DEAR FRANZ,

I begin to find out more and more that you are in reality a great
philosopher, while I appear to myself a hare-brained fellow.
Apart from slowly progressing with my music, I have of late
occupied myself exclusively with a man who has come like a gift
from heaven, although only a literary one, into my solitude. This
is Arthur Schopenhauer, the greatest philosopher since Kant,
whose thoughts, as he himself expresses it, he has thought out to
the end. The German professors ignored him very prudently for
forty years; but recently, to the disgrace of Germany, he has
been discovered by an English critic. All the Hegels, etc., are
charlatans by the side of him. His chief idea, the final negation
of the desire of life, is terribly serious, but it shows the only
salvation possible. To me of course that thought was not new, and
it can indeed be conceived by no one in whom it did not pre-
exist, but this philosopher was the first to place it clearly
before me. If I think of the storm of my heart, the terrible
tenacity with which, against my desire, it used to cling to the
hope of life, and if even now I feel this hurricane within me, I
have at least found a quietus which in wakeful nights helps me to
sleep. This is the genuine, ardent longing for death, for
absolute unconsciousness, total non-existence; freedom from all
dreams is our only final salvation.

In this I have discovered a curious coincidence with your
thoughts; and although you express them differently, being
religious, I know that you mean exactly the same thing. How
profound you are! In your article about the "Dutchman" you have