A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN TWO CORNBRS
a feeling as imperious as the feeling of hunger or pain. I am not
passing judgment on culture, I am only testifying: I feel stifled in it.
Like Rousseau, I have a dim vision of a state of bliss-of full free–
dom and lightness of spirit, of a carefree par.adise. I know too much,
and the burden of what I know weighs upon me. This knowledge–
it is not I who have acquired it through living experience; it is gene–
ral and alien, inherited from forefathers and ancestors; it has pene–
trated into my mind by tempting me with demonstrability, and
filled it. And because it is general, supraindividually demonstrated, its
indisputability freezes my soul. Countless proven facts entangled me
all around, like millions of unbreakable threads, all of them imper–
sonal, all of them irrefutable, inescapable to the point of horror.
And of what use are they to me? An immense number of them
I do not need at all. I do not need them in love and suffering, it is
not thanks to them that I slowly grasp my destiny amidst fatal errors
and unexpected achievements, and I certainly shall not recall them
at the hour of death. But, like refuse, they litter my mind, they are
there at every moment of my life, and stand like a dusty curtain be–
tween me and my joy, my pain, each of my thoughts. It is from this
endless impersonal knowledge, from the countless memorized theories,
truths, hypotheses, rules of logic, and moral laws, from all this load
of amassed intellectual riches with which every one of us is laden, that
the gnawing exhaustion comes. Recall just this-the theory of the
thing in itself and the phenomenon. The great Kant discovered that
we know nothing about the thing itself, and that all characteristics of
it that we perceive are our representations. Schopenhauer consolidated
this truth, having clearly demonstrated that we are completely in–
closed in ourselves and have no means of crossing the boundaries
of our consciousness or of making contact with the world. The thing
in itself is unknowable; in perceiving the world we perceive only
phenomena and the laws of our intellect; we only imagine or dream
the outside world; it does not exist at all, and our perceiving ap–
paratus is the only reality.
This discovery was logically irrefutable. The truth blazed forth
like light in the night, and consciousness unquestioningly had to
submit to it. The greatest revolution took place in men's minds:
things, people, I myself as a creature, in brief, all reality, formerly so
solid and so tangible, everything suddenly rose a foot in the air and
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