Ludwig Fulda

“ The janitress shines my shoes and brings me my meals from a restaurant. The food is dreadful. As you say it is quite impossible to get anybody half-way decent before Christmas or New Year. However, I have written to a dozen employment bureaus, and will go to them myself as soon as my health permits.
This has turned out to be quite a long letter, dear Emma. When a man's heart is full, his pen runs away with him.
I have a suspicion, too, that that infamous cook of a woman has gotten away with my gold cuff buttons—an heirloom from my uncle Frederick. ”

“ The chief bar to the action of imagination, and stop to all greatness in this present age of ours, is its mean and shallow love of jest; so that if there be in any good and lofty work a flaw, failing, or undipped vulnerable part, where sarcasms may stick or stay, it is caught at, and pointed at, and buzzed about, and fixed upon, and stung into, as a recent wound is by flies; and nothing is ever taken seriously or as it was meant, but always, if it may be, turned the wrong-way, and misunderstood: and while this is so, there is not, nor cannot be, any hope of achievement of high things ”

“ Not only do murder and war destroy cultural values without substituting others in their place, not only do the countless conflicts which take place between the different nations and political organizations act anticulturally, but so do also the conflicts between the various social classes of one nation, for they destroy quantities of free energy which are thus withdrawn from the total of real cultural values. At present mankind is in a state of development in which progress depends much less upon the leadership of a few distinguished individuals than upon the collective labor of all workers. ”

“ If we had not loved each other so much before, if we had not continued to respect each other so much, we might perhaps have endured such a condition for several years more. But we both had too high a conception of marriage, too lively a sense of human dignity to be content with an imperfect makeshift. ”

“ Habit is a mighty force, especially with men who—like you and myself—live in an intellectual world and require a solid foundation for it. For how can we survey the world from the height of the tower, unless the foundation of the tower is sure? ”

“ Thus we are living at a time when men are gradually approximating one another very closely in their natures, and when the social organization therefore demands and strives for as thorough an equalization as possible in the conditions of existence of all men.—Ostwald's Natural Philosophy. ”

“ Lina, of course, hasn't the faintest idea where it is. When I dared to suggest in the gentlest tone in the world that she ought to know, she became impertinent. She is going to leave to-morrow. I prefer to let her have her wages until her time is up, including a Christmas gift, as I do not want to live under the same roof with such a good-for-nothing, impudent person.
Well then—please be good enough to let me know where the receipt is. I caught a good cold for lack of my fur coat. I hope you are well and found your family all right. Max. ”

“ Emma Wiegand to Professor Max Wiegand
Freiburg, December 23, 1909. Dear Max:
Your description of the little unpleansantness you had with the cook struck a responsive chord in me. She often told me much worse things than she told you, but I swallowed everything, because her cooking was good. It is only the incompetents that are polite. With cooks the degree of their impudence is a fair measure of their efficiency. ”

“ I, too, served you faithfully, and you never saw it. I never let the fire go out in your home. It is not my fault if you could not get your home warm again.
Who knows whether you would have noticed the gap which my departure left if you had not happened to miss your fur coat. It was that which made you start to write to me. It seems to me only logical that now that you have happily gotten your fur coat back again, we should terminate our correspondence. I at least have nothing more to say.
Goodby—forever,
Emma. ”

“ But you forget what it means to be separated from a person whom you have always had at your side day and night for eleven years. I myself have only gradually come to realize it in the course of the few weeks that I have lived alone. ”

“ As to the furrier's receipt and your cuff buttons, I wager I could find both in five minutes. You remember how often you would hunt for something high and low without being able to find it, and I would put my hand on it in an instant. Men can find a new truth now and then, but never an old button.
Since we have started a correspondence—at your inititative—I should like to ask you for something. ”

“ Now at least you can see with what sort of things I had to cope year in, year out, and you have found out for yourself that in this sphere as in others, there are problems that all the sciences cannot solve. ”

“ It will put this case into one of the two or three pigeonholes which it keeps ready-made for every event, because it does not understand that life with its inexhaustible manifold variety never repeats itself and that even one and the same situation can assume infinitely diverse aspects according to the character of the dramatis personæ. ”

“ Proof of this is that it is coming to be more and more the fact that the great scientific discoveries are made simultaneously bv a number of independent investigators—an indication that society creates in several places the individual conditions requisite for such discoveries. ”