I said I was not isolated, it was only that every day I had to exert myself anew to win the solitude I needed in order to make progress. Sometimes I was even rude, offended people I liked. But if my mind started to balk at studying, I would leave the dormitory, usually alone, and go walking along the bank of the Mur, thinking only of my work until I had conquered my restlessness. Often, however, I merely went down to the Mur, that brown, sluggish, viscous river, for the purpose of complete distraction. I would climb the northern hills and let myself dream while contemplating the outward aspects of nature. Whenever I looked at it, I said, and from any perspective, the surface of the earth struck me as new and I was refreshed by it.
Often, I went on, studying the quality of the air and tramping for miles northeastward, in the direction of the Semmering, gave me the greatest pleasure. It was almost a sense of rapture and probably stemmed from the feeling of being altogether free.
Speculating on the local geology near the Mur, I said, would often calm my mind and give me back the clarity I had lost by strenuous studying. My mind would feel receptive again.
For a long time now I had been regarding myself as an organism I could discipline on command by my own will power, I told my father. To be sure, I sometimes had relapses, but these did not plunge me into despair. It was worth making the maximum effort to shake off a tendency to despair, I said. Better to be terribly strained than despairing.
There were moments when I felt empowered to see right through the whole of creation. “Moments of pure recreation,” I said, though they left me exhausted.
Every day I completely built myself up, and completely destroyed myself.
Self-control, I said, is the satisfaction of using your brain to make the self into a mechanism that obeys your command.
Only through such control can man be happy and perceive his own nature. But very few people ever perceive their natures. To let the feelings predominate, to do nothing against the normal gloominess of the emotions, delivers people up to despair. Where the reason is in control, I said, despair is impossible. “Whenever this state of total irrationality closes down on me, there is nothing but despair inside me.” Nowadays I only very rarely succumb to this state, I said. Life always seemed grim if you did not step outside it; the satisfaction came from enduring it rationally. Most people were governed by their emotions, not their reason, I said, and the result was that most sank into despair. “But the kind of reason I mean,” I said, “is completely unscientific.”
My father had been struck by my sudden loquacity. He commented that he too sometimes found himself talking about something, or even only seeing something he could not put into words, which was actually out of the question for people, was really humanly impossible.
Passing Bloch’s house, we drove toward Hauenstein to call on a more or less crazy industrialist whose name I have forgotten. From Abraham we took a short cut over Geistthal.
Students were always prey to a kind of restlessness, I said, because as long as they are at school they live in a no-man’s land between the parents they have left behind and the world they cannot yet attain, and their instincts still draw them back to their parents rather than toward the world. There are often tragedies inside that no-man’s land, which happen when they realize that they can neither return to their parents nor step out into the world. In the last six months in my dormitory alone three students have killed themselves, I said. Up to the last, there had not been the slightest symptom of emotional or psychic trouble in any of the three.
I myself had never even thought of taking my life, I said. But my father remarked that the idea of suicide had always been a familiar one to him. Even as a child, when other ideas became too much for him, he had often sought refuge in this idea. But whenever the idea did come into his head, it had always taken the form of an alternative that made life possible, hence something rather restful, never something in its own right. Both of us were thinking how dangerous it was to have my sister continually absorbed in thoughts of suicide, either brooding about it or actually attempting it. From the time she was little she had inclined toward self-destruction. What had first been a bit of dramatics, my father said, might later develop into a genuine emotion that could end in the real thing.
Beyond Abraham the hills were covered with large orchards. The farmers had set out their casks of cider in the sun. The houses are old. There is hardly a more isolated region than that between Geistthal and Hauenstein.
