I was allowed to lunch at this uncle’s house every Thursday. I was grateful to him not only for the lunch but for the unique opportunity of occasionally hearing at his table an adult, intelligent, and intellectual conversation. It was a marvellous experience for me to discover that anything of this sort existed at all, for in my home surroundings I had never heard anyone discussing learned topics. I did sometimes attempt to talk seriously with my father, but encountered an impatience and anxious defensiveness which puzzled me. Not until several years later did I come to understand that my poor father did not dare to think, because he was consumed by inward doubts. He was taking refuge from himself and therefore insisted on blind faith. He could not receive it as a grace because he wanted to “win it by struggle,” forcing it to come with convulsive efforts.
My uncle and my cousins could calmly discuss the dogmas and doctrines of the Church Fathers and the opinions of modern theologians. They seemed safely ensconced in a self-evident world order, in which the name of Nietzsche did not occur at all and Jakob Burckhardt was paid only a grudging compliment. Burckhardt was “liberal,” “rather too much of a freethinker”; I gathered that he stood somewhat askew in the eternal order of things. My uncle, I knew, never suspected how remote I was from theology, and I was deeply sorry to have to disappoint him. I would never have dared to lay my problems before him, since I knew only too well how disastrously this would turn out for me. I had nothing to say in my defence. On the contrary, No. 1 personality was fast taking the lead, and my scientific knowledge, though still meagre, was thoroughly saturated with the scientific materialism of the time. It was only painfully held in check by the evidence of history and by Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which apparently nobody in my environment understood. For although Kant was mentioned by my theologian uncle and cousins in tones of praise, his principles were used only to discredit opposing views but were never applied to their own. About this, too, I said nothing.
Consequently, I began to feel more and more uncomfortable when I sat down to table with my uncle and his family. Given my habitually guilty conscience, these Thursdays became black days for me. In this world of social and spiritual security and ease I felt less and less at home, although I thirsted for the drops of intellectual stimulation which occasionally trickled forth. I felt dishonest and ashamed. I had to admit to myself: “Yes, you are a cheat; you lie and deceive people who mean well by you. It’s not their fault that they live in a world of social and intellectual certitudes, that they know nothing of poverty, that their religion is also their paid profession, that they are totally unconscious of the fact that God Himself can wrench a person out of his orderly spiritual world and condemn him to blaspheme. I have no way of explaining this to them. I must take the odium on myself and learn to bear it.” Unfortunately, I had so far been singularly unsuccessful in this endeavour.
As the tensions of this moral conflict increased, No. 2 personality became more and more doubtful and distasteful to me, and I could no longer hide this fact from myself. I tried to extinguish No. 2, but could not succeed in that either. At school and in the presence of my friends I could forget him, and he also disappeared when I was studying science. But as soon as I was by myself, at home or out in the country, Schopenhauer and Kant returned in full force, and with them the grandeur of “God’s world.” My scientific knowledge also formed a part of it, and filled the great canvas with vivid colours and figures. Then No. 1 and his worries about the choice of a profession sank below the horizon, a tiny episode in the last decade of the nineteenth century. But when I returned from my expedition into the centuries, I brought with me a kind of hangover. I, or rather No. 1, lived in the here and now, and sooner or later would have to form a definite idea of what profession he wished to pursue.
Several times my father had a serious talk with me. I was free to study anything I liked, he said, but if I wanted his advice I should keep away from theology. “Be anything you like except a theologian,” he said emphatically. By this time there was a tacit agreement between us that certain things could be said or done without comment. He had never taken me to task for cutting church as often as possible and for not going to Communion any more. The farther away I was from church, the better I felt. The only things I missed were the organ and the choral music, but certainly not the “religious community.” The phrase meant nothing to me at all, for the habitual churchgoers struck me as being far less of a community than the “worldly” folk. The latter may have been less virtuous, but on the other hand they were much nicer people, with natural emotions, more sociable and cheerful, warmer-hearted and more sincere.
I was able to reassure my father that I had not the slightest desire to be a theologian. But I continued to waver between science and the humanities. Both powerfully attracted me. I was beginning to realise that No. 2 had no pied-à-terre. In him I was lifted beyond the here and now; in him I felt myself a single eye in a thousand-eyed universe, but incapable of moving so much as a pebble upon the earth. No. 1 rebelled against this passivity; he wanted to be up and doing, but for the present he was caught in an insoluble conflict. Obviously I had to wait and see what would happen. If anyone asked me what I wanted to be I was in the habit of replying: a philologist, by which I secretly meant Assyrian and Egyptian archæology. In reality, however, I continued to study science and philosophy in my leisure hours, and particularly during the holidays, which I spent at home with my mother and sister. The days were long past when I ran to my mother, lamenting, “I’m bored, I don’t know what to do.” Holidays were now the best time of the year, when I could amuse myself alone. Moreover, during the summer vacations at least, my father was away, as he used regularly to spend his holidays in Sachseln.
Only once did it happen that I too went on a vacation trip. I was fourteen when, on our doctor’s orders, I was sent to Entlebuch for a cure, in the hope that my fitful appetite and my then unstable health would be improved. For the first time I was alone among adult strangers. I was quartered in the Catholic priest’s house. For me this was an eerie and at the same time fascinating adventure. I seldom got a glimpse of the priest himself, and his housekeeper was scarcely an alarming person, though liable to be curt. Nothing in the least menacing happened to me. I was under the supervision of an old country doctor who ran a kind of hotel-sanatorium for convalescents of all types. It was a very mixed group: farm people, minor officials, merchants, and a few cultivated people from Basel, among them a chemist who had attained that pinnacle of glory, the doctorate. My father, too, was a Ph.D., but he was merely a philologist and linguist. This chemist was a fascinating novelty to me: here was a scientist, perhaps one of those who understood the secrets of stones. He was still a young man and taught me to play croquet, but he imparted to me none of his presumably vast learning. And I was too shy, too awkward, and far too ignorant to ask him. I revered him as the first person I had ever met in the flesh who was initiated into the secrets of nature, or some of them, at least. He sat at the same table with me, ate the same food as I did, and occasionally even exchanged a few words with me. I felt transported into the sublimer sphere of adulthood. This elevation in my status was confirmed when I was permitted to go on the outings arranged for the boarders. On one of these occasions we visited a distillery, and were invited to sample their wares. In literal fulfilment of the verse:
But now there comes a kicker,
This stuff, you see, is liquor6
I found the various little glasses so inspiring that I was wafted into an entirely new and unexpected state of consciousness. There was no longer any inside or outside, no longer an “I” and the “others,” No. 1 and No. 2 were no more; caution and timidity were gone, and the earth and sky, the universe and everything in it that creeps and flies, revolves, rises, or falls, had all become one. I was shamefully, gloriously, triumphantly drunk. It was as if I were drowned in a sea of blissful musings, but, because of the violent heaving of the waves, had to cling with eyes, hands, and feet to all solid objects in order to keep my balance on the swaying streets and between the rocking houses and trees. “Marvellous,” I thought, “only unfortunately just a little too much.” The experience came to a rather woeful end, but it nevertheless remained a discovery, a premonition of beauty and meaning which I had spoiled only by my stupidity.
At the end of my stay my father came to fetch me, and we travelled
