He took up the watch and closed it and returned it to his pocket, looping the chain again through his suspender.
William Faulkner, Light in August (Chapter 7).
He had forgotten to wind it so the watch was dead . . .
Gilbert Rose, William Faulkner's Light in August: The Orchestration of Time in the Psychology of Artistic Style.
Now it was ticking again.
Joachim Kohler, Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation.
But he knew it was late without having to look at the watch.
Gilbert Rose, William Faulkner's Light in August: The Orchestration of Time in the Psychology of Artistic Style.
In this world, a second is a second is a second. Time paces forward with exquisite regularity, at precisely the same velocity in every corner of space.
Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams.
And yet, not exactly!
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine.
No doubt a . . .
Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister.
. . . detailed examination of the question . . .
Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory.
. . . would show that . . .
Henry James, Washington Square.
Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.
William Shakespeare, Othello.
For a moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then I noted the clock.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine.
. . . the clock in the corner.
Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams.
A moment before, as it seemed, it had stood at a minute or so past ten; now it was . . .
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine.
. . . midnight.
William Shakespeare, Othello.
Time!
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Excerpt from To Time.
The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate?
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.
He then became lost in his own thoughts, without really knowing what he was thinking about.
Buket Uzuner, An Unbearable Passion.
The past rose before his eyes . . .
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha.
. . . undone after all and played backward in memory and forward in hope . . .
Gilbert Rose, William Faulkner's Light in August: The Orchestration of Time in the Psychology of Artistic Style.
Now I am on the last half-emptied case . . .
Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library.
. . . of worm-eaten books thickly laden with dust . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust.
. . . and it is way past midnight. Other thoughts fill me than the ones I am talking about—not thoughts but images, memories. Memories of the cities in which I found so many things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel . . .
Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library.
____________________________________________________________

Day dawn.—
Richard Wagner, Parsifal.
I am rather depressed.
Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes.
I go to the basement and open . . .
Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.
. . . my trunk.
Edgar B.P. Darlington, The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings.
The basement is in . . .
Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.
. . . my mountain home . . .
Joseph A. Altsheler, The Guns of Bull Run.
. . . after a long, harsh winter, and deep in . . .
Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.
. . . the trunk . . .
Edgar B.P. Darlington, The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings.
. . . when I reach for . . .
Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.
. . . Mementos of past pains and pleasures . . .
Charlotte Bronte, Excerpt from Mementos.
. . . I still feel the cold of February.
Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.
The past is a quiet place where change occurs in increments of glacial slowness; it is a perpetually verdant landscape. You can go there and find that nothing much has happened since your last visit.
Luc Sante, The Factory of Facts.
In probing my childhood (which is the next best to probing one's eternity) I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.
Vladimir Nabakov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited.
But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion?
Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams.
[I]s there any reason to trust a man in his late fifties, who speaks of his "child's memory" as if it existed, unintruded upon by intervening experience, like an old movie reel, waiting only for a projector?
Philip Gourevitch, The Memory Thief.
Nobody can really say for sure, because nobody really knows . . .
Charles M. Kozierok, Risks of Overclocking the Processor.
Speaking personally, I find that . . .
Daniel J. Boorstin, Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the Unexpected.
My early childhood memories are planted, first and foremost, in exact snapshots of my photographic memory and in the feelings imprinted in them, and the physical sensations. Then comes memory of being able to hear, and things I heard, then things I thought, and last of all, memory of things I said.
Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood.
Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted . . .
George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle.
. . . in me, . . .
Homer, The Odyssey.
. . . almost in the manner of genetic information . . .
George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle.
. . . to become galvanized into . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . what will later be . . .
Karthik Ramanan, The Birth of a Legend.
. . . a cinematic re-presentation
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
The first pictures surface one by one, like upbeats, flashes of light, with no discernible connection, but sharp and clear. Just pictures, almost no thoughts attached:

It must have been Riga, in winter. The city moat was frozen over. I'm sitting all bundled up with someone on a sled, and we're running smoothly over the ice as if we're on a street. Other sleds overtake us, and people on skates. Everyone's laughing, looking happy. On both sides tree branches are bright and heavy with snow. They bend over the ice; we travel through and under them like through a silver tunnel.
Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood.
I remember going in one end and coming out the other.
Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.
I think I'm floating. I'm happy. But this picture is quickly scared off by other ones, dark and suffocating, which push into my brain and won't let go. They're like a wall of solid black between me and the sparkling and the sun.
Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood.
I fight against my depression.
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Tuesday, January 5, 1869).
I am not well, but I am not mad. I’m after something. Memory, yes. A reel. More than just time. Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.
I summon up remembrance of things past
William Shakespeare, Sonnet No. XXX.
But more than just time.
Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.
Mid-day.
Richard Wagner, Parsifal.
A walk in the bright sunshine . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Tuesday, January 5, 1869).
. . . at noon . . .
Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.
. . . was a great help to me; from the top of the hill I was enraptured by the ring of snow-capped mountains, which suggested to me a mysterious, unmoving dance. Absorbed long in watching the picture, my spirit heard the music which higher beings reproduce for us in sounds. — The transience of all individual existence, the eternity of the whole, was reflected to me in the blue mirror of the lake.
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Tuesday, January 5, 1869).
"When one has passed through a narrow gorge and has suddenly arrived at a summit, after which the ways part and the richest prospect opens in different directions, one may linger for a moment and consider which way one should turn first"
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
My deep inner strength restored, I summoned the Friend from his work and together we wandered up the hill; the magnificent . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Tuesday, January 5, 1869).
. . . view of mountains . . .
Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Americans and the Vietnamese in Vietnam.
. . . looked like a spectral shadow.
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Tuesday, January 5, 1869).
Fresh snow had fallen, and this partly concealed the crevasses, so that we could not make out the most dangerous places. Here my guide had to take the lead and reconnoiter the paths. At last we reached the opening of the pass leading out to . . .
Richard Wagner, My Life.
. . . the shallow valley . . .
Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.
. . . to which a precipitous slope of ice and snow had led us.
Richard Wagner, My Life.
We stand among dark boulders, taller than we, that came to rest here 20,000 years ago when the glacier melted and retreated north.
Lance Morrow, A View from the Shore.
That which has driven me to the steep summit,
now holds me spellbound at the abyss's edge:
Richard Wagner, 'Above the abyss I stand'
I now felt that strange and mysterious sensation which is awakened in the mind when looking down from lofty hilltops, and now I was able to do so without any feeling of nervousness, having fortunately hardened myself to that kind of sublime contemplation. I wholly forgot who I was, and where I was.
Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth.
_______________________________________________________________

"I can't remember. It may come back to me. At the moment I just can't remember, really I can't. It's no good chasing it."
