[...] No one bothers his head about me and this is beginning to put me into a really good temper. Heavens! what an incredible amount one can do without! The one thing I forgo very unwillingly is your society, my child; I know no one at all to whom I so love to communicate my thoughts. That is never possible between men; however great the friendship they never want to step outside themselves, but to assert themselves and let themselves be as little encroached upon as possible. It just is so—the man lives his own life. But when I think how many good things you have enticed out of me, it can only be an added joy to me that you acted so uncalculatingly and yet always got the best from me. How glad I am that I introduced you to the S. Bach piece the other day! It never gave even me so much pleasure, and I never felt it so intimately. But such a thing never occurs to me when I am alone. When Liszt and I made music together it was different; it was mere music; technique and æsthetics always played a great part. There is always a rub somewhere, between men. I seemed stupid to you, perhaps, at our last meeting in Lucerne, and yet our meeting bore noble fruit in me; you can see that at this moment in my steady mood for work. Ought I not to be grateful to you? And that, indeed, as a true friend? [...]
That Köppen's book [The Religion of Buddha] has pleased you so, shows me how good a reader you are. I was annoyed by much in the book, because it made me think all the time how hard the pure knowledge of Buddha's teaching must be made for others. Well, it is a good thing that you were not perplexed. Yes, child, there you have a vision of the universe compared to which every other dogma must seem petty and borné! The philosopher with his most sweeping speculations, the scientist with his most far-reaching inferences, the artist with his most extravagant fantasies, the man with the biggest heart for all that breathes and suffers—all find ample room, all find their fullest selves in this marvellous, this incomparable world-myth!
Tell me, while you lingered there, how did our splendid modern European world strike you? Do you not find in it, either the roughest barbarism, or the first barbarous beginnings of a development brought to perfect bloom ages since by that noble primitive people? Railways—State-made morality! Ha! ha!—
My sole defence, as a rule, from the repulsiveness of our present period is a refreshing draught from that holy source of the Ganges; one sip and the whole outer world shrinks to the importance of a busy ant-heap. The universe is within, deep in the soul—not there, without, where madness bears full sway.—So be it. And so even Köppen has done you no harm! [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 2, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 418