Lost Son. Hermann Broch

no “eternal values,” or as philosophy terms it, nothing “absolute.” Since your “I” is totally alone, however, it has to create all these beautiful things for itself: and in fact the human spirit has done exactly that. For all the truth one can experience, all the beauty, every value, in short, all “reality,” has been created by the mind itself. It’s reality that the stars move in elliptical paths, but to find them, or rather, to invent them, required the mind of Kepler. Even just to recognize the beauty of nature, let alone imitate it, required thousands of years of intellectual effort.

       So it is the task of the “I,” insofar as it yearns for absolute truth and absolute value (out of this fear of death), to constantly create anew its own reality, and to constantly expand it. The human mind of course will never grasp the final truth about the world and life, for “to know all would mean to be God.” But what makes all value-creating work rewarding is that it allows us, makes it possible in the first place for us to approach this ultimate goal. Even learning in itself is a part of this reward, because it keeps enlarging the breadth of reality available to the learning “I”; and if it is ever your fate to accomplish productive, value-creating work of your own, in the artistic, scientific, or whatever other field it may be, then you will experience a joy, a joyousness that will make it clear to you that the idea of death, even more than that, death itself can at least partially if not wholly be overcome. The founders of the great religions were not idiots in preaching the doctrine of eternal life: as philosophers, they created their own personal immortality from within themselves. Granted, this doesn’t mean that they are flitting around heaven as little angels with harps or pianos, or that they are wandering about the earth as spirits whom we can lure into saying “hello” to us at spiritualist séances, but that the individual human being, the single “I” looking out from within himself, can overcome death.

       I do not know if this is all too difficult for you, or whether I have already said too much. But you can always ask questions. Still, if you think about all this, and think about it seriously, you won’t lose your way. The most important thing for you to know is that every possibility is open to you, that your are getting the kind of education that will enable you to direct the rest of your life in any and every direction. That is why I keep pushing you to be as well prepared as possible in the sciences as in sports or the more practical subjects such as languages, etc. For that reason I don’t wish you to give up your sketching, either.

       This letter has gotten terribly long; I will write you again tomorrow. I am out of time for today. Grandpapa is quite seriously ill, Dr. Langer is on a business trip, and you can imagine that I am doubly overworked. Grandmama also has an awful lot to do caring for him; she and Grandpapa send their very best to you. Your letter was of course confidential, I did not even show it to Mama. And I didn’t tell her anything about your injury, so as not to upset her.

       That’s all for now, more tomorrow. P.

      [KW13/1, 64–67]

      HELLO, OLD BOY: There is a draft of this letter, written on February 5, 1925, which was never sent.

      STILL, YOUR LETTER PLEASED ME: this letter is lost, as were many of Armand’s to his father.

      VALUES: Broch was then working on a formal value theory, the results of which, fitted to the plot, he integrated into the third volume of his trilogy The Sleepwalkers, under the title “The Disintegration of Values.”

      THINKING “I”: Broch is trying to clarify certain basic positions of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Broch had already studied Husserl’s Logical Investigations (Halle, 1913, 2nd edition).

      KEPLER: Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), the German astronomer, discovered planetary movements, later named for him, and disproved the idea that planetary orbits were necessarily circular.

      “TO KNOW ALL”: Alludes to Genesis 3:5.

      YOUR SKETCHING: Armand had already taken drawing lessons in the school at Traiskirchen. While at the Collège de Normandie, he most liked drawing cars.

      DR. LANGER: Fritz Langer was a member of the managing board of the Teesdorf factory.