Tuesday, October 24 – Wednesday, October 25:
At night, before bed.
Your letter has come from Munich. — you are right, my love! I myself cannot understand how I was able to show you the letter from Frau W. Seeking now to explain it to myself, I find that the sole explanation that I can find will, at the same time, have to reassure you. Reading through the letter with you, I was truly shocked too: I had not even read it correctly or properly to myself; so preoccupied had I been while assimilating it that I was now first astonished at its contents. What you are to gather from this strange preoccupation I will excuse myself from explaining: it is too natural. Certainly now also for the first time it dawned on me what my letter might then have contained: even of that my recollection was still only very vague. Whatever it may have been, I only know it was my beauty-urge ideally to cover up an indescribably disagreeable frame of mind from that time, in order — to save myself. I knew only that this letter from that time had been an external sign of the magnanimity of my heart, and must therefore have regarded it as a strangely veracious fate that this letter was not accepted. I ought now to have demanded it back: over that you are right, my love. That I did not, is explicable to me only by my having in the end forgotten it in its wording, and ultimately by the bitterness having vanished completely from my heart. I did not demand of Frau Wille that she should give the letter to M.W., — but simply mentioned, by the way, that, ifit had not yet been asked for, Fr. W. should certainly take it that she would also, through her, have nothing more to learn of me: this in order to explain my not sending her any greetings. Secretly I was malicious enough to wish her the humiliation that reading this letter ought once again to cause her. That may all have been unclear, unattractive and confused: the main thing in this matter was my preoccupation. You do me total and wicked, wicked injustice when you say that I wrote the unposted lines for you. — With that I put up only because I think I can see that I have deserved to suffer injustice, having in the whole matter acted with an unattractive preoccupation, of which, I am afraid, I became aware only — as I said — on reading Frau W.’s letter through again with you. — But never mind! — Don’t brood over it any more. It was not nice of me, but really only lack of thought. There is nothing, nothing else behind it! — But it has been a useful lesson to me. I thank you for it! —