John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.
It must have been Riga, in winter.
Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood.
He paused and corrected himself.
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer.
No, no!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust.
For a moment the close observer's mind refused to engage. Then he remembered a night at . . .
John Le Carre, The Night Manager.
("Where?")
Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth.
"But of course! . . ."
John Le Carre, The Night Manager.
. . . Leipzig!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust.
"Ye-e-es," he muttered . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
There, there . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister.
. . . in Leipzig . . .
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus.
. . . Wagner first . . .
John Rockwell, A Philosopher Explains Wagner’s Third Element.
. . . met young Nietzsche, who was enchanted by . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . the older man’s . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . wit, awed by his greatness and overjoyed to hear him discuss his debt to Schopenhauer. The brilliant boy, less than a year older than Ludwig of Bavaria—Nietzsche's dead father and Wagner had been born in the same year—in turn made an extraordinary impression on the composer, who encouraged him to visit Triebschen . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
—Tribschen, a villa standing just outside Lucerne on a wooded tongue of land projecting into the Vierwaldstaetter Lake—
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (translator's introduction).
. . . to continue their discussion of music and philosophy.
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
I knew that the idea of somebody saying "Tell me everything" and meaning it was an unbearably exciting, heady thing for me. That somebody would first allow me to say everything that was in my mind, and then would understand it, promised a kind of intellectual and emotional utopia. It was the connection with another human soul that I was after.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
[N]o clouds shaded those early bewitching and refreshing days at the lake, where Nietzsche, submissively lost in adoration, passed golden hours stolen from his . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . professorial . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
. . . duties at Basel.
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
For the rest of his life he would remember . . .
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
. . . one summer morning . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
. . . on the lake.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
They were seated in the boat, . . .
Ernest Hemingway, Indian Camp.
. . . facing each other like two mirrors, . . .
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
. . . Nietzsche . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
. . . in the stern, . . .
Ernest Hemingway, Indian Camp.
. . . Wagner . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
. . . rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water.
Ernest Hemingway, Indian Camp.
Nietzsche . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
. . . trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning. In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with . . .
Ernest Hemingway, Indian Camp.
. . . his mentor . . .
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
. . . rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
Ernest Hemingway, Indian Camp.
Years after his break with Wagner, he observed, "I pass over my other relationships lightly; but at no price would I have my life bereft of those days at Triebschen, days of confidence, of serenity, of sublime flashes, of profound moments."
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
(I had no idea at the time how large this house would loom in my subsequent life)
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Wagner liked him enormously. But completely disinterested friendship was a luxury he permitted himself infrequently. He sensed Nietzsche's abilities as a writer and wished to yoke them to his cause.
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
Certainly he was impressed by the professor’s eminently articulate style.
Elmer Bendiner, A Time For Angels: The Tragicomic History of the League of Nations.
The relationship between the two men grew increasingly close, and during the war year of 1870—the high tide of their intimacy—each labored at a work reflecting this happiest time of their friendship, a brief period Richard Strauss considered one of the century's most significant moments.
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
For me they were steps, I have climbed up upon them—therefore I had to pass over them. But they thought I wanted to settle down on them . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.
Humanly speaking, they were worlds apart. On the one hand, an ebullient artist and man of the theatrical world who would gladly—health and wealth permitting—have been an epicurian, a go-getter whose life flowed past like a dream, a sensualist involved in the everlasting drama of existence, laughing and weeping as his emotions dictated. On the other, a brilliant but austere pedant who procured experiences and exaggerated what life had not granted him—a capacity for fun and enjoyment.
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.

_____________________________________________________________

Opposites attract—partly by complementing each other.
Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron.
It is in just this way that truly meaningful friendships can arise among human beings: for antithetical qualities make possible a closer and more intimate union.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
In many ways it was an unexpected friendship. Eissler was much older, and seemed to be everything I was not: conservative in dress, brusque and apparently unfriendly in manner, spare in speech. But what Eissler and I experienced together was, while completely nonsexual, nonetheless romantic in some important sense of the word. For one, it was shot through with fantasy. For another, we both behaved as if we were somehow infatuated, both intellectually and emotionally.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Let us say that . . .
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
. . . we were slowly to form such a true friendship that it seemed a thing of destiny.
Miguel Serrano, Jung & Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships.
In this he was deceived: but who, in his place, wouldn't have deceived himself about that?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
I liked visiting Eissler in his home in New York. His office was a delight to me; completely buried in papers, articles, and books. What mattered most for me and seemingly for Eissler during my visits was that we got to sit in his office and talk psychoanalytic history.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
I felt as if I had . . .
Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession.
. . . . intruded upon the holy of holies.
Jack London, Martin Eden.
It is hard for me now, from this distance, and with all that has happened in between to recapture the mood it put me in, but there is no doubt that I was completely absorbed.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
From the moment they were . . .
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
. . . alone together side by side . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
—from that moment there sprang up a conversation that was contrary to all the laws of logic, contrary because entirely different subjects were talked of at the same time. This simultaneous discussion of many topics, far from hindering a clear understanding, was the surest indication that they fully understood each other. Just as in a dream when everything is unreal, meaningless, and contradictory except the feeling that governs the dream, so in this communion of thoughts, contrary to all laws of reason, the words themselves were not clear and consecutive, but only the feeling that prompted them.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
I felt, rightly, that I had a great deal to learn from Eissler, and I was a good and willing pupil.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
For the moment the great gulf that separated them was bridged.
Jack London, Martin Eden.
It was no longer a relationship of dependence, but one of equality and reciprocity. He could be the guest of this superior mind without humiliation, since the other man had given recognition to the creative power in him.
Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund.
It is dozens of years since . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . I became interested in the origins of psychoanalysis and in Sigmund Freud's relationship with Wilhelm Fliess, the nose and throat physician who was his closest friend during the years Freud was formulating his new theories.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
The friendship between the two was an unusual one.
Hermann Hesse, Beneath the Wheel.
Two years younger than Freud, Fliess became his confidant in the mid-1890s. Freud’s letters to him, . . .
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
. . . which constitute . . .
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.
. . . the basic document as it were, the wellspring of psychoanalysis. . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . combine passion with intellectual virtuosity.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
The last term in my last year of college . . .
Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel.
. . . I wrote an eager . . .
Mark Twain, Christian Science.
. . . paper on Freud’s letters to Wilhelm Fliess . . .
Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel.
. . . though I was interested in . . .
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure.
. . . all the permutations of male relationships that are a little skewed: father-son relationships between two men who aren’t really father and son, this loving relationship between two men who aren’t lovers, unlabelable male relationships.
Dave Weich, Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures.
