Sils-Maria, 14 August, 1881
To Peter Gast,
…The August sun is overhead, the year is slipping away, the mountains and forests are becoming more hushed and more peaceful. Thoughts have emerged on my horizon the likes of which I’ve never seen--I won’t even hint at what they are, but shall maintain my own unshakable calm. I suppose now I’ll have to live a few more years longer! Ah, my friend, I sometimes think that I lead a highly dangerous life, since I’m one of those machines that can burst apart! The intensity of my feelings makes me shudder and laugh. Several times I have been unable to leave my room, for the ridiculous reason that my eyes were inflamed. Why? Because I’d cried too much on my wanderings the day before. Not sentimental tears, mind you, but tears of joy, to the accompaniment of which I sang and talked nonsense, filled with a new vision far superior to other men.
If I could derive my strength from myself, if I had to depend on the outside world for encouragement, comfort, and good cheer, where would I be! What would I be! There really were moments and even whole periods in my life (e.g., the year 1878) when a word of encouragement, a friendly squeeze of the hand would have been the ideal medicine--and precisely then I was left in the lurch by all those I’d supposed I could rely on, and who could have done me such kindness. Now I no longer expect it, and feel only a certain dim and dreary astonishment when, for example, I think of the letters I get: it’s all so meaningless. Nothing’s happened to anyone because of me; no one’s given me any thought. It’s all very decent and well-intended, what they write me, but distant, distant, distant….
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