Giving of Oneself

Johan Huizinga, ‘‘Historical Ideals of Life (1915),’’ in The Course of Civilizations, tr. James S. Holmes & Hans van Marie (Providence: Cluny, 2018), 106:

We have spoken of the age-old impulse to abandon culture, to flee from the present day and its misery. In times such as these the impulse comes over us now and then more powerfully than ever. What will be the refuge? There are still a number of roads open. Though the past no longer proffers us the lovely dream of a peaceful perfection that may perhaps return in the future, ancient beauty and wisdom still grant sweet forgetfulness to the person who seeks it. Does the future have more to offer? We can observe this raging world from an absurd distance and say that it will take three thousand years for all the madness of the present conflict, the stupidity and the terror, the fate of states and nations, the very cultural values that now seem the highest stake to have become just as unimportant to humanity as the wars of Assyria are today. This is no consolation; that, too, is mere forgetfulness. And such resignation can also be achieved from a briefer distance: we can view all this through the eyes of those who have fallen. That is still the shortest road to liberation. The person who wants to abandon today with its heavy burden of history, has to abandon life. But the person who wants to carry that burden and still climb upward finds a fourth road open: that of the simple act—it makes no difference whether in the trenches or in any other serious work. Giving of oneself is the end and the beginning of every philosophy of life. Liberation is to be found not in the abandonment of culture, but in the abandonment of one’s own ego.

An Open Hand

Maria von Wedemeyer to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pätzig, 8 October 1943 (in Love Letters from Cell 92, tr. John Brownjohn (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995)), 96:

In words one so easily talks at cross purposes, but in music one experiences a communion. That’s what all the words you write are like—like an open hand which I can grasp, which I love and want to cling to.

Sad Lucidity Of Soul

Emery Neff, The Poetry of History: The Contribution of Literature and Literary Scholarship To the Writing of History since Voltaire (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1947; repr. 1961), 151-2:

Faith in the exceptional individual tended to replace faith in the group, in the nation, in the mass of mankind. Among men of letters, this revulsion of feeling was reinforced by growing awareness that increased literacy and cheap printing, instead of enlightening the masses, encouraged books with diluted or distorted thought and without art. Unwilling to stoop to meet the demand for literature as a mere commercial product, most of the ablest writers held themselves to exacting standards of art and thought. The extreme of this scorn of popular taste was the doctrine of art for art’s sake proclaimed by Gautier, Flaubert, and Baudelaire in France, by Swinburne, D. G. Rossetti, and Pater in England. “Let the Empire run along,” was the celebrated counsel of Flaubert, “Let us climb to the top of our ivory tower, to the last step, the one nearest the sky. It is cold there, sometimes, isn’t it? But what does that matter? You see the stars shine clear, and you do not hear the geese cackle any longer.”

Disgust with the present, with the spectacle of ignorant masses deluded and exploited by a vulgar plutocracy, with the ugliness of crass industrialism, turned many eyes to the past for refuge, for refreshment. In this mood Leconte de Lisle produced Poémes antiques (1852) and William Morris The Earthly Paradise (1868-1870); in this mood Flaubert, Thackeray, and Morris each composed a historical novel— Salammbô (1862), Henry Esmond (1852), and the historical romance A Dream of John Ball (1888). “I am going to write a novel whose action will take place three centuries before Christ,” Flaubert explained, “for I feel the need of escaping from the modern world, . . . which fatigues me as much to reproduce as it disgusts me to observe.” His theme was the “implacable war” of Carthage with her mercenaries brilliantly sketched by Michelet, a savage and remorseless struggle in which neither side engaged his sympathies. For, however refreshing a change from the present, the past was seldom idealized by authors who came to maturity after 1848. They contemplated both past and future with what Matthew Arnold called a “sad lucidity of soul.”

