The society of others tortures me, and I
avoid it only to torture myself. Everything I do fills me with
disgust. It can't go on for ever. I can't stand such a life any
longer. I will kill myself rather than live like this.... I don't
believe in anything, and I have only one desire--to sleep so
soundly that human misery will exist no more for me. I ought to be
able to get such a sleep somehow; it should not be really
difficult."
For distraction he went to Italy; Turin, Genoa, Spezia, and Nice. But
there, in a strange world, his loneliness seemed so frightful that he
became very depressed, and made all haste back to Zurich. It was there
he wrote the happy music of _Das Rheingold_. He began the score of _Die
Walkuere_ at a time when his normal condition was one of suffering. Then
he discovered Schopenhauer, whose philosophy only helped to confirm and
crystallise his instinctive pessimism. In the spring of 1855 he went to
London to give concerts; but he was ill there, and this fresh contact
with the world only served to annoy him further. He had some difficulty
in again taking up _Die Walkuere_; but he finished it at last in spite of
frequent attacks of facial erysipelas, for which he afterwards had to
undergo a hydropathic cure at Geneva.
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