It may be stretching the term beyond its legitimate province, but in important ways, Freud imposed on Fliess a role akin to that of psychoanalyst. Freud's prolonged failure, his virtual refusal, to appraise his intimate friend realistically hints that he was caught in a severe transference relationship: Freud idealized Fliess beyond measure [and] even wanted to name a son after Fliess, only to be frustrated, in 1893 and 1895, by the birth of daughters, Sophie and Anna. He poured out his innermost secrets to his Other in Berlin on paper and, during their carefully prearranged, eagerly anticipated "congresses," in person.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
_____________________________________________________________

I got your last letter to me and thank you very much for it.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
Recently, . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
William,
James Joyce, Ulysses.
. . . the Meistersinger afforded me a strange pleasure. A parallel between [my friend and protector] Breuer and H. Sachs is forced upon me by the circumstance that he too was in the theater. I was sympathetically moved by the "morning dream interpretation melody . . . ”
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . which bears out what . . .
Richard Ellmann, Preface to James Joyce, Ulysses.
. . . I myself . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . have said more abstractly.
Richard Ellmann, Preface to James Joyce, Ulysses.
Moreover, as in no other opera, real ideas are set to music, with the tones of feeling attached to it lingering on as one reflects upon them.
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
—Ah, listen to this for God’ sake, . . .
James Joyce, Ulysses.
WALTHER:
I had a wonderfully beautiful dream.
SACHS:
That bodes well! Tell it to me!
WALTHER:
I scarcely dare even to think of it:
I fear to see it vanish from me.
SACHS:
My friend, it is precisely the poet's task
to interpret and record his dreamings.
Believe me, man's truest madness
is disclosed to him in dreams:
all poetry and versification
is nothing but true dream interpretation.
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
This is . . .
Carl Gustav Jung, The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious.
. . . my dream theory . . .
Sigmund Freud, The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement.
. . . in unadorned, primitive concreteness of vision.
Carl Gustav Jung, The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious.
Odd, don’t you think?
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
There is of course no need to return . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . the galleypage . . .
James Joyce, Ulysses.
. . . I am sending to you. Since you did not take exception to anything in Chapter 1 . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . of my dream book . . .
Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Story Girl: A Compound Letter.
. . . I can unhesitantly sign off to . . .
Edward Jay Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald.
. . . the first batch of quirefolded papers.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
Nothing else has yet been set in type. You shall receive the proofs as soon as they arrive and the new parts will be marked in them. — I have inserted a large number of new dreams, which I hope you will not delete.
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
Have you got that?
James Joyce, Ulysses.
The whole thing is planned on the model of an imaginary walk. At the beginning, the dark forest of authors (who do not see the trees), hopelessly lost on wrong tracks. Then a concealed pass through which I lead the reader—my specimen dream with its peculiarities, details, indiscretions, bad jokes—and then suddenly the high ground and the view and the question: which way do you wish to go now?
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
What do you think?
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
Forgive me if I seem to boast.
Robert Frost, Excerpt from An Unstamped Letter in Our Rural Letter Box.
Today, on a superb Sunday marred only by leaden tiredness, . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . the necessity of repose, obviating movement:
James Joyce, Ulysses.
I am very sedentary.
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
Proof fever.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
But on the next rainy day I shall tramp on foot to my beloved Salzburg, where I actually unearthed a few Egyptian antiquities last time. These things put me in a good mood and speak of distant times and countries . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
With the most cordial greetings and thanks for your cooperation in . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . what I jocularly call . . .
Dale Vander Veen, Dale’s April Devotions.
. . . the Egyptian dream book
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
_____________________________________________________________

You have now read about thirty pages and you’re becoming caught up in the story. At a certain point you remark: “This sentence sounds somehow familiar. In fact, this whole passage reads like something I’ve read before.” Of course:
Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler.
The tale has been told and retold so many times that it has taken on the strains of a fable.
Marcia Bartusiak, Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony: Listening to the Sounds of Space-Time.
The full flavor of a . . .
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment.
. . . fable . . .
Marcia Bartusiak, Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony: Listening to the Sounds of Space-Time.
. . . can best be gained by not only retelling it or by hearing it many times—then some detail at first overlooked becomes ever more meaningful, or is seen in a new light—but also through becoming acquainted with the same motif in several variations. In all variations of this tale, . . .
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment.
. . . this one . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
. . . the only one that concerns us here:
G.H. Valins, The Pattern of English.
An eager student bent on storming heights
Has delved in archives and in libraries,
But adds the touch of genius when he writes
A first book full of deepest subtleties.
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game (Excerpt from “Soap Bubbles”).
_____________________________________________________________

Arrival of Prof. Nietzsche's book.
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Wednesday, January 3, 1872).
I looked at it . . .
Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth.
. . . turned over idly pages of . . .
James Joyce, Ulysses.
. . . it with curiosity . . .
Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth.
It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
What of it, though?
Robert Frost, Excerpt from Lucretius Versus the Lake Poets.
On January 2, 1872, Nietzsche sent Wagner an . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . uncut . . .
Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler.
. . . advance copy of his book, now entitled The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, as a "token of goodwill and friendship." Many of the ideas to which Wagner had undoubtedly given livelier expression in conversation [with Nietzsche] than in his essays on art . . . recurred in an intensified and spiritualized form in Nietzsche's sublime prose.
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
Let's see how it begins.
Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler.
I suppose . . . I could paraphrase
Gilbert K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown.
No, no; wait!
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw.
“He . . . ”
Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul.
. . . can say in his own words, much better, what I as his ambassador in my enthusiasm might only hint at:
Siegfried Hessing, Prologue with Sinozana—Parallels via East and West.
It was in dreams, says Lucretius, that the glorious divine figures first appeared to the souls of men; in dreams the great shaper beheld the splendid bodies of superhuman beings; and the Hellenic poet, if questioned about the mysteries of poetic inspiration, would likewise have suggested dreams and he might have given an explanation like that of Hans Sachs in the Meistersinger . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
“This is the book I have been longing for,” says R.—
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Saturday, January 6, 1872).
Opening a path for yourself, . . .
Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler.
. . . with a paper-knife . . .
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit.
. . . in the barrier of . . .
Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler.
. . . strange pages of . . .
James Joyce, Ulysses.
. . . virgin manuscript . . .
V. Penelope Pelizzon, Human Field.
. . . becomes linked with the thoughts of how much the word contains and conceals: you cut your way through your reading as if through a dense forest.
Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler.
Where now?
James Joyce, Ulysses.
Drove into town, home with R., . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Thursday, January 4, 1872).
. . . through . . .
Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler.
. . . fog, darkness, and snow, . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Thursday, January 4, 1872).
