Dearest Felice, you don’t know me, you don’t know me in my baseness, and even this baseness can be traced to that core which you can call literature, or anything you like. What a wretched writer, and how angry I am with myself to think that I have been unable to convince you of it. (Since early morning, and even now, my hand is pressed against my left temple, otherwise I couldn’t function.)
What is stopping me can hardly be said to be facts; it is fear, an insurmountable fear, fear of achieving happiness, a desire and a command to torment myself for some higher purpose. That you, dearest, should be forced to land under the wheels of this carriage, which is destined for me alone, is really terrible. I am consigned to darkness by my inner voice, yet in reality am drawn to you; this is irreconcilable; yet even if we were to try, the blows would fall alike on you and me.
Dearest, I certainly don’t want you to be other than you are; after all, it’s you I love and not a mirage. But then again there is that tyranny which my very existence imposes upon you; this contradiction tears me apart. It also proves the imposs-ibility of it.
If you were here and I saw your suffering (it wouldn’t be just that, your suffering at a distance is worse), if I were able to help, if we could get married at once, without thinking, I would of course let everything go, I would even let misfortune take its course. But this is not the way out at present. Considering your dear, suicidal letter received today, I could almost promise to let everything rest the way it was in your sense, and to torment you no more. But how many times have I promised this! I cannot vouch for myself. With your next letter, or perhaps during this very night, this fear will return, I can’t escape it, it will be impossible to live through the period of our engage-ment. What hitherto has been repeated every month, will be repeated every week. Every other letter will occasion fright-ening associations for me, and that terrible humming top inside me will start spinning again. This won’t be your fault, it never has been, Felice; the fault lies in the general impossibility of it. For example, I read your last letter. It isn’t possible for you to imagine the alarm it created in me. The considered reections that had led your parents to give their consent lay before me. What did I care about these considerations? I detested these considerations. You wrote about your mother’s potential love for me! What should I do with her love? I who could never return it, who never could or would wish to be equal to her love! Even the extensive discussion with your parents horrified me. Even the connection between engagement and holidays, and the actual putting into words of this connection, terrified me. This is mad-ness, I see it clearly, but at the same time it is ineradicable, that I know.
And yet these are merely indications of my true nature, which would never stop undermining you. Do realize this, Felice; I am prostrate before you and implore you to push me aside; anything else means ruin for us both. This is the word, I believe, I wrote in January; again it is bursting forth; it cannot be suppressed. If I could rip myself open before you, you would say it yourself.
Franz