Two letters

Two letters

Narodni Listy, 13. Feb 1925

Dear Friend!

You ask me a question that has no answer.  How could I, who is neither familiar with your relationship to your wife nor that to your lover, advise you whether you should get a divorce and marry a second time or whether you should stay with your wife? What does it help that I know you inside out, as you write, that I also know Helena, your wife, and Sonia, your love? Even though if I know your situation in each and every detail, even though I tell myself that there are no outer obstacles to a divorce, that you and your wife are both financially independent, have no children, that you have no common material ties, like a store or career - what does it mean and what does it signify? Nothing. No one can advise or help you with this innermost decision, it is a secret of feelings, nerves, heart, soul that you cannot explain to anyone, and if you tried: one can only understand another as far as the own experience goes. Therefore I can give you no advice at all. Instead I can tell you about my own experiences that may not be worth much, like all experiences. But in such a case, if someone needs our compassion, it might be appropriate to bring one’s own experiences forward, and that is all I can do for you.

You still envision the world like a immature person. You still believe, or try to believe with all your might, that life has a goal, years are leading somewhere, a certain result is achieved, something finite is accomplished. Once you look at life as it deserves to be looked at, you will realize that there is only  birth and death, and the time in between. Then you will immediately value things you do not  attach importance to now: inner order and balance of the soul; it is roughly like a well run store at a street corner, with a sign of your great-great-grandfather. It is running on invisible paths and gives life something reliable. Reliability is admittedly immobile and thus something hopeless. But also things of great wisdom are hopeless, if you admit that hope is a feeling for people who cannot bear the presence. And given this reliability of life, feelings like love, the longing “to start a new life” or being in love become pure follies. You cannot find a common ground , you cannot substitute one for the other. In the end it does not matter whether you lose your life with or without hopes, but that you will lose it, my dear boy, is absolutely sure, because you will get old and die. This is by the way the only defeat the human brain can accept, it is a defeat of the body and the only defeat without revenge.

You are amazingly childish: you think you have a particularly exceptional fortune, an exceptional soul and exceptional feelings. My dear, we all had a father and a mother, and we all will find a place where we will get buried. In light of those tremendous facts it does not matter much whether we have black or blonde hair, whether we own a village shop at the market or a house in Cotagi. In any case: We are all afraid of death and fend the fear, everybody to his best ability, we love, work, have ideas, fight, simply waste our time according to our talents. Your pain has been felt by almost everyone and your longings are also known by almost all. once you know this, you will feel lighter, and be it because you see that most people survived it, and you will probably also survive, and somehow, who knows how, reach the other side. And you realize that everyone in a similar situation will do something foolish. You will likely do something foolish as well and still you will live on. This is weird and maybe you are mad with me. But imagine, imagine very calmly, how in one year from now the same sun will shine on a meadow full of flowers and a river bend in the lowlands.

Why do I claim you would do something silly? Because all decisions between two things are silly. You should live in such a way that you never are in a situation where you have to decide, and you did the basic mistake at the moment when you let this situation happen. What follows are not mistakes, but consequences that follow the first step and over which you have no control anymore. Technically you are in a better situation today, when you have to decide between two women, because you have something complete that consists of two halves. You compensate for the deficiencies in your marriage with your affair, and the weaknesses of the affair are compensated by your marriage. You make another mistake if you think of any of the halves as being independently complete. The value of man is in his limitations, only in his limitations he can develop his qualities to the full. THis is a bit as if a person would specialize in tenderness, earnestness, exuberance  or sensibility. Some traits of qualities dominate, others are lacking; a chemist has no idea about how to shoe a horse and a capable washerwoman does not know how to construct a steam engine. Each person surrounds himself with an atmosphere of his defining qualities. There are people you can be merry with, and people with whom you can be ambitious. WIth others you are bold, simple or desparate. By having two women you have two worlds, and it is no coincidence -that much intuitive sense of balance people have- that the opposite worlds do complement each other. If you decide yourself for one women you will lose the other, you will thus lose the other world, the counterpart. You will not have one women, you will have a women without the other: one and the longing for the other woman. My dearest, allow me to say it cynically: you will certainly regret your decision, no matter for whom you decide yourself.

You forget something important: the love in marriage is different in kind from the other love, and it does not depend on the person at all. A marriage is officially set up for eternity. By common sorrows, common furniture. You have bought the stuff at some point in time and over the years it multiplied, became a face, created itself like a living thing. In the midst of this world lives love, not threatened by the world, but by itself. When love’s fire was almost extinguished it was kept alive by shared pots, shared coal bills, and a new shared and beloved painting in the corner of the room, by the poetry of the daily routine, the quiet security of the familiar. If the love to your lover should try to escape you cannot hold it back with reality. At the moment when you start hating everything about your lover that you loved so much before -fine fingers, once so delicate, now disgustingly fragile, little ears, so cute one year ago, today strangely pale-  at that exact moment it is over. There is no common ground and land for life. There is only love, naked like a robbed person. If Sonia was your wife and Helena your lover you would love them not with the same love as you love them today, but with the opposite love. Sonia would be the wife that you are devoted to, full of compassion and thankful humanness, and Helena would be the exciting star, who would make the world look open to you.

Suppose you confess to your wife, leave her and start “a new life”, like you call it. Between the old and the new life will be an awful barrier: the separation. In the moment when you look into the face, that has been with you for years,that was smiling, crying, singing, and all of that together with you, you will find the memory of everything you experienced: this familiar face you will never see again, those words of the common vocabulary you will never say again, never coming home again and knowing already at the stairs how you will be received. This person has lived next to you for years and now, immediately it should disappear? Maybe she will get sick, maybe she will cry, maybe she will be poor and lonely. Maybe this person whom you knew so well will die on day. Unbearable pain is verkrampfen your heart. More than pain, it is hell. The whole struggle of life and love only had one meaning: to find a companion for old age and a companion until death. And now you want to give this only meaning up? You are going to suffer so immensely that you will think that you do not like anyone in the whole world besides the one companion that you do not love anymore. And if you should have enough strength to continue you will end up in the other world like a wounded animal.

Maybe you will arrive there unwounded, like a cat that always falls on her four legs, and you will heal. Yet, by heavens: what then? Again a “new life”? Again the same fight between man and love? Again stuff, pots, coal bills? And in the best case, after years,  you will win again a companion for age and a companion for dying, and then why, yes why did you not stay?

Dearest Friend!

Thousand thanks for you sincere letter. If I could force my heart to the feelings I might feel in one, two, ten years, then I might think like you do. Maybe that would be the only true wisdom: think ahead, think like an experienced person, while we are inexperienced. The world would be different if the intensity of youth could be combined with the thoughtfulness of age. Maybe you are right by chapter and verse, I believe you, but I did not experience this. That’s why I go. I go and know it won’t be a victory, I wouldn’t know where and over what I could win, leaving is the victory. I emptied my life like a glass of water, and now I will fill this glass anew. Courage is rewarded and courage is punished. Everything is double-edged, for everything you have to pay, and on both sides you will always regret what had happened. I know that. But really, the sun is shining each spring on a meadow full of flowers; and if that’s the only safety in this world, it’s the one I cling to.

Now, my dearest, I will go to Paris, then to London, and then -who knows. Who knows when I will return and who knows what I will experience. I neither fear nor look forward to it, I am just waiting, prepared for the life to come. It might well be that in a year from now, if a friend wants my advice, I will say the same that you did. But this merciless law is outside the dichotomy of the world and outside all our reflections: we are incorrigible. As long as we don’t try, we don’t know anything. And we cannot live better than others, who went ahead of us.