[656W-{4/12/58}Letter to Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein: SLRW, p. 384-385]
[P. 384] {FEUER} “What increasingly attracts me to great poets is what they conceal by their silence rather than what they express, indeed, it is almost more from a poet’s silence than from what he says that I learn to acknowledge his greatness: and it is this that makes Calderon so great and so precious to me. What makes me love music with such inexpressible joy is that it conceals [P. 385] everything, while expressing what is least imaginable: it is thus, strictly speaking, the only true art, the other arts being merely adjuncts. What I concealed that evening I revealed to the assembled guests in loud and sonorous tones by means of my Beethoven … .” [656W-{4/12/58}Letter to Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein: SLRW, p. 384-385]
[657W-{9/18/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: Quoted by Robert Donington in his Wagner’s ‘Ring’ and its Symbols; p. 152]
[P. 152] {FEUER} “I had been distressingly but more or less decidedly disengaging myself from the world; everything in me had turned to negation and rejection; even my artistic creativeness was distressing to me, for it was longing with an insatiable longing to replace that negation, that rejection, by something affirmative and positive, the marriage of myself to myself (‘sich-mir-vermaehlende’).” [657W-{9/18/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: Quoted by Robert Donington in his Wagner’s ‘Ring’ and its Symbols; p. 152]
[658W-{9/30/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: RWLMW, p. 46]
[P. 46] {anti-FEUER} {SCHOP} “… all around me is quite doleful; what has any manner of significance, helpless and suffering: and only the insignificant can thoroughly enjoy existence. Yet what recks Nature of it all? She goes her blind way, intent on nothing but the race: i.e., to live anew and anew, commence ever again: spread, spread – utmost spread; the individual, on whom she loads all burdens of existence, is naught to her but a grain of sand in this spread of the species; a grain she can replace at any moment, if she only gives an extra twist to the race, a thousand- and a million-fold! Oh, I can’t stand hearing anyone appeal to Nature: with finer minds ‘tis finely meant, but for that very reason something else is meant thereby; for Nature is heartless and devoid of feeling, and every egoist, ay, every monster, can appeal to her example with more cause and warranty than the man of feeling. (…) Yet it is just like everything in Nature: for the individual she holds misery, death and despair, in readiness, and leaves him to lift himself above them by his highest effort of resignation: she cannot prevent that succeeding, but looks on in amazement, and says perhaps: ‘Is that what I really willed?’ “ [658W-{9/30/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: RWLMW, p. 46]
[659W-{10/1/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 422-423]
[P. 422] {FEUER} {SCHOP} “(…) It is dreadful to see how our lives – which, on the whole, remain addicted to pleasure – rest upon such a bottomless pit of cruellest misery! (…) … without feeling any envy, I have nevertheless felt an instinctive hatred of the rich: I admit that not even they can be called happy, in spite of their possessions; but they have the quite obvious intention of wishing to be so; and it is this which alienates me from them. With subtle intent they avoid anything that could possibly make them feel sympathetic towards the misery upon which all their
