Aphoristic Writings, Notebook, and Letters to a Friend, by Otto ...

Dear friend!
Dresden, 12th August, 1902
Thus the fate of the sausage, which I have repeatedly inquired after with keen
interest in Bayreuth, has fulfilled itself. It has regretfully returned to its origin. Was it
still edible? Hopefully you have tried it once around 10 o’clock in the morning!
To gradually step up from the sausage: The man is a certain Dr. Mario C., whom
I, at the time still as a philosophy student, had fleetingly acquainted myself with at the
psychology congress in Paris. He is of course small, very dark, with a proportionately
sharp countenance, intelligent eyes, which seem to observe. He gave me the
impression of a very serious and not very happy man. I talked less with him than in
his presence with his friend, a philosophising mathematics professor from Lower
Italy, who spoke to me in the international painting exhibition just as I had sated
myself viewing Klimt’s “Philosophy” there in great haste, and stepped up to the dais.
Now you know all that I know . . .
Please write to me about what, especially, there is to see in Saxon Switzerland 49 .
But I may be a bit more critical than you have thought, to ask you to consider: In the
Munich secession are three pictures which do not annoy one, and in Nymphenburg,
that you recommended to me nonetheless, are none at all. I certainly know how
beautifully a person who, like you, lives a great deal in his past, nightly gilds any
memory, even the most irksome; I do likewise; but one should be wary of allowing
the eternally unfulfillable wish of reliving through others to satisfy one: otherwise
they will come back and want to spoil one’s pleasure for everything, don’t you think?
I intend to leave Dresden early on Wednesday. About ten o clock I am in Berlin
(poste restante) and the next morning travel immediately onward toward Stralsund
(poste restante) and the island Rügen (Sassnitz, poste restante). I am likely to pass a
longer time there. I am very pleased at that.
On the return journey, I want to remain longer in Berlin and visit Saxon
Switzerland, if you earnestly recommend it to me.
By the way – upon Nature one need place no claims, it fulfills simply all. I only
ask you whether I will receive impressions there, which P 50 . does not offer. Saxon
enthusiasm, to me, always belittles things.
With pleasure, I take it from the rhythm of your last letter that it begins to go
better with you. Indeed you already spit upon the state examination, upon Zurich!?
I am doing somewhat better today – I now have the conviction that I am yet born
to be a musician. Yet at least preferably. Today I discovered a specifically musical
imagination in myself, of which I would never have thought myself capable, and
which has filled me with a great reverence.
49
Region of Germany on the Czech border near Dresden. [Trans]
50
Pürkersdorf. [Trans]
77