The whole business seemed heaven-sent, totall yunplanned and yet so
perfectlyex nihilo. And it was precisel ythis exuberance that Constantin
Constantius desired to repeat, but in vain. The box was taken, Beckmann
and Grobecker were not the least bit amusing, and the young woman was
not there. Utterl ydepressed, Constantin Constantius spent half an hour in
the theater, whereafter he concluded that repetition did not exist. Nonethe-
less he repeated his attempt and paid yet another visit to the theater, but the
onl ything repeated was the impossibilit yof repetition, after which he de-
cided to leave town: “M ydiscover ywas not significant and yet it was curi-
ous, for I had discovered that repetition absolutel ydid not exist, and I had
come to certaint yabout this b yrepeating it in ever ypossible wa y.”
The onl ything remaining was the slender hope that seeing his home
again would turn into a sort of repetition. But even this was not to be. In
the absence of his master, Constantin Constantius’s servant had initiated,
though not yet completed, a major housecleaning that had turned every-
thing upside down: “I realized that no repetition exists, and m yprevious
view of life had won out. How ashamed I felt, that I, who had been so
cavalier with that young man, had now been placed in the same position.
Indeed, it seemed to me as though I myself were that young man, as though
m ygrandiose words, which now I would not repeat for the world, had onl y
been a dream from which I had awakened, allowing life ceaselessl yand
faithlessl ytotake back[Danish:tage igjen] everything it had given—without
having given arepetition[Danish:Gjen-tagelse].”
For Constantin Constantius the result is the negative (but not unimpor-
tant) knowledge that one cannot “calculate on the basis of uncertainties.”
A thing happens when it happens, but it does not happen if one willsthat
it must happen. Constantin Constantius was thus “entirel yconvinced” that
if hehad notjourneyed to Berlinin order toinvestigate the extent to which
repetition was possible, he would have had “the time of [his] life doing
precisel ythe same things.”
“Long Live the Post Horn!”
As repetition is a break in the immediate regularit yof things, chance is a
break in the normal predictabilit yof things. Repetition and chance are
thus names for a sudden happening that can intervene and change the
course of things for shorter or longer periods of time. These two, repetition
and chance, mirror each other, but repetition is religious, while chance is
aesthetic. A person cannotwilleither of them, repetition or chance. Both