s a whole or
in parts, I can never look back upon without a great deal of inward
amusement, a little melancholy, and considerable self-satisfaction.
Still, as a refined lover and writer, I will endeavor to refashion the
coarse occurrence and adapt it to my purpose. For me and for this
book, however, for my love of it and for its inner development, there
is no better adaptation of means to ends than this, namely, that right
at the start I begin by abolishing what we call orderly arrangement,
keep myself entirely aloof from it, frankly claiming and asserting the
right to a charming confusion. This is all the more necessary,
inasmuch as the material which our life and love offers to my spirit
and to my pen is so incessantly progressive and so inflexibly
systematic. If the form were also of that character, this, in its way,
unique letter would then acquire an intolerable unity and monotony,
and would no longer produce the desired effect, namely, to fashion and
complete a most lovely chaos of sublime harmonies and interesting
pleasures. So I use my incontestable right to a confused style by
inserting here, in the wrong place, one of the many incoherent sheets
which I once filled with rubbish, and which you, good creature,
carefully preserved without my knowing it. It was written in a mood of
impatient longing, due to my not finding you where I most surely
expected to find you--in your room, on our sofa--in the haphazard
words suggested by the pen you had lately been using.

The selection is not difficult. For since, among the dreamy fancies
which are here confided to you in permanent letters, the recollection
of this most beautiful world is the most significant, and has a
certain sort of resemblance to what they call thought, I choose in
preference to anything else a dithyrambic fantasy on the most lovely
of situations. For once we know to a certainty that we live in a most
beautiful world, the next need is obvious, namely, to inform ourselves
fully, either through ourselves or through others, about the most
lovely situation in this most beautiful world.

DITHYRAMBIC FANTASY ON THE LOVELIEST OF SITUATIONS

A big tear falls upon the holy sheet which I found here instead of
you. How faithfully and how simply you have sketched it, the old and
daring idea of my dearest and most intimate purpose! In you it has
grown up, and in this mirror I do not shrink from loving and admiring
myself. Only here I see myself in harmonious c