We both felt . . .
Charles Dickens, Bleak House.
. . . dazed, contemplating that whiteness . . .
Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler.
. . . as if each of us were hypnotized . . .
R.D. Laing, The Politics of the Family.
. . . looking fixedly at . . .
Charles Dickens, Bleak House.
. . . blank manuscript pages . . .
Patrick Kavanaugh, The Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers.
I at last . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Thursday, June 3, 1869).
. . . a blanket to my chin . . .
Robert Frost, Excerpt from An Unstamped Letter in Our Rural Letter Box.
. . . thought of the times when I lived here against all the rules like a dream figure, and when this landscape seemed so appropriate.
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Thursday, January 4, 1872).
Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost, Excerpt from Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.
What does it mean? Why this:
Morris Bishop, Petrarch.
In the middle of the journey . . .
Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm.
. . . in long winter nights . . .
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
. . . we find ourselves in dark woods where the right path seems lost. But even so melancholy a poet saw for a prophetic moment that at the end of the confusion . . .
Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm.
. . . in the rosy light of morning . . .
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
. . . there is sometimes a clearing in whose sunlight things appear more distinct and precious than ever before.
Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm.
Can you conceive what new and vital power I draw from living in the wilderness?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust.
Returning home . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Wednesday, March 6, 1872).
. . . I felt as if I had come out of a bleak, harsh woods into a cozy lair.
Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession.
—In the evening read more of Nietzsche's book, which gives R. ever-increasing satisfaction, but we wonder where the public for it will be found.
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Thursday, January 4, 1872).
On my way upstairs to bed I stopped to . . .
Josh Short, The Workers All Call Daddy Cap’n.
. . . sit on my spiral staircase and reflect, reflect, until the mildness of my thoughts lulls and calms me; and then from downstairs I hear music:
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Tuesday, September 30, 1879).
I was lost, so to speak, in the milky way.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
Only within. Inside the brain
Robert Frost, Excerpt from An Unstamped Letter in Our Rural Letter Box.
An indescribable impression—
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Tuesday, July 8, 1879).
All my senses now want to sink into slumber.
Hermann Hesse, Excerpt from Going to Sleep (Poem set to music by Richard Strauss).
Winter’s revenant invites you into it, and there you lie while the bleached sheet . . .
V. Penelope Pelizzon, Human Field.
. . . of snow accumulating . . .
Kelly and Rich Willis, Glass Ceiling: trekkers battle frostbite, storms and exhaustion in their quest to reach the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro.
. . . just beyond the window pane . . .
Angel Xuan Chang, A Ghost Outside My Window.
. . . translates you to an angel in a solitary bed.
V. Penelope Pelizzon, Human Field.
In the meantime Richard comes up and shows me . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Wednesday, January 20, 1869).
. . . a really beautiful letter, a poem in itself, . . .
James Joyce, Ulysses.
. . . which he has written to . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Friday, October 27, 1876).
. . . the professor . . .
James Joyce, Ulysses.
. . . telling him what he thinks of the book and its author.
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Thursday, January 18, 1872).
Yes. This. Here.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
. . . in your rural letter box I leave this note without a stamp to tell you . . .
Robert Frost, Excerpt from An Unstamped Letter In Our Rural Letter Box.
My friend!
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
Never have I read anything more beautiful than your book!
Richard Wagner, Letter to Friedrich Nietzsche.
You thought it out excellently!
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
How splendid it all is!
Richard Wagner, Letter to Friedrich Nietzsche.
. . . an amazing tour de force . . .
U.S. District Court (Southern District of New York), U.S. v. One Book Called “Ulysses.”
No rule seemed to fit it, and yet there was no fault in it.—
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nòrnberg.
Whether or not one enjoys such a technique as . . .
U.S. District Court (Southern District of New York), U.S. v. One Book Called “Ulysses.”
. . . you have achieved . . .
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
. . . is a matter of taste on which disagreement or argument is futile, but to subject that technique to the standards of some other technique seems to me to be little short of absurd.
U.S. District Court (Southern District of New York), U.S. v. One Book Called “Ulysses.”
I am writing to you quickly now because reading it has left me so inordinately excited that I must first await the return of reason before reading it properly.
Richard Wagner, Letter to Friedrich Nietzsche.
And it is partly to compel
Myself, in forma pauperis,
To say as much I write you this.
Robert Frost, Excerpt from An Unstamped Letter in Our Rural Letter Box.
Every life . . .
James Joyce, Ulysses.
—Friedrich!
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
. . . is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law, but always meeting ourselves.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
You’re . . .
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nòrnberg.
. . . a giant of a man, . . .
Franz Kafka, The Judgment.
. . . and our . . .
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit.
. . . meeting calls to mind . . .
Malham M. Wakin, Fighting Right.
. . . an Allegory of . . .
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit.
. . . two stars’ having coalesced . . .
Robert Frost, Excerpt from An Unstamped Letter in Our Rural Letter Box.
. . . a couple of stars which came together in constellation . . .
The Diary of Richard Wagner: The Brown Book –1865-1882.
. . . as never before, . . .
Hermann von Gilm, Excerpt from Dedication (Poem set to music by Richard Strauss).
. . . while the other stars all look’d on . . .
Walt Whitman, Excerpt from When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.
. . . in amazement, and did not know what next.
The Diary of Richard Wagner: The Brown Book – 1865-1882.
What more remains?
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
‘We were born one for another and are certain to do fine things together . . .’
Richard Strauss, Letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
—There's nothing more I can say.
The Diary of Richard Wagner: The Brown Book – 1865-1882.
Be thanked.
Hermann von Gilm, Excerpt from Dedication (Poem set to music by Richard Strauss).
I now depart a debtor.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred.
Nietzsche's first book was . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . a vivid visual poem, a creative condensation of life, death, and immortality.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
Nietzsche had, in fact, become . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . a second Joseph: . . .
Marianne Krull, Freud and His Father.
. . . a man famous in the Bible as an interpreter of dreams.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
Joseph . . .
Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study.
. . . who was becoming daily more conscious of his own powers, more convinced of his mission . . . Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . pieced [Pharaoh's] dreams together exactly as they had visited Pharaoh in the night, and the king was greatly amazed. Joseph was able to accomplish this feat, because he had dreamed the same dream as Pharaoh, at the same time as he.
Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews.
Pharaoh was, of course, the . . .
Ken Frieden, Freud's Dream of Interpretation.
. . . Master who stood for a great deal that the younger man . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . longing to do immortal work . . .
Woodrow Wilson, Letter to Ellen Axson.
