[...] I feel that I am clean. I know in my innermost soul that I always worked for others, never for myself; my perpetual sufferings bear me witness.
But joy? Joy is nothing to me now! And that is my consolation. Each joy that I detected in myself would become my accuser and would destroy my proud right to scorn it.
And so to-day I can tell you with an odd sense of satisfaction that the news from Germany, of the annulment of my banishment, which I received a few days ago, has left me quite cold and indifferent. [...]
I have a friend, however, whom I grow to love better and better. He is my old Schopenhauer, so morose to all appearance, and yet so profoundly imbued with love! [...] And how beautiful it is that the old man knows nothing at all of what he is to me, or of what I am to myself through him!
And now let me remember a friend of quite another kind. You may laugh, but I am speaking of a true angel who is ever at my side—a being unalterably friendly, who never so much as looks at me without lavishing a deluge of joy and caresses upon me. He is the little dog which you once sent to me from your sick-bed! [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 2, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 471