Gazing Irreverently, & Praising Instead Of Praying

Emery Neff, The Poetry of History: The Contribution of Literature and Literary Scholarship To the Writing of History since Voltaire (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1947; repr. 1961), 139-140: 

Michelet’s power of resurrection first comes into full play in explaining how the Middle Ages, especially France of the Middle Ages, “expressed in architecture its most intimate thought.” He repeoples the great churches. “Try to imagine the effect of lights in these prodigious monuments, when the clergy, circulating by aerial ramps, animated the dark masses with fantastic processions, passing and repassing along balustrades, on bridges of lacework, in rich costumes, with candles and chants; when lights and voices turned in circle after circle, while from below, in the shadow, the ocean of people responded. That was for this era the true drama, the true mystery play; the representation of the journey of humanity across the three worlds, that sublime initiation which Dante took from transitory reality to fix eternally in his Divine Comedy. This colossal theater of sacred drama has returned, after the long festival of the Middle Ages, to silence and shadow. The feeble voice one hears there, the voice of the priest, is impotent to fill the arches whose amplitude was designed to embrace and contain the thunder of the people’s voice. The church is widowed, empty. Its profound symbolism, which then spoke so loud, is mute; now an object of scientific curiosity, of Alexandrian interpretations. The church is a Gothic museum, visited by the sophisticated. They move about, gaze irreverently, praise instead of praying.” The very stones of these churches illustrated the philosophy of Vico by the sublime anonymity of the masons who shaped them. “To know with what care they toiled, obscure and lost in their guild, with what abnegation, you must go over the most retired, least accessible parts of the cathedrals. Mount to those aerial deserts, to the ultimate points of those spires where the roofer fears to venture. There you will often find, buffeted by eternal wind, some masterpiece of art and sculpture upon which the poor workman lavished his life. He worked for God only, for the cure of his soul.” Tombs told the same story. “In the first Christian ages, in the time of lively faith, sorrows were patient. Death seemed a brief divorce, it separated, but only to reunite. A sign of this belief in the soul, in the reunion of souls, is that, up to the twelfth century, the body, the mortal remains, seems to have less importance. It does not yet ask for magnificent tombs. Hidden in a corner of the church, a simple slab covers it; enough to mark it for the day of resurrection: Hinc surrectura.”

Divine Souls

Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Al-Maṭālib al-ʿĀliya min al-ʿIlm al-Ilāhī, ed. Aḥmad Ḥijāzī al-Saqqā, vol. 1 (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1987), 55–57 (personal trans.):

It has already been established, in our view, that human rational souls differ from one another in quiddity (māhiyyah) and substance (jawhar). Some are noble, divine, and celestial; others are dark, turbid, and profane. . . . Once this has been established, we say: among souls there are those whose very substance and essence are, from the outset, divine souls—disposed toward the Presence of Holiness [or the Holy], endowed with an abundant love for It, and deeply immersed in the degrees of its knowledge. Others possess something of these qualities, yet only in a weak measure. Still others are murky and darkened souls, devoid of these divine attractions and spiritual inclinations, submerged in the sea of passing passion and in the darkness of the world of the senses and fancy. 

To make these meanings more vividly clear, let me offer the following analogy. The mountains and hills of the world are of two kinds: in some there occurs mineral deposits, while in others there are not. Induction shows that mountains devoid of minerals are far more numerous than those in which minerals are formed. Furthermore, among the mountains that do produce minerals, some yield only inferiour, base substances, such as petroleum, sulfur, lime, and salt; while others produce precious, noble minerals, such as gold, silver, ruby, spinel, and the like. Again, induction shows that the mountains containing these precious and noble minerals are vastly fewer than those producing only the inferiour kinds. We may further observe that, among those mountains which contain these precious and noble minerals—the seven principal metallic bodies—the baser the metal, the more abundant its deposits; whereas the nobler the metal, the scarcer its occurrence.

Let human souls be understood by analogy with mountains and hills, and let the lights of the knowledge and love of God correspond to pure, refined gold. Just as most of the mountains and hills of this world contain no mineral deposits at all, so too the souls of most human beings are devoid of any inclination toward the world of spiritual realities. Moreover, even if souls of this kind were to devote themselves to the most rigourous bodily disciplines, they would derive but little benefit from them, just as a mountain lacking any mineral vein yields nothing at all, no matter how much effort one expends in excavating it.

And just as the mountains that do contain minerals differ from one another in degrees of richness and abundance beyond all possibility of precise measurement, so too the ranks of souls differ in strength and weakness, in greater and lesser capacity, by differences that admit of no exhaustive determination. And just as it is not impossible that, on rare occasions, there should exist a mountain containing a cavern filled with gold, so likewise it is not impossible that, in widely separated æons, there should arise a human being whose inward cavern of spirit is filled with the lights of the Divine Majesty.