. . . was beginning to envisage as his own special world
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
____________________________________________________________

The reader, at this point, will have realized for some time now that this is not a chemical treatise: my presumption does not reach so far—"ma voix est foible, et meme un peu profane." Nor is it an autobiography, save in the partial and symbolic limits in which every piece of writing is autobiographical, indeed every human work; but it is in some fashion a . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
. . . poetic endeavor . . .
Kirsten Wille, Poetic License.
. . . whose aim it is to elucidate . . .
Irvin Goldman, Abductory Inference, Communication Theory and Subjective Science.
. . . the mysterious chemistry of the mind and . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . of human woes, passions and felicities.
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
Now our interest is in this human content.
Sigmund Freud, The Theme of the Three Caskets.
And yet, do not those very endeavors speak for the fact that . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Moses of Michelangelo.
. . . it happens also in chemistry as in . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
. . . the man-world that . . .
Jack London, The Valley of the Moon.
. . . attraction and relatedness . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
. . . play their . . .
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle.
. . . fateful roles
Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man's Soul.
Permit me to clarify the situation by a metaphor.
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
Now the molecules of inorganic matter . . .
Carole Angier, The Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography.
. . . as I have learned, . . .
Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset.
. . . attach to each other at one point only, making long but stable chains. Organic molecules, by contrast, have a double bond: they attach to each other at two or even more points, making possible richer but also less stable combinations.
Carole Angier, The Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography.
To continue:
Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection.
The hydrogen bond is only a twentieth as strong as the bonds that usually hold atoms together within a molecule. It is strong enough, even so, to hold the two strands . . .
Isaac Asimov, The Wellsprings of Life.
. . . of DNA code . . .
Richard Preston, The Cobra Event: A Novel.
. . . in place. Yet it is also weak enough to break and allow the two chains to separate on occasion . . .
Isaac Asimov, The Wellsprings of Life.
At present I should have to put you off with dreadful technical terms which would still give you no idea of what is happening. One has to have these entities before one's eyes, and see how, although they appear to be lifeless, they are in fact perpetually ready to spring into activity; . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
. . . but if . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
. . . to comprehend is the same as forming an image, we will never form an image of a happening whose scale is a millionth of a millimeter, whose rhythm is a millionth of a second, and whose protagonists are in their essence invisible. Every verbal description must be inadequate, and one will be as good as the next, so let us settle for the following description.
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
Atoms attract one another, atoms repel one another.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
It needs little imagination . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
. . . to see reflected in . . .
Anna Katherine Green, The Woman in the Alcove.
. . . the record of the friendship of Wagner and Nietzsche . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . a metaphor from which we may extract . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
. . . a lesson that . . .
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
. . . is neither remote nor metaphysical:
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
So long as each seemed to the other to be just a factor in his own egoistic . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . development, a . . .
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
. . . chemical alter ego . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
. . . their mutual attraction was stronger than their repulsion. But from the moment that this . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . anarchy of atoms, . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
. . . this always unstable equilibrium became still more unstable by reason of Nietzsche's gradual realisation of what he was in himself, and his own illimitable self-esteem, his sense of his mission, his lust for power, his inability to suffer contradiction clashed with a similar complex of forces in Wagner, a breach between the two men was inevitable.
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
_____________________________________________________________

To be a good philosopher, one must be dry, clear, without illusion. A banker who has made a fortune has one character trait that is needed for making discoveries in philosophy, that is to say, for seeing clearly into what is.
Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron, quoting Stendhal, as attributed by Nietzsche.
With his Human, All too Human . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . his second book . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Mixed Opinions and Maxims.
. . . Nietzsche purged himself of everything alien to his new attitude . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . an attitude of . . .
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
. . . sharp repudiation
Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther.
He wanted only a life free of other people’s dreams, open to the sensations of a greater world.
Rich Cohen, Lake Effect.
With this book . . .
Walter Kaufmann, Translator’s Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
. . . which proved to be . . .
Edgar B.P. Darlington, The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings.
. . . the first open skirmish in what was to become his holy war against Wagnerism . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: His Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . Nietzsche came into his own.
Walter Kaufmann, Translator’s Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
Not until then did he become fully conscious of weaknesses in Richard Wagner, . . .
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key. . .
. . . the spiritual bankruptcy . . .
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright.
. . . he had previously overlooked in his idealization of the older man.
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
Though he could have no doubt by now that his way and Wagner's must henceforth diverge, he still loved the older man and respected his idealism and his towering genius too much to be discourteous to him. He parted from him, indeed, with a great deal of regret at its being inevitable, for his own conscience' sake, that he should have to alienate him by his scientific freethinking.
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
He explained that his "new Self" was . . .
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
. . . gradually groping for new roles and a new identity. There was the public scramble for acceptance, but there may also have been the less conscious striving for a new identity to replace the old identity as . . .
Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron.
. . . one of Wagner's literary lackeys
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
In Human, All-Too-Human (1878) Wagner’s name does not appear—
Walter Kaufmann, Translator’s Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
. . . though covertly . . .
Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
. . . Wagner and Cosima . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . were the target of many an aphorism . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
—but the chapter on the soul of artists and writers contains observations and reflections . . .
Walter Kaufmann, Translator’s Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
. . . very ironical in tone . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Sunday, March 3, 1872).
. . . conceived in . . .
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address.
. . . satirical counterpoint . . .
The American Tradition in Literature.
. . . to all things . . .
Wilkie Collins, The Evil Genius.
. . . Wagnerian.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Attempt at Self-Criticism.
So the . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . arrogant and rhapsodic book . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Attempt at Self-Criticism.
. . . was not impenetrable by . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . initiates . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Attempt at Self-Criticism.
. . . who possessed . . .
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery.
. . . the power granted by insight.
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
Of course . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . Richard and Cosima . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . would know they . . .
Mark Twain, Roughing It.
. . . were the object of such an unintermitting, general, and relentless . . .
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe.
. . . satire;
Mark Twain, Roughing It.
. . . he should have realized that; his own . . .
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
. . . graphic diction . . .
Anthony Trollope, Dr. Thorne.
. . . and . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
. . . subtle allusion . . .
Henry James, The Aspern Papers.
. . . would bring . . .
William Shakespeare, Hamlet.
. . . it about.
Robert Ludlum, The Parsifal Mosaic.
After dispatching two copies to . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . Wagner—and Cosima, . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . fellow-rhapsodizers and . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Attempt at Self-Criticism.
. . . fair-weather friends . . .
Howard Pyle, Twilight Land.
. . . Nietzsche . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner.
. . . awaited news that Wagner would permit a friend to differ.
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Mind, and His Music.
—Question:
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
“What happened next?”
Joseph Conrad, The Arrow of Gold.
—the chemist . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
. . . among us . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Attempt at Self-Criticism.
