7
In that I thus lack all spiritual contact, must renounce every artistic enjoyment — I miss music most painfully — I feel myself ever more constricted; the more I live on familiar terms with everyone here, must live and cannot live otherwise, since no one here represents a principle in such a way that a tension with him would be worth the trouble, the more isolated I feel. But precisely by lacking all other elevations and stimulations and being thrown back upon myself in my isolation, my scientific development is accelerated, and at the moment when I am for the first time cast into a foreign world and moreover set myself in the most insane harmony with everything, I have at once brought my position inwardly to a decisiveness, to a decisiveness which runs directly counter to the rest of my previous presuppositions. Alongside my other works, the second edition of the Philosophy of Religion, I shall in all quietness work out the book on John.
8
No impression from outside, no spiritual movement beside me, no opposition, nothing antithetical around me: that is splendid, glorious, at least for one period of life; for me this moment has come precisely at the right time: that will also take from my style its stiffness, its antithetical monotony.....