Essays and Letters by Friedrich H?lderlin

Author:Friedrich H?lderlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141938912
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

I have just learnt that the French Directory has been dismissed, the Council of Elders sent to St Cloud and Bonaparte made a sort of dictator.

81. To Johann Gottfried Ebel

[Homburg, ~ November 1799]

My dear friend,

However much I am obliged to you for your kind promise of future participation in my literary enterprise the real pleasure your letter gave me was quite a different one. I felt more strongly than I can say, as I read it, how much you meant to me from the first moment, and how much I have done without since I last saw you.

The more I come to understand and tolerate and love people in their various sufferings, the more deeply and unforgettably the outstanding ones among them press themselves into my mind. And I must confess that I know few people with whom I can follow my soul with such assuredness as I can whenever I think of and talk about you, something that happens often. If only we were closer to one another – for my sake, for you do not need me, or less than I do you, and I don’t know if I would mean as much to you as I once seemed to. Many experiences, which given my disposition were almost inevitable, have pretty much undermined my confidence in all that used to be my chief source of hope and joy, the ideal image of man and his life and being; and the ever changing conditions of the world, great and small, in which I belong frighten me still, now that I am somewhat freer again, to a degree that I can only admit to you, because you understand me. Habit is such a powerful goddess that probably no one can abandon her with impunity. The agreement with others that we achieve so easily when we keep to what we already have, this consonance of opinions and customs, only appears to us in its true significance when we have to do without it, and our hearts may well never find the same peace again once we have given up the old ties, for in the end the forging of new ones is something we have little control over, especially as concerns the finer and higher sort. It is true that people who have raised themselves into a new world of rightness and goodness then hold together all the more closely and enduringly.

How much I should have liked to give you a full account of my departure from the household that meant, and still means, so much to both of us. But then I should have had to tell you infinitely more than I can say! I should have preferred to ask you a favour, and should still like to. Our noble friend, whom I have always seen come through her many ordeals in greater affirmation of her best life, even finer and more delicate despite the bitter anomalies of her situation, nonetheless seems to me, if her sadness is not to

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