SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
captain of a merchant vessel
He was the captain of a merchant vessel; a clever, good-hearted boy, but restless and nervous, irresolute and unhappy, like his father. «He has the misfortune to resemble me in everything,» said Berlioz; «and we love each other like a couple of twins.»[33] «Ah, my poor Louis,» he wrote to him, «what should I do without you?» A few months afterwards he learnt that Louis had died in far-away seas.
He was now alone.[34] There were no more friendly voices; all that he heard was a hideous duet between loneliness and weariness, sung in his ear during the bustle of the day and in the silence of the night.[35] He was wasted with disease. In 1856, at Weimar, following great fatigue, he was seized with an internal malady. It began with great mental distress; he used to sleep in the streets. He suffered constantly; he was like «a tree without leaves, streaming with rain.» At the end of 1861, the disease was in an acute stage. He had attacks of pain sometimes lasting thirty hours, during which he would writhe in agony in his bed. «I live in the midst of my physical pain, overwhelmed with weariness. Death is very slow.»[36]
[Footnote 33: Mémoires, II, 420.]
[Footnote 34: «I do not know how Berlioz has managed to be cut off like this. He has neither friends nor followers; neither the warm sun of popularity nor the pleasant shade of friendship» (Liszt to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 16 May, 1861).]
[Footnote 35: In a letter to Bennet he says, «I am weary, I am weary….» How often does this piteous cry sound in his letters towards the end of his life. «I feel I am going to die…. I am weary unto death» (21 August, 1868–six months before his death).]
[Footnote 36: Letter to Asger Hammerick, 1865.]
Worst of all, in the heart of his misery, there was nothing that comforted him. He believed in nothing–neither in God nor immortality.
«I have no faith…. I hate all philosophy and everything that resembles it, whether religious or otherwise…. I am as incapable of making a medicine of faith as of having faith in medicine.»[37]
«God is stupid and cruel in his complete indifference.»[38]
He did not believe in beauty or honour, in mankind or himself.
«Everything passes. Space and time consume beauty, youth, love, glory, genius. Human life is nothing; death is no better. Worlds are born and die like ourselves. All is nothing. Yes, yes, yes! All is nothing…. To love or hate, enjoy or suffer, admire or sneer, live or die–what does it matter? There is nothing in greatness or littleness, beauty or ugliness. Eternity is indifferent; indifference is eternal.»[39]
«I am weary of life; and I am forced to see that belief in absurdities is necessary to human minds, and that it is born in them as insects are born in swamps.»[40]
[Footnote 37: Letters to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 22 July, 21 September, 1862; and August, 1864.]
[Footnote 38: Mémoires, II, 335. He shocked Mendelssohn, and even Wagner, by his irreligion. (See Berlioz’s letter to Wagner, 10 September, 1855.)]
[Footnote 39: Les Grotesques de la Musique, pp. 295-6.]
[Footnote 40: Letter to the Abbé Girod. See Hippeau, Berlioz intime, p. 434.]
this was: Captain Of A Merchant Vessel
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