Really, how unreasonable and slack is the life I lead! I don’t even want to talk about it. I have spent this Sunday hanging my head without being unhappy, sitting around without being unduly bored, going for a walk with Felix, and then (almost with a sigh of relief) alone, and yet, whatever I did, there was always that sensation of a fist in my neck.
“The feeling that you might be taken from me”—how could I not have it, dearest, since I deny myself the right (but “right” is not strong enough, “deny” is not strong enough!), since I deny myself the right to keep you? Don’t deceive yourself, dearest; the cause of the trouble lies not in the distance; on the contrary, it is this very distance that gives me at least the semblance of having some right to you, and I am holding on to that, insofar as one can hold on to uncertainties with uncertain hands.
By the way, last night I discovered something that should have been terrible, but in fact came almost as a relief. I got home late from Baum’s, I did not feel like writing to you then, though there is so little variation within my moods that it makes no sense to preserve any single one for my letters to you, and so I might well have written and enjoyed the benefit, but I did not write; nor did I feel like going to bed; I still felt too great an uneasiness within myself after taking an admittedly only very short walk with my relatives whom, after a premature parting from Max, his wife, and Felix, I had gone to meet at the coffeehouse—and so, because the notebooks containing my novel happened to be lying there (by some chance these books, long unused, had risen to the surface), I looked at these books and read them at first with unconcerned confidence, as though I knew from memory the exact sequence of what was good, fairly good, and bad, but grew more and more amazed, and finally came to the irrefutable conclusion that of the entire book only the first chapter stems from an inner truth, while all the rest, with the exception, of course, of some isolated short and even longer passages, was written as it were from recollections of deep but totally absent feelings, and consequently has to be rejected—i.e., out of some 400 large pages only 56 (I think) remain. If the 200 odd pages of an utterly useless version of the story, written in the winter and spring of last year, are added to the 350 pages, then for this story I wrote a total of 550 worthless pages. But now goodnight, my poor dearest, dream of pleasanter things than of your
Franz