. . . replies:
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
.. . a misfortune! What a misfortune!
Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island.
Wagner, . . .
Joachim Kohler, Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation.
. . . confident of his greatness and rightness . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . and . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
. . . infuriated by disloyalty, real or imagined . . .
Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm.
. . . sacrificed a relationship . . .
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
. . . treating his one-time disciple from now on as a traitor to his cause.
Joachim Kohler, Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation.
To put it vividly:
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals.
Wagner . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
. . . in the ironic guise of a man betrayed . . .
George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle.
. . . declared that the young Nietzsche had budded and bloomed, but now only the bulb was left—"a really disgusting object."
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
‘Fool!’ I tell myself.
Richard Wagner, Letter to King Ludwig II.
“The man is a fool!”
E. Phillips Oppenheim, The Tempting of Tavernake.
Fool! Imbecile! Traitor! Lackey!—I wouldn’t be caught dead reading those books . . .
Simon Gray, Butley.
. . . of his.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Guardian Angel.
Nietzsche!
Cosima Wagner, Letter to Richard Strauss.
Yes, I did sometimes pity him.
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda.
I remember when . . .
Simon Gray, Butley.
. . . he . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Thursday, June 3, 1869).
. . . stood in this room, . . .
Simon Gray, Butley.
. . . on his first visit, . . .
Jack London, Burning Daylight.
. . . darkly dressed to colour up . . .
Simon Gray, Butley.
. . . his . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Thursday, June 3, 1869).
. . . melancholy, and I had . . .
Simon Gray, Butley.
. . . him . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Thursday, June 3, 1869).
. . . read a little Eliot to me. Do you remember?
Simon Gray, Butley.
Cosima, . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Thursday, June 3, 1869).
.. . . You must remember—
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda.
Little did we know that a long time away, far into the future, we would be worrying and fretting together about . . .
Simon Gray, Butley.
. . . how the boy had. . .
Bret Harte, The Three Partners.
. . . lost his head completely . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Thursday, June 3, 1869).
. . . the conceited wretch.
Bret Harte, The Man of No Account.
Our beginnings never know our ends. They’re always so sad, so sad.
Simon Gray, Butley
Accused of default in his duties as . . .
John W. Freeman, The Language of Longing: Parsifal's Theme of Yearning.
. . . disciple . . .
Joachim Kohler, Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation.
. . . Nietzsche had to break with Wagner.
Walter Kaufmann, Introduction to The Case of Wagner.
He went the way that go he must . . .
Thomas Mann, Tonio Kroger.
It was . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
. . . a fatal end. And yet a liberation—
Thomas Mann, Mario and The Magician.
If I were a moralist, who knows what I might call it? Perhaps a self-overcoming.—
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
Nietzsche saw himself as . . .
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
. . . undergoing a radical solution to a monumental personal crisis . . .
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright.
I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
Human, All-Too-Human is the monument of a crisis. It is subtitled "A Book for Free Spirits"; almost every sentence marks some victory—here I liberated myself from what in my nature did not belong to me. Idealism, for example; the title means: "where you see ideal things, I see what is—human, alas, all-too-human!"—I know man better.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
But today . . .
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
Oh, today, today!
Henry James, The Aspern Papers.
Today, I should think . . .
E. Phillips Oppenheim, The Malefactor.
. . . it an impossible book: I consider it badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful even of the propriety of proof . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Attempt at Self-Criticism.
But . . .
Patrick Carnegy, The Paris Version of Tannh¬user.
. . . I realize how . . .
Betty DeGeneres, Love, Ellen.
. . . All Too Human . . .
George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education.
. . . is about a human personality conflict so fundamental that we may perhaps see the artistic fault as congruent with . . .
Patrick Carnegy, The Paris Version of Tannhauser.
. . . the book’s . . .
Mark Twain, Christian Science.
. . . central theme.
Patrick Carnegy, The Paris Version of Tannhauser.
Discontinuity is both the theme and the form, deflation the theme and the . . .
George and Portia Kernodle, Invitation to the Theatre.
. . . creative . . .
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright.
. . . method.
George and Portia Kernodle, Invitation to the Theatre.
To this extent . . .
Patrick Carnegy, The Paris Version of Tannh¬user.
. . . All Too Human . . .
George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education.
. . . is about itself and supplies its own critique.
Patrick Carnegy, The Paris Version of Tannhauser.
No matter how intense the intellectual effort that absorbed him beforehand, the moment of vision seemed to require an almost blind surrender to something other than himself.
Maria Shrady, Moments of Insight.
Be it a daemon or a genius that often rules us in hours of crisis—enough:
Richard Wagner, Letter to Arrigo Boito.
High noon . . .
Robert Lowell’s Poems: A Selection by J. Raban (Excerpt from “Fourth of July in Maine”).
. . . one Saturday . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . in a small chestnut grove, high above the lake . . .
Hermann Hesse, Klein and Wagner.
. . . I fell into a kind of somnolent state, in which . . .
Richard Wagner, My Life.
. . . overcast by a strange melancholy . . .
Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons.
. . . there came to me the promptings . . .
Richard Wagner, Letter to Arrigo Boito.
. . . from my true self.
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
One can guess at the precise spot . . .
Paul Ferris, Dr. Freud: A Life.
. . . where I . . .
Richard Wagner, My Life.
. . . succumbed to the persistent and irresistible desire . . .
Zane Grey, The Light of Western Stars.
. . . to dream,—
Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister.
. . . but it hardly matters any more. Air, branches and a bird or two . . .
Paul Ferris, Dr. Freud: A Life.
. . . now . . .
Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons.
. . . fill the space
Paul Ferris, Dr. Freud: A Life.
I stretched myself, dead tired, . . .
Richard Wagner, My Life.
. . . atop the . . .
Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons.
. . . hilly country, . . .
Richard Wagner, My Life.
. . . where . . .
Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question.
. . . on a good day it is possible to see mountaintops fifty miles away, swimming in the distant heat on pillows of pellucid air. This was such a day.
Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons.
From the heights the sound of sheep-bells is heard. On a rocky eminence a young shepherd is reclining, turned towards the valley, playing on his pipe.
Richard Wagner, Tannhauser.
The hilltops and . . .
Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons.
. . . valley stretching . . .
Richard Wagner, Tannhauser.
. . . around the mountain city were not yet parched by the summer sun, but freshened by the green of a brief spring.
Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons.
In his fantasy he raised himself above the realities of his existence and scaled dizzy heights of wish-fulfillment only to be hurled down . . .
Isaac Deutscher, Marc Chagall and the Jewish Imagination.
. . . from this plateau of insight to more conflict and suffering in the depths; but the heights were there to be scaled again.
