Best thanks, my dearest Franz. I have just written to M. Fenelon, enclosing my passport once more. Candidly speaking, the matter suddenly begins to annoy me very much, and I do not expect a good result. My wish quite coincides with your plan. I fully anticipated that Basle could not be avoided altogether; it is adapted for a meeting with the friends who have come to Carlsruhe. The excursion to Paris after that concerns us two alone; so our thoughts have once more been the same.
As to the rest, I am longing to get to work at last. My ordinary life is unbearable unless I, so to speak, devour myself. Moreover, I cannot keep my peace, as I particularly want to do, unless I devote myself to this music. After your visit, everything came to nothing with me this summer; no other hope was fulfilled, all went wrong, and well, we shall see whether I get this passport. The day after tomorrow week, we shall meet. I wish it were the day after tomorrow. Will you, or shall I, engage the hotel? Let it be the Drei Könige; they have nice rooms there and a balcony looking over the Rhine; let us engage some of those. You are once more in the middle of your exertions, and I must almost envy you; I at least realize by such exertions alone that I am alive. Rest is death to me; and if sometimes I go in quest of it, I mean that other rest, the beautiful, the joyful, I feel that in reality it must be nothing but death, but real, noble, perfect death, not this death in life which I die from day to day.
Richard Wagner
Source: Project Gutenberg eBook #3835, Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt — Volume 1, No. 132