Dear Mother!
Here am I alone again and happiness has flown away Like a dream! Hope remains to me—but I am hardly young enough now to live on hope!
God knows if I can bear it! I can be composed and resigned, but for whose sake? For the sake of my pride! Yet this pride is all I have—my last refuge in a loveless life. [...] I need not pose before you, though I can say to you openly, I feel very unhappy! Thoughts, wishes, hopes, ah! what are you all compared to reality! I have wrenched myself free of the old tormenting life, but the new life still hovers formless before me. So I am neither dead nor living, the martyr of memory, reluctant to depend on a hope whose fulfilment I cannot and may not actively further, a victim of the torments of imagination, at the mercy of events which I scarcely dare look upon, which I am utterly powerless myself to direct! Only one thing could restore me fully to life—if I could myself act and actively sacrifice myself. Now I can do nothing but suffer, gaze into the blue heavens and see misfortune after misfortune pass over me without daring to raise a finger! [...]
Memory comes to me too, memory, that freight of a life without content! Oh, with what anguish I remember! I can only still love my wife just because I can only remember her. I must, then, remember her continually, and every sense of past suffering vanishes when I think of her, only to give place to the greater anguish pity awakes in me. I can only lament for her now, no longer for myself, for every ground of complaint on my side is blotted out by our parting. Poor woman! She was so rich, so endowed, whom could she not have made completely happy! Alas that she lacked just one thing, the one thing without which all love is illusion, all the cares of love a martyrdom, all union, torment—the understanding of the one we believe we love, that understanding which alone gives joy in the loved one, which makes us bear all sorrow joyfully. I had to part from thee, that I might be able to love thee again—I had to do it though it destroyed both of us! Now I can weep for thee. [...] So I can regret nothing, for I know that I—even in the enjoyment of the greatest new happiness—have only become richer in love, for now I can love thee too till my life's end!
How do I live now? Where do I live now? Do I live at all? Yes, you dear women came to me—and so I could live! [...] You accepted from the man what the artist gave you—from the artist what the man confided in you! Ah, how safe I felt in your love, how calmed, how glad to be one with you. [...]
In a year we shall meet again—in a year, too, I hope to see Jessie once more. In a year! God in Heaven! Have we not all experience enough already to know what a year means? [...] God knows where we are to turn now. Every place is the same to the homeless, for every place is equally bad, equally valueless. I am grieved for Karl. I am dragging him about with me and I am afraid he will not be happy with me much longer. Well, we have experienced many adventures and many disillusionments about places, and we think of going to a larger town, perhaps to Thun, near Berne. In any case it is cheaper to live in a real town than in the small places which are run only for visitors. Moreover, I must now be on my guard. If war breaks out I shall not be safe in Switzerland for a moment, and—though I do not rate life immoderately high—I will not make a present of myself to some Austrian corporal. If the worst comes to the worst, I think I may have to flee to London. [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 177