Once you have grasped this analogy, you will understand that not everyone who undertakes spiritual discipline—even in its most arduous forms—is thereby destined to attain anything. Nor does everyone who attains something thereby reach the final end. Indeed, the ultimate end in this path admits of no limit. For just as there is no end to the Majesty of God or to the sublimity of His Greatness, so there is likewise no end to the degrees of beatitude attainable upon this path.

Therefore, keep this analogy constantly before your eyes and firmly fixed in your imagination, lest you be deceived into thinking that everyone who travels the path arrives, or that everyone who seeks necessarily finds. We do not deny that these spiritual disciplines have certain effects in some respects, for perseverance in practice does indeed produce effects of a certain kind. Yet it is evident that merely applying kohl to the eyes is not the same as possessing dark, thick eyelids.1

How excellent are the words of the Sage of Poets [= al-Mutanabbī]:

The heart is urged to forget you,

Yet innate nature refuses to be transformed.

Aristotle likewise said: ‘‘Whoever wishes to embark upon the pursuit of these divine sciences must acquire for himself another nature’’ What he means is that one must exert oneself to strip the intellect of its attachments to sense, to mere assumptions (wahm), and to fancy.

1 This line is from a line of verse by the poet al-Mutanabbī, which reads more beautifully in Arabic: وليس التكحُّل في العينين كالكَحَل.

The Unhappiness, Faults, & Follies Of Literary Men, & The History Of Genius

Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Friedrich Schiller (vol. 5 of the Library Edition of Carlyle’s Collected Works, London: Chapman and Hall), 51-52, 53-54:

If to know wisdom were to practise it; if fame brought true dignity and peace of mind; or happiness consisted in nourishing the intellect with its appropriate food and surrounding the imagination with ideal beauty, a literary life would be the most enviable which the lot of this world affords. But the truth is far otherwise. The Man of Letters has no immutable, all-conquering volition, more than other men; to understand and to perform are two very different things with him as with every one. His fame rarely exerts a favourable influence on his dignity of character, and never on his peace of mind: its glitter is external, for the eyes of others; within, it is but the aliment of unrest, the oil cast upon the ever-gnawing fire of ambition, quickening into fresh vehemence the blaze which it stills for a moment. Moreover, this Man of Letters is not wholly made of spirit, but of clay and spirit mixed: his thinking faculties may be nobly trained and exercised, but he must have affections as well as thoughts to make him happy, and food and raiment must be given him or he dies. Far from being the most enviable, his way of life is perhaps, among the many modes by which an ardent mind endeavours to express its activity, the most thickly beset with suffering and degradation. Look at the biography of authors! Except the Newgate Calendar, it is the most sickening chapter in the history of man. The calamities of these people are a fertile topic; and too often their faults and vices have kept pace with their calamities. Nor is it difficult to see how this has happened. Talent of any sort is generally accompanied with a peculiar fineness of sensibility; of genius this is the most essential constituent; and life in any shape has sorrows enough for hearts so formed. The employments of literature sharpen this natural tendency; the vexations that accompany them frequently exasperate it into morbid soreness. The cares and toils of literature are the business of life; its delights are too ethereal and too transient to furnish that perennial flow of satisfaction, coarse but plenteous and substantial, of which happiness in this world of ours is made. The most finished efforts of the mind give it little pleasure, frequently they give it pain; for men’s aims are ever far beyond their strength. And the outward recompense of these undertakings, the distinction they confer, is of still smaller value: the desire for it is insatiable even when successful; and when baffled, it issues in jealousy and envy, and every pitiful and painful feeling. So keen a temperament with so little to restrain or satisfy, so much to distress or tempt it, produces contradictions which few are adequate to reconcile. Hence the unhappiness of literary men, hence their faults and follies. [...]

Yet among these men are to be found the brightest specimens and the chief benefactors of mankind! It is they that keep awake the finer parts of our souls; that give us better aims than power or pleasure, and withstand the total sovereignty of Mammon in this earth. They are the vanguard in the march of mind; the intellectual Backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and the activity of their happier brethren. Pity that from all their conquests, so rich in benefit to others, themselves should reap so little! But it is vain to murmur. They are volunteers in this cause; they weighed the charms of it against the perils: and they must abide the results of their decision, as all must. The hardships of the course they follow are formidable, but not all inevitable; and to such as pursue it rightly, it is not without its great rewards. If an author’s life is more agitated and more painful than that of others, it may also be made more spirit-stirring and exalted: fortune may render him unhappy; it is only himself that can make him despicable. The history of genius has, in fact, its bright side as well as its dark. And if it is distressing to survey the misery, and what is worse, the debasement of so many gifted men, it is doubly cheering on the other hand to reflect on the few, who, amid the temptations and sorrows to which life in all its provinces and most in theirs is liable, have travelled through it in calm and virtuous majesty, and are now hallowed in our memories, not less for their conduct than their writings. Such men are the flower of this lower world: to such alone can the epithet of great be applied with its true emphasis. There is a congruity in their proceedings which one loves to contemplate: ‘he who would write heroic poems, should make his whole life a heroic poem.’

