy orbits reached out no more. As the sail, when the mad wind eases, trembles, falters and flutters, so I hung upon your lips, — ready for death! And we knew all. And now the orbits are changed. — Now the eternal leap-year has been won. And now — you grow ever more beautiful to me! — Everything I have lived away so quickly: nothing has held, no illusion. With us everything was willing. You are coming ever more beautifully to life again, so that less and less can I understand how I wandered distant from you for so long. Oh Cosima! Certainly you cannot see, looking at me, how I love you, how I respect and honour myself because you love me! Now I expect you will look shrewdly at me and laugh? —
No, imagine me now here in Vienna. I’ve been out, once, quite briefly, and now I’ve sworn only to drive out on my errands. I am now so hideously ashamed at having once run around here looking as if I fancied I’d make something out of it for myself, if not even find something in it. Fine nonsense! — Besides, certainly now after three years, the people here have become much more brutish. — No — my propylaea — quiet, peace — my Parzival and — and — and — high above, deep inside — who then? Probably you? — Ask! — Franz has just come and only just brought me your letter which you gave him — : yesterday, after our arrival, he was quite giddy with Vienna, and forgot it. My love, I thank you! — You do, don’t you? Love me? —
Yesterday evening Standhartner was with me: we’ve put a lot in order. Today it’s off with him to the dentist — it’s that monster who will now decide my existence — that is to say, in Vienna. — This evening at Fröbel’s. — Yesterday settled business. Received Porges III. Am being clever and awaiting chances. —
Oh heavens, now into my house — and never again any further than to the Nymphenburg and the English Garden! And write pages and pages, no ‘learned papers’ — that goes without saying, for then I get a telling off — always music, nothing but music!”?
My love! I’ve slept well. How about you? And Isolde? —
Now I shall telegraph to you so that you have something for the witching hour. Dear Cosima! Cosima! Cosima! — — And once more — Cosima! — Shall I now be angry with your begetter, — that won’t do? But that’s what he’s out for! The devil! — Adieu! —