United States or Lebanon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The cool night air felt refreshing after the heat of the small room. Dorfling declined the offers his friends made to accompany him home. They all wished him "Farewell." "Die well, would be a better wish," replied Dorfling, and with these strange words in their ears they left him. Schrotter and Wilhelm went a part of the way with Paul, who had the furthest to go.
The father died, and Dorfling hastened to put the business into liquidation, and devote himself to philosophical studies. For a year he drifted from one school to another, sitting at the feet of the most celebrated teachers and plunging himself into their systems. In the autumn of 1872 he appeared suddenly in Berlin, and renewed his old acquaintance with Wilhelm.
While he spoke he took away the bottle, and Barinskoi tried to get it back again; a little struggle ensued. Dorfling put an end to it by an emphatic "Please don't do that." Turning to Wilhelm he went on: "I do not believe in your idea of duty; you place instinct at the foundation. I use another word.
You had every right to it, having made it the object of your life." "Not the object of my life," interrupted Dorfling. "The only object I have in life is death, which I call deliverance." "Very good; I will say then, when you conceived it your duty to write it." "'Duty' yes, I will allow that word to pass. Let us rather say impulse, or instinct.
"Over this, however, is placed the creation of the negation arriving at the consciousness of its own 'ego, in addition to the knowledge of the object it has in view; thus consciousness precedes the rest," said Wilhelm. Dorfling shook his head. "These objections are close reasoning. You will find them answered in the book."
Since then he had become a frequent guest at Dr. Schrotter's dinner table, and a companion to Wilhelm, in his afternoon walks. Dorfling was the most wonderful listener that any one could wish to have, though he himself was rather silent.
One day, soon after the Easter of 1874, Dorfling brought his friends a great piece of news. The book was ready, it was even in the press, and would be published in a few days by a large firm, but he wanted to present them with copies before the book appeared at the shops. He therefore invited them to a little festival to celebrate the occasion.
This man was, like Dorfling, a Rhinelander, he combined a successful career as a writer of comic verses with a confirmed pessimism. When he had written one of his merriest couplets, he would stop his work and sigh with Dorfling over the tragedy of life. The papers treated his farces as rubbish, but the public adored them.
"That is the remark of a philosopher," said Barinskoi, and poked his pointed red nose in the savory steam from his soup. "It is difficult to tear oneself away," said Schrotter; "it would be very friendly of you to give an idea of the thoughts at the foundation of your thesis." "How could I explain a whole system intelligibly in a few words?" said Dorfling.
He now opened a drawer of his writing-table, took out a yellow envelope in which Schrotter was in the habit of giving him, on the first of every month, fifteen hundred marks out of the Dorfling bequest, and handed the sum which he had received the day before, and was still unbroken, to the workingmen's leader. The man turned over the three five-hundred-mark notes, and then looked up startled.
Word Of The Day