Youth Changed Into A Man

Thomas Carlyle, ‘‘German Literature of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (1831),’’ in Critical and Miscellaneaous Essays (New York: John B. Alden, 1885), 12-13: 

In the history of the universal mind, there is a certain analogy to that of the individual. Our first self-consciousness is the first revelation to us of a whole universe, wondrous and altogether good; it is a feeling of joy and new-found strength, of mysterious infinite hope and capability; and in all men, either by word or act, expresses itself poetically. The world without us and within us, beshone by the young light of Love, and all instinct with a divinity, is beautiful and great; it seems for us a boundless happiness that we are privileged to live. This is the season of generous deeds and feelings; which also, on the lips of the gifted, form themselves into musical utterance, and give spoken poetry as well as acted. Nothing is calculated and measured, but all is loved, believed, appropriated. All action is spontaneous, high sentiment a sure, imperishable good; and thus the youth stands, like the First Man, in his fair Garden, giving Names to the bright Appearances of this Universe which he has inherited, and rejoicing in it as glorious and divine. Erelong, however, comes a harsher time. Under the first beauty of man’s life appears an infinite, earnest rigour: high sentiment will not avail, unless it can continue to be translated into noble action; which problem, in the destiny appointed for man born to toil, is difficult, interminable, capable of only approximate solution. What flowed softly in melodious coherence when seen and sung from a distance, proves rugged and unmanageable when practically handled. The fervid, lyrical gladness of past years gives place to a collected thoughtfulness and energy; nay often,—so painful, so unexpected are the contradictions everywhere met with,—to gloom, sadness and anger; and not till after long struggles and hard-contested victories is the youth changed into a man.

From Contemplating How Things Should Be To Knowing How They Are

Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Friedrich Schiller (vol. 5 of the Library Edition of Carlyle’s Collected Works, London: Chapman and Hall), 99-100 (emphasis mine):

Schiller was, in fact, growing tired of fictitious writing. Imagination was with him a strong, not an exclusive, perhaps not even a predominating faculty: in the sublimest flights of his genius, intellect is a quality as conspicuous as any other; we are frequently not more delighted with the grandeur of the drapery in which he clothes his thoughts, than with the grandeur of the thoughts themselves. To a mind so restless, the cultivation of all its powers was a peremptory want; in one so earnest, the love of truth was sure to be among its strongest passions. Even while revelling, with unworn ardour, in the dreamy scenes of the Imagination, he had often cast a longing look, and sometimes made a hurried inroad, into the calmer provinces of reason: but the first effervescence of youth was past, and now more than ever, the love of contemplating or painting things as they should be, began to yield to the love of knowing things as they are. The tendency of his mind was gradually changing; he was about to enter on a new field of enterprise, where new triumphs awaited him.

Schiller As An Example Of German Character

Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Friedrich Schiller (vol. 5 of the Library Edition of Carlyle’s Collected Works, London: Chapman and Hall), 230-233:

