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Vienna, Thursday
June 19, 1884
My beloved treasure
I can't remember ever having been so rushed, otherwise I would have answered all your sweet, good letters with long pages of explanation; but as it is I have to be brief today, too; after all, I hope we will soon be able to talk.
Coca1 wasn't finished till last night; the first half has already been corrected today; it will be 1 1/2 sheets long; the few gulden I have earned by it I had to subtract from my pupil, whom I sent away yesterday and today. Now there is still the correction of a second paper;2 in addition I have to give electrical treatments, read, and work at the Journal, but I am as strong as a lion, gay and cheerful, and you can well imagine that this isn't the mood in which to drop everything and become a male nurse to a mental case.3
My beloved girl, you must utterly banish from your mind gloomy thoughts such as that you are hindering me from earning a living. After all, you know the key to my life: that I can work only when spurred on by great hopes for things uppermost in my mind. Before I met you I didn't know the joy of living, and now that “in principle” you are mine, to have you completely is the one condition I make to life, which I otherwise don't set any great store by. I am very stubborn and very reckless and need great challenges; I have done a number of things which any sensible person would be bound to consider very rash. For example, to take up science as a poverty-stricken man, then as a poverty-stricken man to capture a poor girl-but this must continue to be my way of life: risking a lot, hoping a lot, working a lot. To average bourgeois common sense I have been lost long ago. And now I am supposed not to see you for three months-and this in addition to our uncertain circumstances, and with people as unpredictable as our families! In three months Eli may be in Hamburg, or the situation in my family may prevent me from leaving. In short, I know nothing about the future. I daren't count on i