Reece Simmonds’s Reviews > Letters to Felice > Status Update

21st November 1913

“The fact that no one knows where I am is my only happiness. If only I could prolong this forever! It would be far more just than death. I am empty and futile in every corner of my being, even in my unhappiness. Now for an island, with nobody on it, instead of the sanatorium”

Picking this back up

4th August 1913

“I shall perish if we are not together soon. For if we are not together soon, my love for you, which refuses any other thought to enter my head, would be directed towards an imaginary idea, towards a phantom, towards something totally unattainable and at the same time totally and at all times indispensable; but if this was so it might be enough to rip me out of this world.”

7 July 1913 ~ “Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often - and in my inmost self perhaps all the time - I doubt whether I am a human being.”

Only read a few letters tonight. A few pretty gut wrenching pages! I really do feel for Franz a lot - if only he knew how much his work, and him, is loved today!

Can’t pick just the one quote so 2/3 will do :’)

13 May 1913 ~ You don’t know, Felice, you don’t know what it is that imprisons me and makes me the unhappiest of men, in spite of seeming to be very close to you - you, my sole purpose on this earth. Oh god, I wish you were not on this earth, but entirely within me, or rather that I were not on this earth but entirely within you; I feel there is one too many of us; the separation into two people is unbearable.

13 April 1913 ~ “I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.”

2 April 1913 ~ “I, dearest, become estranged? I who die of longing for you here at my desk? While washing my hands outside in the dark passage today, I was somehow so overcome by the thought of you that I had to step across to the window to seek some comfort, if only from the grey sky. This is how I live.”

2 April 1913 ~ “I, dearest, become estranged? I who die of longing for you here at my desk? While washing my hands outside in the dark passage today, I was somehow so overcome by the thought of you that I had to step across to the window to seek some comfort, if only from the grey sky. This is how I live.”

From 14 to 15 March 1912 [1913] ~ “I sleep little, fitfully, and badly; I don’t take much exercise, am utterly dissatisfied with myself, all of which made me collapse quite helplessly into the armchair.”

18th/19th February 1913 - “When I look into myself I see so much that is obscure and still in flux that I can not even properly explain or fully accept the dislike I feel for myself.”