Schiller gives a fine example of the German character: he has all its good qualities in a high degree, with very few of its defects. We trace in him all that downrightness and simplicity, that sincerity of heart and mind, for which the Germans are remarked; their enthusiasm, their patient, long-continuing, earnest devotedness; their imagination, delighting in the lofty and magnificent; their intellect, rising into refined abstractions, stretching itself into comprehensive generalisations. But the excesses to which such a character is liable are, in him, prevented by a firm and watchful sense of propriety. His simplicity never degenerates into ineptitude or insipidity; his enthusiasm must be based on reason; he rarely suffers his love of the vast to betray him into toleration of the vague. The boy Schiller was extravagant; but the man admits no bombast in his style, no inflation in his thoughts or actions. He is the poet of truth; our understandings and consciences are satisfied, while our hearts and imaginations are moved. His fictions are emphatically nature copied and embellished; his sentiments are refined and touchingly beautiful, but they are likewise manly and correct; they exalt and inspire, but they do not mislead. Above all, he has no cant; in any of its thousand branches, ridiculous or hateful, none. He does not distort his character or genius into shapes, which he thinks more becoming than their natural one: he does not hang out principles which are not his, or harbour beloved persuasions which he half or wholly knows to be false. He did not often speak of wholesome prejudices; he did not ‘embrace the Roman Catholic religion because it was the grandest and most comfortable.’ Truth with Schiller, or what seemed such, was an indispensable requisite: if he but suspected an opinion to be false, however dear it may have been, he seems to have examined it with rigid scrutiny, and if he found it guilty, to have plucked it out, and resolutely cast it forth. The sacrifice might cause him pain, permanent pain; real damage, he imagined, it could hardly cause him. It is irksome and dangerous to travel in the dark; but better so, than with an Ignis-fatuus to guide us. Considering the warmth of his sensibilities, Schiller’s merit on this point is greater than we might at first suppose. For a man with whom intellect is the ruling or exclusive faculty, whose sympathies, loves, hatreds, are comparatively coarse and dull, it may be easy to avoid this half-wilful entertainment of error, and this cant which is the consequence and sign of it. But for a man of keen tastes, a large fund of innate probity is necessary to prevent his aping the excellence which he loves so much, yet is unable to attain. Among persons of the latter sort, it is extremely rare to meet with one completely unaffected. Schiller’s other noble qualities would not have justice, did we neglect to notice this, the truest proof of their nobility. Honest, unpretending, manly simplicity pervades all parts of his character and genius and habits of life. We not only admire him, we trust him and love him.

‘The character of child-like simplicity,’ he has himself observed, ‘which genius impresses on its works, it shows also in its private life and manners. It is bashful, for nature is ever so; but it is not prudish, for only corruption is prudish. It is clear-sighted, for nature can never be the contrary; but it is not cunning, for this only art can be. It is faithful to its character and inclinations; but not so much because it is directed by principles, as because after all vibrations nature constantly reverts to her original position, constantly renews her primitive demand. It is modest, nay timid, for genius is always a secret to itself; but it is not anxious, for it knows not the dangers of the way which it travels. Of the private habits of the persons who have been peculiarly distinguished by their genius, our information is small; but the little that has been recorded for us of the chief of them,—of Sophocles, Archimedes, Hippocrates; and in modern times, of Dante and Tasso, of Rafaelle, Albrecht Dürer, Cervantes, Shakspeare, Fielding, and others,—confirms this observation.’ Schiller himself confirms it; perhaps more strongly than most of the examples here adduced. No man ever wore his faculties more meekly, or performed great works with less consciousness of their greatness. Abstracted from the contemplation of himself, his eye was turned upon the objects of his labour, and he pursued them with the eagerness, the entireness, the spontaneous sincerity, of a boy pursuing sport. Hence this ‘child-like simplicity,’ the last perfection of his other excellencies. His was a mighty spirit unheedful of its might. He walked the earth in calm power: ‘the staff of his spear was like a weaver’s beam;’ but he wielded it like a wand.

Pleasures Of The Soul

Plutarch, Symposiacs, bk. V., tr. T. C. (in Plutarch’s Essays And Miscellanies, 1911, vol. III.), 313-314:

What is your opinion at present, Sossius Senecio, of the pleasures of mind and body, is not evident to me;

        Because us two a thousand things divide,
        Vast shady hills, and the rough ocean’s tide.1

