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children which of course is what this entire letter is about.
There is a view that the fear of marriage is sometimes due to a
dread that the children would later repay one s own sins against the
parents in the same coin. That doesn t mean very much in my case,
Letter to his Father 137
I believe, for after all my sense of guilt has its origin in you, and is
also too deeply aware that it is a unique case indeed, this feeling of
uniqueness is part of its agony: any repetition is unimaginable.
Anyway, I must say that I would find such a mute, dull, dry, obsessed
son quite intolerable, and, if nothing else were possible, I would
almost certainly run away from him, emigrate, as you never meant to
do until I intended to marry. So I might have been partly influenced
by that too in my unfitness for marriage.
But a more important factor there is my anxiety for myself. To be
understood like this: I have already suggested that in my writing and
the things connected to it I have made small attempts at independ-
ence, attempts at flight, with the smallest success. They are hardly
going to lead anywhere I have a great deal of evidence for that.
Nevertheless it is my responsibility to watch over them or rather,
that is what my life consists in: in preventing any danger it is in my
power to avert even the possibility of such a danger from
approaching them. Marriage is the possibility of such a danger; true,
it is also the possibility of the greatest support, but it is enough for
me that it is the possibility of such a danger. What would I do if it
were a danger after all! How could I go on living in a marriage and
sense this danger, unprovable perhaps, but in any case undeniable!
Faced with this, it is true I am capable of wavering, but the final
outcome is certain: I must do without it. The proverb of the bird in
the hand and the two in the bush applies here only in the remotest
degree. In my hand I have nothing: in the bush, everything there is.
But even so for this is how the conditions of my struggle and the
needs of my life decide it I am bound to choose the nothing.
Similarly, I was bound to choose the profession I did.
But the most important impediment to marriage was my ingrained
conviction that to maintain, let alone to guide, a family necessarily
requires all those things I have acknowledged in you, that is, all of
them together, the good and the bad, as they are organically united
in you. I mean strength and contempt for the other, good health and
a certain excess, readiness of speech and unapproachability, self-
confidence and dissatisfaction with everyone else, superiority over
the world and tyranny, knowledge of human nature and mistrust of
most human beings, and then again qualities without any drawbacks
to them such as hard work, stamina, quick wits, fearlessness. In com-
parison, I had almost nothing, or very little, of all these, and was it
138 Letter to his Father
with this I wanted to risk marrying, when at the same time I could
see that even you had to struggle hard in your marriage, and with
your children even failed? Of course I didn t expressly ask myself
this question, and I didn t expressly answer it, otherwise common
sense would have dealt with the matter and pointed to other men
who are not like you (to name one near at hand who is very different
from you: Uncle Richard*), and in spite of that have still married,
and at least haven t gone to pieces under it which is already a great
deal, and would have been more than enough for me. But I simply
didn t ask this question, for it had been my life from childhood on.
I wasn t examining myself simply in respect of marriage, but in
respect of every little thing; and in respect of every little thing you
convinced me by example and by upbringing, just as I have been try-
ing to describe it, of my unfitness. And what was true for every little
thing, and put you in the right, was of course bound to be true of the
greatest thing: marriage. Until my attempts at marrying, I had grown
up rather like a businessman who, for all his worries and foreboding,
does not keep strict accounts, living from one day to the next. He
makes a few small profits, which are so rare that he is constantly
nursing them, exaggerating them in his imagination, but otherwise
he makes only daily losses. Everything is entered, but never bal-
anced. Now comes the time when he is compelled to balance the
books, that is, my attempt to marry. And with the huge sums that
have to be reckoned with then, it is as if the smallest profit had never
been, and everything was one single great debt owing. And now
marry, without going mad!
So ends my life with you up until now, and such are the prospects
it bears within it for the future.
You might, if you view the reasons I have given for my fear of you,
reply: You maintain I am making things easy for myself when
I explain my relationship to you simply by putting the blame on you.
But for my part, I believe that in spite of all your apparent efforts,
you are at least making it no harder for yourself, indeed far more to
your advantage. In the first place you too disclaim any guilt or
responsibility on your part so in that respect we are proceeding in
the same way. But whereas I then ascribe the sole guilt to you as
frankly as I mean it, you try to be too clever for your own good and
at the same time too caring for your own good and absolve me
of all guilt too. Of course, you are only seemingly successful in this
Letter to his Father 139
(and you re not aiming for more than that, are you?), and it emerges
between the lines, in spite of all your fine phrases about nature and
contraries and helplessness, that really I have been the aggressor,
while everything you have done was only self-defence. So by your
bad faith you might have achieved enough to satisfy you by now, for
you have proved three things: first that you are innocent, secondly
that I am guilty, and thirdly that out of sheer magnanimity you are
not only prepared to forgive me, but also which is both more and
less on top of that even prove and even want to believe yourself
that I, though it is contrary to the truth, am innocent too. That
should already be enough to satisfy you, but it is not enough for you
yet. For you have got it into your head to try to live off me to the last
drop. I grant, we fight each other, but there are two kinds of fighting.
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