The Tanners

At around this same time, Professor Klaus, a brother of Simon’s who lived in a historic capital where he’d made a name for himself, had begun to worry about his younger brother’s behavior. A good, quiet, dutiful person, he would dearly have loved to see his brothers find the firm respect-commanding ground beneath their feet in life that he, the eldest, had. But this was so utterly not the case, at least till now, in fact it was so very much the opposite, that Professor Klaus began to reproach himself in his heart. He told himself, for example: “I should have been a person who would long since have had every opportunity to lead my brothers to the right path. Until now I’ve failed to do so. How could I have neglected these duties, etc.” Dr. Klaus knew thousands of duties, small and large, and sometimes it seemed as if he were longing to have even more of them. He was one of those people who feel so compelled to fulfill duties that they go plunging into great collapsing edifices constructed entirely of disagreeable duties simply out of the fear that some secret, inconspicuous duty might somehow elude them. They cause themselves to experience many a troubled hour because of these unfulfilled duties — never stopping to consider how one duty always piles a second one upon the person undertaking the first — and they believe they’ve already fulfilled something like a duty just by being made anxious and uneasy by any dark inkling of its presence. They meddle in many an affair that — if they’d stop to think about it in a less anxious way — hasn’t a blessed thing to do with them, and they wish to see others as worry-laden as themselves. They tend to cast envious glances upon naïve unencumbered people, and then criticize them for being frivolous characters since they move through life so gracefully, their heads held so easily aloft. Dr. Klaus often forced himself to entertain a certain small modest sensation of insouciance, but always he would return again to his gray dreary duties, in the thrall of which he languished as in a dark prison. Perhaps, back when he was still young, he’d once felt a desire to stop, but he’d lacked the strength to leave undone something that resembled a nagging duty and couldn’t just walk past it with a dismissive smile. Dismissive? Oh, he never dismissed anything at all! Attempting this — or so it seemed to him — would have split him in twain from bottom to top; he’d have been incapable of avoiding painful recollections of what he’d cast aside and dismissed. He never dismissed or discarded anything at all, and he was wasting his young life analyzing and examining things utterly unworthy of examination, study, attention or love. Thus he’d grown older, but since he was by no means anything like a person devoid of sensibility and imagination, he often also reproached himself bitterly for neglecting the duty of being at least a little happy. This was yet another neglect of duty, a new one, which with perfect acuity demonstrated that the dutiful never quite succeed in fulfilling all their duties, indeed, that such individuals are the most likely of all human beings to disregard their foremost duties and only later — perhaps when it’s already too late — call them once more to mind. On more than one occasion Dr. Klaus felt sad about himself when he thought of the precious happiness that had faded from his view, the happiness of finding himself united with a young sweet girl, who of course would have to have been a girl from an impeccable family. At around the same time as he was contemplating his own person in a melancholy frame of mind, he wrote to his brother Simon, whom he genuinely loved and whose conduct in this world troubled him, a letter whose contents were approximately as follows:

Dear Brother,