“He would have deserved more, much more. Most of humanity, however, are incorrigible blockheads, full of fussy prejudice and false modesty. After a while even he was attacked. It was mainly the poets who plotted against him, those cantankerous crackpots who pretend to be apostles, but if two get together they flay the hide off a third; the poets, who sing of purity but avoid even the vicinity of the bathroom; the poets, who beg everyone, even beggars, at street-corners for just a little fame, just a little affection, just a little statue, beg mortals for immortality; those light-minded, jealous, wan exhibitionists who will sell their souls for a rhyme or an epithet, set out their innermost secrets for sale, turn to profit the deaths of their fathers, mothers, and children and in later years, in the ‘night of inspiration,’ dig up their graves, open their coffins, and rummage for ‘experiences’ by the dark lantern of vanity like grave robbers after gold teeth and jewels, then confess and snivel, those necrophiles, those fishwives. Forgive me, but I loathe them. There in Darmstadt, in my youth, I came to loathe them. They couldn’t abide that elevated president. And they had reason. They, who in their nauseating verse described themselves, without any basis, as ‘knights of dreams’ and ‘dreamers of dreams,’ envied that noble old man who was a dreamer in the strict sense of the word. They played interminable tasteless, malicious jokes on him. They said that after all those years he was satisfying his need for sleep in front of the biggest audience that he could find, like a hunger artist starving in an officially sealed glass cage in the public view. They said that he never took off his pince-nez during sessions just so as to be able to see the images more clearly in his dreams, because he was so shortsighted that he wouldn’t even be able to see dream images and would wake up out of boredom. They said that since he’d been active in the sphere of public life, that fine proverb ‘Life is a brief dream’ had lost its meaning, because life now seemed a very long dream. I clasped my hands together and begged them for mercy and clemency. I emphasized that even the most outstanding persons have some little shortcoming which we must disregard because of their other qualities. I quoted Horace at them too. Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.* To which they replied that that was quite right, but the president didn’t just nod but slept all the time, and was incapable of anything else.
“I struggled desperately. The rising flood, however, soon threatened to cover everything. Sometimes the poets’ anger would appear publicly in a humorous publication or in a hostile article. They hated him. What was the reason? Well, probably their pompous-mawkish outlook. The very ones who deliberately lived their lives on a dunghill just so a few colorful toadstools should grow there could not endure that purity, that mighty, peerless quality of leadership, that irreproachable genius. While he was peacefully asleep in the presidential chair they saw all kinds of nightmares — without reason, naturally, because their view was always distorted, their judgment always clouded. They thought of the helmsman of a ship, overcome by sleep at the wheel while the ship ran onto an iceberg. They thought of the railwayman snoring beside the switch box while behind his back the skeleton grinned as it directed the train to thunder to its fate on the wrong track. What false perceptions, what lame comparisons. The ship and the train must of course be taken care of. They are physical entities. Harm could result if they collided with others. But I ask you, what harm could come to science and literature? I ask you, whom or what did that harmless, honorable president injure by sleeping, worn out by his manifold activities? I ask you, wasn’t he rather beneficial to everything and everybody? I think I’m right.
“It has been my experience, at least, that in public life peace and harmony can be maintained only if we let things take their course and don’t interfere with the eternal laws of life. These don’t depend on our wishes, so we can do virtually nothing to alter them. The president’s high-minded sleep, overarching opposition, gave expression to this. All the disorder on this earth has arisen from the desire of some to create order, all the filth from the fact that some have swept up. Make no mistake, the real curse in this world is planning, and true happiness the lack of it, the spontaneous, the capricious. I’ll give you an example. I was the first to arrive here. For a few minutes I was all alone in the private room of the Torpedo. In came Berta, the bakery girl. I bought a császárzsemle* from her and kissed her on the lips. A second before I had no idea that I would do that. Nor had she. So it was beautiful. Nobody had planned that kiss. If kisses are planned they turn into marriage and duties, become sour and insipid. Wars and revolutions too are planned, and that’s why they’re so dreadfully hideous and vile. A stabbing in the street, the murder of a wife or husband, the massacre of a whole family, is much more humane. Planning kills literature too — the formation of cliques, the guild system, in-house criticism which writes ‘a few warm lines’ about the in-house sacred cow. Whereas the writer that scribbles his never-to-be-published verses on an iron table by the washroom in the coffeehouse is always a saint. Examples show that those who have dragged mankind into misfortune, blood, and filth have been those who were enthusiastic about public affairs, took their mission seriously, burned the midnight oil passionately and respectably, whereas the benefactors of humanity have been those who minded their own business, shunned responsibility, took no interest, and slept. The trouble’s not that the world has been guided with too little wisdom. The trouble is that it has been guided at all.
“Don’t be surprised, my friends, at hearing such profound philosophizing from me on this occasion, because I’m much happier with frivolous talk. I learned it from the man from whom I’ve learnt more than from anyone else in my life, my loved and respected mentor and preceptor, but he never taught me anything, merely slept all the time. He was wisdom itself. Those piffling, snotty, unkempt poets, who spoke of him so disparagingly, had no idea how wise he was. What had he not seen, what did he not know! He’d seen tendencies appear and disappear without trace. He’d seen the greatest writers in Germany become the least overnight and new poets suddenly go out of fashion — for no apparent reason, in just a few minutes, while they were shaving at home, not suspecting a thing. He’d welcomed geniuses who later rotted on straw in stables, and he’d condemned and officially denounced the false doctrines of charlatans in the cultural association under his direction, then a couple of years later endorsed those doctrines in the cultural association under his direction, and consequently later even taught them at the university. He knew that everything was hopelessly relative, and that there was no reliable means of assessment. He also knew that people generally disagreed through conflicts of interest, protested solemnly against things, but then generally solemnly retracted, made peace, and that the deadly enemies of yesteryear walked arm-in-arm in the corridors of the Germania and sat whispering on velvet couches in alcoves. Once he’d discovered that, nothing surprised him again. He had a wonderful knowledge of people and life, which would always sort itself out somehow, one should just not worry about it. What else can anyone so wise do but sleep? Put your hands on your hearts and tell me, can there be a better place for sleeping than in public, on the presidential dais, on which, like a bier, candles flicker, and there is a comfortable, imposing, presidential armchair? I tell you, he did indeed sleep out of wisdom, patience, insight, mature, manly contemplation, and therefore relied on the capricious and unexpected, and permitted the ship or train of science and literature to speed freely ahead.