Dear Cecilie,
I had intended writing to you yesterday, so that you would receive my letter on New Year’s Day; but illness prevented me from doing so, which is why my good wishes will now arrive a day late.
Rest assured that your letter gave me a deal of pleasure; I had been expecting to hear from you for some considerable time and was beginning to suppose that something I had said in my last letter had upset you. All the better that it had not! - Each time you turn to me in this way, I am involuntarily reminded of our youth when we two really belonged to each other more than to any one else: all the memories that I have of that time are inextricably bound up with you. - I expect the same is true of you, and, just as we always look back on our youth as a time of greater happiness, you, too, no doubt yearn to retreat from the squalor of the present and rediscover the person who was then closest to you. The Loschwitz bathing party and my boots, Humann etc. still have their occasional part to play: if we had not placed the key in the pumpkin, everything would then have turned out for the better. Don’t you agree? - But it has all turned out quite pitifully: I live surrounded by people who drive me back increasingly into myself, in spite of my lively desire for self-expression; there is no man alive who does not feel a greater need than I do to pour out all his riches without reserve, and yet there is none who is given less in return than I; my outgoings bear no relation to my income: I am unbelievably lacking in agreeable impressions; I am continually forced to fall back on myself. It is a particular misfortune for me that most of my friends are philistines and that they often cling to me with an affection that really has nothing to do with my true nature, so that I am obliged to return it with a certain dishonesty. On the whole it is the men whom I find most repugnant, while women are soonest capable of making an agreeable impression upon me. It is hideously nonsensical that men always go around with men, and women with women; the entire human race will eventually perish as a result of this perversity. If only the majority of women had not already been ruined by it all! Men nowadays are born philistines, and women become so because of them. That is how it is! - I am living a kind of dog’s life here: all my illusions about friends to which I abandon myself so readily cannot ultimately last for long: in the end I am the one who is hurt by the effort it takes to maintain my illusions, and I am driven by sheer necessity to expose things as they really are in all their naked truth. And so I continue to live my old life of solitude: but I am finally succumbing since my heart is lacking in sustenance. My nerves are in a very bad way and, after many attempts to find a radical cure, I have finally lost all hope of getting better: all that I can do is get as much rest and comfort as possible, in order to be able to hold out a little longer. My work is the only thing that sustains me: but my cerebral nerves are already in such a state that I can never spend more than two hours a day working, and even these two hours are only possible if I can lie down for a further two hours after working and finally sleep a little; if sleep is denied me, the rest of the day is wasted. In this way I have finally completed my great Nibelung poem: if the outside world can offer encouragement, I shall make a start on the music in the spring.
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 156