Page:Karl Gjellerup - Minna, A novel - 1913.djvu/345

 much. I once said to you jokingly that if I wanted to kill my reason, it would be through piano-playing. Perhaps I really have tried mentally to take my life through this heavenly poison.

"Had I seen any light, had I known what I am now aware of, surely I should have spared myself more."

"2nd May.

"I wish I knew really what you think of death. Do you believe in a reunion? It is difficult to realise, still, I cannot understand that my own self should quite vanish. I often think of old Hertz, whom I have heard talking about the soul and immortality on many different occasions. As it was, in the main, the doctrine of his beloved Kant (or so I understood), it is no great wonder if I, poor unlearned creature as I was and am, should not have mastered it at all. Nevertheless, it struck me deeply at that time, and in later days the mystic lore he was so fond of has recurred to me in many a lonely and desolate hour. One sentence, and I trust, the very one fitted to be the key to this whole train of thought, has stamped itself upon my memory almost word for word, because Hertz used to recapitulate it on every possible occasion, with many variations, to be sure, but it always came to this: 'What we call Self is not Self as it is in reality (only for this he had a queer phrase, 'in itself,' I think), but only as it appears in our sense-consciousness.' Now, over this sentence I have pondered many and many a time in my own stupid way, because I wanted very badly to know what my self in reality was, hoping that it might turn out to be something better than what I did know of myself. And often I have fancied that that which I do not know of myself, because it does not appear in the little dim mirror of consciousness, and that