longed-for contentment rests, and it is this alone that keeps me a world apart from them. I have observed the way in which I am drawn in the other direction with a force that inspires me with sympathy, and that everything touches me deeply only insofar as it arouses fellow-feeling in me, i.e. fellow-suffering. I see in this fellow-suffering the most salient feature of my moral being, and presumably it is this that is the well-spring of my art. But what characterizes fellow-suffering is that it is by no means conditioned in its affections by the individual qualities of the suffering object but rather by the perception of suffering itself. In love it is otherwise: here we advance to a feeling of fellow-joy, and we can share the joy of an individual only if we find the latter’s particular characteristics acceptable in the highest degree, and homogeneous. This is more likely in the case of common types, since here it is purely sexual relations which are almost exclusively at work. The more noble the nature, the more difficult it is to achieve fellow-joy through [P. 423] redintegration: but, if we succeed, there is nothing equal to it!” [659W-{10/1/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 422-423]
[660W-{10/1/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 424]
[P. 424] {anti-FEUER} “It is in his distress that the individual’s road to salvation is to be found, a road which is not open to animals; if he does not recognize this to be so but insists upon considering it to be locked and barred to him, I feel an instinctive urge to throw this door wide open for him, and am capable of going to lengths of great cruelty in order to make him conscious of the need to suffer. Nothing leaves me colder than the philistine’s complaint that he has been disturbed in his contentment: any compassion here would be pure complicity. Just as my entire nature involves shaking people out of their common condition, here, too, I feel an urge simply to spur them on in order to make them feel life’s great anguish!” [660W-{10/1/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 424]
[661W-{10/3/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: RWLMW, p. 52-53]
[P. 52] {anti-FEUER} “ … by the nature of things, … superlative friendship can be nothing but an ideal; whereas Nature, that hoary old sinner and egoist, with the best of will – if she could [P. 53] possibly have it – can do no else than deem herself the whole exclusive world in every individual, and merely acknowledge the other individual so far as it flatters this illusion of Self. ‘Tis so, and yet, one holds on! God, what a worth it must have, the thing for whose sake one holds on, with such a knowledge!“ [661W-{10/3/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: RWLMW, p. 52-53]
[662W-{10/5/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 425]
[P. 424] {FEUER} [P. 425] “The difficulty [in writing a music-drama about the Buddha] was to make the Buddha himself – a figure totally liberated and above all passion – suitable for dramatic and, more especially, musical treatment. But I have now solved the problem by having him reach one last remaining stage in his development whereby he is seen to acquire a new insight, which – like every insight – is conveyed not by abstract associations of ideas but by intuitive emotional experience … ; as a result, this insight reveals him in his final progress towards a state of supreme enlightenment. Ananda, who is closer to life and directly affected by the violent love of the Chandala girl, becomes the agent of this ultimate enlightenment. – Deeply stirred and shaken, Ananda can return this love only in his own, supreme, sense, as a desire to draw his beloved to him