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
In a dream of which he could afterwards recall only a few fragments, he saw a door that looked like the . . .
Hermann Hesse, Klein and Wagner.
. . . mysterious, dark, and inviting . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . entrance to a theater. On it a large poster with huge lettering (this was undecided) either . . .
Hermann Hesse, Klein and Wagner.
Tannhauser
Amos Elon, Herzl.
. . . or "Wagner." He entered.
Hermann Hesse, Klein and Wagner.
Turning right, . . .
Edmund Engelman, Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna, 1938.
. . . he . . .
Norman H. Finkelstein, Theodor Herzl: Architect of a Nation quoting Theodor Herzl.
. . . walked up a massive, wide staircase which . . .
Edmund Engelman, Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna, 1938.
. . .was light and brilliant, an immense affair of white marble overlaid with agates and alabasters, and swept up to a magnificent foyer, a long golden corridor with high doors that opened into the auditorium.
Sheldon M. Novick, Henry James: The Young Master.
Then, . . .
Charles Baudelaire, Richard Wagner and Tannhauser in Paris.
. . . as if in a trance . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
“I,” . . . –that is, . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
. . . the dreamer himself . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . penetrated . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . a wonderful place arranged like a theatre, where, in a gilded gallery . . .
Henry James, An International Episode.
. . . I evoked the delectable state of a man possessed by . . .
Charles Baudelaire, Richard Wagner and Tannhauser in Paris.
. . . fantastic notions—
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Celestial Railroad.
. . . notions of return to the “womb” of history, . . .
Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons.
. . . by a profound reverie in total solitude with vast horizons and bathed in a diffused light; immensity without other décor than itself. Soon I became aware of a heightened brightness, of a light growing in intensity so quickly that the shades of meaning provided by a dictionary would not suffice to express this constant increase of burning whiteness. Then I achieved a full apprehension of a soul floating in light, of an ecstasy compounded of joy and insight, hovering above and far removed from the natural world.
Charles Baudelaire, Richard Wagner and Tannhauser in Paris.
It was felt as a wonderful experience.
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
But—Oh!
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan.
. . . an experience that . . .
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery.
. . . was linked with the terrifying feeling that . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . it seemed somehow . . .
Henry James, The Ambassadors.
—I can use no other phrase—
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw.
It seemed . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
Too much! Too much!
Richard Wagner, Tannhauser.
Waking from this deep sleep, he saw with astonishment the trees above him.
Hermann Hesse, Klein and Wagner.
“How changed it all is!” cried Friedrich. “There’s been a miracle here.”
Theodor Herzl, Old-New Land.
He was stiff lying on the hard ground, but refreshed. With a faint note of dreadfulness, the dream reverberated within him.
Hermann Hesse, Klein and Wagner.
But that beautiful dream . . .
Franz Kafka, The Burrow.
. . . of mingled delight and dread . . .
Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea.
. . . is past and I must set to work
Franz Kafka, The Burrow.
I knew what I had to do. Nothing else mattered.
Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons quoting an early Zionist pioneer.
“If you will it, . . .
Norman H. Finkelstein, Theodor Herzl: Architect of a Nation quoting Theodor Herzl.
I thought
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . it is no dream.”
Norman H. Finkelstein, Theodor Herzl: Architect of a Nation quoting Theodor Herzl.
And indeed I started on a morning in spring. Everything was starting to bud. Beautiful weather.
Arthur Miller, Conversation with John Lahr.
May, May had come!
Richard Wagner, Tannhauser.
Life was springing from her nourishing flank, buds were bursting into green leaves, . . .
Emile Zola, Germinal.
. . . fresh green leaves . . .
Richard Wagner, Tannhauser
. . . fields were trembling . . .
‹mile Zola, Germinal.
. . . there . . .
Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question.
. . . under the push of the grass. On all sides seeds were swelling and stretching, thrusting through the plain in search of warmth and light.
Emile Zola, Germinal.
A breeze came up and blew from the maples a shower of spermatozoic soft-headed green buds.
E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime.
And soon this germination . . .
Emile Zola, Germinal.
. . . a splendid, manifold, junglelike growth and upward striving, a kind of tropical tempo in the competition to grow, . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
. . . would sunder the earth.
Emile Zola, Germinal.
And then once more . . .
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan.
. . . the dream . . .
Hermann Hesse, Klein and Wagner.
. . . a dream in iridescent colors, . . .
Shimon Peres, The Imaginary Voyage with Theodor Herzl in Israel.
. . . reverberated within him.
Hermann Hesse, Klein and Wagner.
What strange, naive, and African games of the imagination! he thought, smiling for a moment as the door with its invitation to enter the "Wagner" theater returned to his memory. What an idea, to represent his relationship with Wagner in this way. The spirit of the dream was coarse, but brilliant. It hit the nail on the head. The theater called "Wagner"—was that not himself, was it not an invitation to enter into his own interior being, into the foreign land of his true self? For Wagner was himself—Wagner was the murderer and the hunted man within him, but Wagner was also the composer, the artist, the genius, the seducer, lover of life and the senses, luxury—Wagner was the collective name for everything repressed, buried, scanted in the life of Friedrich . . .
Hermann Hesse, Klein and Wagner.
I quickly understood the very essence of my own nature: the stream of life was not to flow to me from without, but from within.
Richard Wagner, My Life.
During the next two or three weeks, . . .
Amos Elon, Herzl.
. . . Nietzsche . . .
Desmond Stewart, Theodor Herzl: Artist and Politician. A Biography of the Father of Modern Israel.
. . . neglected his job and closeted himself in his hotel room. . . . He wrote day and night, standing, sitting at his desk, walking along the street, at dinner, in bed, strolling in the park. For hours he tramped about. . . .
Amos Elon, Herzl.
. . . Basel . . .
Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library.
. . . “to dispel the pangs of new trains of thought.” The hot June air inflamed his body. His days passed in a state of feverish exaltation. At night the idea crept into his sleepy consciousness, and he would awake with a start, unable to fall asleep again. For inspiration and to dispel occasional doubts, . . .
Amos Elon, Herzl.
. . . he . . .
Norman H. Finkelstein, Theodor Herzl: Architect of a Nation quoting Theodor Herzl.
. . . turned to Wagnerian music. He was enraptured by the music of . . .
Amos Elon, Herzl.
. . . Tannhauser:
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . an allegory of a modern society impoverished by precisely those Christian values it claims to represent.
The Penguin Opera Guide.
I’ve been a man who’s been waking up, . . .
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words.
. . . he wrote, . . .
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.
. . . cured of a long, bitter-sweet madness.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words.