But formerly, I am sure, you did not lean to nor like their opinion, who will not allow the soul to have any proper agreeable pleasure, which without respect to the body she desires for herself; but define that she lives as a form assistant to the body, is directed by the passions of it, and, as that is affected, is either pleased or grieved, or, like a looking-glass, only receives the images of those sensible impressions made upon the body. This sordid and debasing opinion is especially in this way confuted; for at a feast, the genteel well-bred men after supper fall upon some topic or another as second course, and cheer one another by their pleasant talk. Now the body hath very little or no share in this; which evidently proves that this is a particular banquet for the soul, and that those pleasures are peculiar to her, and different from those which pass to her through the body and are vitiated thereby. Now, as nurses, when they feed children, taste a little of their pap, and have but small pleasure therefrom, but when the infants are satisfied, leave crying, and go to sleep, then being at their own disposal, they take such meat and drink as is agreeable to their own bodies; thus the soul partakes of the pleasures that arise from eating and drinking, like a nurse, being subservient to the appetites of the body, kindly yielding to its necessities and wants, and calming its desires; but when that is satisfied and at rest, then being free from her business and servile employment, she seeks her own proper pleasures, revels on discourse, problems, stories, curious questions, or subtle resolutions. Nay, what shall a man say, when he sees the dull unlearned fellows after supper minding such pleasures as have not the least relation to the body? They tell tales, propose riddles, or set one another a guessing at names, comprised and hid under such and such numbers. Thus mimics, drolls, Menander and his actors were admitted into banquets, not because they can free the eye from any pain, or raise any tickling motion in the flesh; but because the soul, being naturally philosophical and a lover of instruction, covets its own proper pleasure and satisfaction, when it is free from the trouble of looking after the body.

1 Iliad, I. 156.

Virtue Growing By Use

Plutarch, Whether ’twere Rightly Said, Live Concealed, tr. Charles Whitaker (in Plutarch’s Essays And Miscellanies, 1911, vol. III.), 7:

For

    Virtue, like finest brass, by use grows bright.1

And not our houses alone, when (as Sophocles has it) they stand long untenanted, run the faster to ruin; but men’s natural parts, lying unemployed for lack of acquaintance with the world, contract a kind of filth or rust and craziness thereby. For sottish ease, and a life wholly sedentary and given up to idleness, spoil and debilitate not only the body but the soul too. And as close waters shadowed over by bordering trees, and stagnated in default of springs to supply current and motion to them, become foul and corrupt; so, methinks, is it with the innate faculties of a dull unstirring soul,—whatever usefulness, whatever seeds of good she may have latent in her, yet when she puts not these powers into action, when once they stagnate, they lose their vigor and run to decay.

1 Sophocles, Frag. 779.

Taste of Heavenly Things

John Lyly, “Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit [1578],” in Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit; Euphues & his England (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1916), 156:

He that hath no motion of God in his mind, no feeling of the Spirit, no taste of heavenly things, no remorse in conscience, no spark of zeal is rather to be confounded by torments than reasons.

A Strange Harmonious World

Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, as quoted in: Egon Schwarz, “Hugo Von Hofmannsthal as a Critic,” Arthur R. Evans (ed.), On Four Modern Humanists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 3:

Every . . . perfect thing we find lying in our path is a fragment that has strayed from a strange harmonious world, like meteorites which have somehow fallen down upon the paths of our earth. The task is now to call forth from the lost fragment, through a great exertion of the imagination, a momentary vision of that strange world. Whoever can accomplish this and is capable of such an exertion and concentration of the reproductive imagination will be a great critic. He will also be very just and very conciliatory because he will measure every work of art by an ideal, but a subjective ideal gained from the artist’s personality, and he will sense the beauty of all that has been conceived and born in truth.

A Cloud Of Melancholy

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thoughts out of Season, tr. Adrian Collins (Edinburgh and London, 1909), pt. II., Schopenhauer as Educator, §III, 122-3:

These men who have saved their inner freedom, must also live and be seen in the outer world: they stand in countless human relations by their birth, position, education and country, their own circumstances and the importunity of others: and so they are presumed to hold an immense number of opinions, simply because these happen to prevail: every look that is not a denial counts as an assent, every motion of the hand that does not destroy is regarded as an aid. These free and lonely men know that they perpetually seem other than they are. While they wish for nothing but truth and honesty, they are in a net of misunderstanding; and that ardent desire cannot prevent a mist of false opinions, of adaptations and wrong conclusions, of partial misapprehension and intentional reticence, from gathering round their actions. And there settles a cloud of melancholy on their brows: for such natures hate the necessity of pretence worse than death: and the continual bitterness gives them a threatening and volcanic character. They take revenge from time to time for their forced concealment and self-restraint: they issue from their dens with lowering looks: their words and deeds are explosive, and may lead to their own destruction. Schopenhauer lived amid dangers of this sort. Such lonely men need love, and friends, to whom they can be as open and sincere as to themselves, and in whose presence the deadening silence and hypocrisy may cease. Take their friends away, and there is left an increasing peril; Heinrich von Kleist was broken by the lack of love, and the most terrible weapon against unusual men is to drive them into themselves; and then their issuing forth again is a volcanic eruption. Yet there are always some demi-gods who can bear life under these fearful conditions and can be their conquerors: and if you would hear their lonely chant, listen to the music of Beethoven.