How I thought about myself at this time (1876), with what tremendous sureness I got hold of my task and its world-historical aspect—the whole book bears witness to that. . . . Only, with my intuitive cunning, I avoided the little word "I" once again and bathed in world-historical glory . . . Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
It sort of unveiled itself. I was the stenographer.
Arthur Miller, Conversation with John Lahr.
I suppose . . .
Luc Sante, The Factory of Facts.
I, the authorial voice,
Richard Selzer, Raising the Dead.
. . . suppose I am never completely present in any given moment, since different aspects of myself are contained in different rooms of language . . . . Given desire and purpose, I could make my home in any of them. I don't have a house, only this succession of rented rooms.
Luc Sante, The Factory of Facts.
So, he was less than somebody in any category; he was more nobody than at any other time. And in the anonymous period immediately ahead of him he found decided happiness—for a while.
Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther.
What was certain, although he did not realize it, was that he was no longer the same man. Everything in him was changed.
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
He had undergone a complete evolution.
Emile Zola, Germinal.
“One book of my life is ending. A new one is beginning. Of what kind?”
Norman H. Finkelstein, Theodor Herzl: Architect of a Nation quoting The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl.
______________________________________________________________

Thoreau required of any writer a simple and sincere account of his life, and no doubt if . . .
Stephen A. Black, Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy.
Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner.
. . . had been able to write straightforwardly of . . .
Stephen A. Black, Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy.
. . . the ugly growths and parasitic creepers infecting the dense Wagner-Nietzsche forest, . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
All Too Human
George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education.
. . . would not have been written or would have been very different.
Stephen A. Black, Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy.
I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there was . . .
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
. . . a serious but . . .
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit.
. . . welcome visitor, . . .
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
. . . a gentle, perceptive soul who would have been an ideal companion in the woods, . . .
William O. Douglas, Go East Young Man: The Early Years—The Autobiography of William O. Douglas.
. . . a young man named Nietzsche . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . who at one time came through the village, through snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the trees, and shared with me some long winter evenings. One of the last of the philosophers,—
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
. . . one of my . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . Waldensian friends.
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
At that time . . .
Thomas Hardy, Far From The Madding Crowd.
I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond . . .
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
Now I conserve pathologically precise memories of my encounters in that by now remote world: well, . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
I had last seen him a weedy youth, timid and deferential, much given to clicking of heels and bowing. Now in stalked a wiry, tough man with a masterful air whose first act was to deposit on the table a . . .
Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.
. . . draft copy of a . . .
Colleen Conway, Lakes Region Conservation Trust Has Big Plans for Red Hill.
. . . book with the marks of a great destiny, . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
. . . a collection of aphorisms that bears the title Human, All-Too-Human.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals.
I asked him if he . . .
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
. . . would like me . . .
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit.
. . . to contribute to this book. If he would, he should tell me a story and, if he would allow me to make a suggestion, it should be our kind of story, in which you thrash about in the dark for a week or a month, it seems that it will be dark forever, and you feel like throwing it all up and changing your trade; then in the dark you espy a glimmer, proceed groping in that direction, and the light grows, and finally order follows chaos.
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
The young man stood in silence . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
He would never reply.
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
I wish I could say that I had . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . supplied him with ideas as much as with support.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
All that was futile. . . .
We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone.
Hermann Hesse, Demian.
He embraced me then. "Good luck, good luck." I never saw him again.
Claude Lanzmann, Shoah.
There was nothing we could do but part, because neither of us had anything to give the other and neither of us could be fair to the other.
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
He never said . . .
Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister.
. . . just how he went about creating a new personality, but it was a difficult process.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
Today I know that it is a hopeless task to try to dress a man in words, make him live again on the printed page, especially a man like . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
. . . my dear young friend.
Bram Stoker, Dracula.
He was not the sort of person you can tell stories about, nor to whom one erects monuments—he who laughed at all monuments: he lived completely in his deeds, . . .
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
—which were nothing less than . . .
Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders.
. . . the adventures of an . . .
Kate Douglas Wiggin, A Summer in a Canyon.
. . . unworldly young recluse . . .
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . and when they were over nothing of him remains—nothing but words, precisely.
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
I kept . . .
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
. . . Prof. Nietzsche's book . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (Wednesday, January 3, 1872).
. . . on my table through the summer, though I looked at . . .
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
. . . a page or two . . .
Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Guardian Angel.
. . . only now and then.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
One thing more, which I might later forget:
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
I finally left . . .
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
. . . the distant solitude of the wood, where I was living quietly and peacefully
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
________________________________________________________________

It is time to pause and reflect.
Sigmund Freud, The Moses of Michelangelo.
Whatever may be at the bottom of this questionable book, it must have been an exceptionally significant and fascinating question, and deeply personal at that:
Friedrich Nietzsche, Attempt at Self-Criticism.
As far as I can recall, I have always held that the function of the writer is to remember, not to forget, to preserve the transient in words, to conjure up the past by evocation and loving portrayal. True, a trace of the old idealist tradition of the writer as teacher or prophet and preacher has clung to me. But I have always taken this less in the sense of instruction and education than in the sense of a summons to instill soul and spirit into life.
Hermann Hesse, Reflections.
And as such any philosophical legitimation was of no great importance to me at all. By nature untalented for philosophy, I have made a virtue of necessity and prepared myself to work out, as much as possible, unspoiled, unprejudiced and unprepared, the facts which unveiled themselves as new to me. In the endeavor to understand a philosopher, I thought it would be unavoidable to imbue oneself with his ideas and to undergo his guidance during one's work.
Siegfried Hessing, Freud’s Relation with Spinoza quoting Sigmund Freud.
Nietzsche, [a] philosopher whose guesses and intuitions often agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious findings of psychoanalysis, was for a long time avoided by me on that very account; I was less concerned with the question of priority than with keeping my mind unembarrassed.
Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study.
But oddly enough . . .
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
I had on one occasion . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . read Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra . . .
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
—and above all . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
. . . I was impressed by the beauty of his prose—
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
Frankly, I had no desire to penetrate more deeply at this point . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
But I—
Thomas Mann, Felix Krull.
I can remember how impressed I was when I read . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . the following lines:—
Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars.
"'Now I die and vanish,' you would say, 'and all at once I am nothing. The soul is as mortal as the body. But the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs and will create me again. I myself belong to the causes of the eternal recurrence. I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent—not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I come back eternally to this same, selfsame life, in what is greatest as in what is smallest, to teach again the eternal recurrence of all things, to speak again the word of the great noon of earth and man, to proclaim the overman again to men. I spoke my word, I break of my word: thus my eternal lot wants it; as a proclaimer I perish. The hour has now come when he who goes under should bless himself. Thus ends Zarathustra's going under.'"
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Now, years later, I . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.