What Cannot Letters Inspire?

Letters of Abelard and Heloise, tr. John Hughes (London, 1776), II., Heloise to Abelard, 87-88:

If a picture, which is but a mute representation of an object, can give such pleasure, what cannot letters inspire? They have souls; they can speak; they have in them all that force which expresses the transports of the heart; they have all the fire of our passions; they can raise them as much as if the persons themselves were present; they have all the softness and delicacy of speech, and sometimes a boldness of expression even beyond it. [•••]

Letters were first invented for comforting such solitary wretches as myself. Having lost the substantial pleasures of seeing and possessing you, I shall in some measure compensate this loss by the satisfaction I shall find in your writing. There I shall read your most secret thoughts; I shall carry them always about me; I shall kiss them every moment: if you can be capable of any jealousy, let it be for the fond caresses I shall bestow on your letters, and envy only the happiness of those rivals. That writing may be no trouble to you, write always to me carelessly, and without study: I had rather read the dictates of the heart than of the brain. I cannot live if you do not tell me you always love me; but that language ought to be so natural to you, that I believe you cannot speak otherwise to me without great violence to yourself. And since, by that melancholy relation to your friend, you have awakened all my sorrows, it is but reasonable you should allay them by some marks of an inviolable love.

Retired To These Deserts And At Peace

Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645), Desde la Torre (translated as From the Tower by Elwin Wirkala):

        Retired to these deserts and at peace,
        and with but few, though learnèd, books beside,
        I live conversing now with the deceased,
        and listen with my eyes to those who died.

        Open, whether or not I miss their points,
        they mend or fecundate my everything,
        their music’s muted counterpoints when joined
        with this life’s dream bespeak awakening.

        Great Souls absented by mortality,
        in death avenging injuries of years,
        the learnèd press, Oh Josef, has set free!

        Hours fled forever disappear,
        but they are best accounted for in letters,
        read and studied, when they make us better.

        Retirado en la paz de estos desiertos,
        Con pocos, pero doctos libros juntos,
        Vivo en conversación con los difuntos,
        Y escucho con mis ojos a los muertos.

        Si no siempre entendidos, siempre abiertos,
        O enmiendan, o fecundan mis asuntos;
        Y en músicos callados contrapuntos
        Al sueño de la vida hablan despiertos.

        Las Grandes Almas que la Muerte ausenta,
        De injurias de los años vengadora,
        Libra, ¡oh gran Don Josef!, docta la Imprenta.

        En fuga irrevocable huye la hora;
        Pero aquélla el mejor cálculo cuenta,
        Que en la lección y estudios nos mejora.

Making Room For Another

Henry David Thoreau, Journal, Oct. 24, 1837:

Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another. The oak dies down to the ground, leaving within its rind a rich virgin mould, which will impart a vigorous life to an infant forest. The pine leaves a sandy and sterile soil, the harder woods a strong and fruitful mould.

So this constant abrasion and decay makes the soil of my future growth. As I live now so shall I reap. If I grow pines and birches, my virgin mould will not sustain the oak; but pines and birches, or, perchance, weeds and brambles, will constitute my second growth.

So Tiresome A Scene

David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, vol. II., pt. III., sect. X. (ed. T. H. Green & T. H. Grose, London: Longmans, 1882, pp. 226-7):

Human life is so tiresome a scene, and men generally are of such indolent dispositions, that whatever amuses them, tho’ by a passion mixt with pain, does in the main give them a sensible pleasure.

Silent And Triumphant Love

Miguel de Unamuno, Essays and Soliloquies, tr. J. E. Crawford Flitch (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), Don Quixote’s Niece, 110-111:

“Take my mouth and cover it with warm kisses in silence, and renounce a cold eternity of fame in the mouths of those whom you will never know. Will you hear them speaking of you when you are dead? Bury all your love in my breast, and if it is a great love, it is better that you should bury it in me than that you should lavish it among men who easily forget and soon pass away. They are not worthy of admiring you, my Alonso, they are not worthy of it. You will live for me alone and so you will live more truly for all the universe and for God. So living, your might and your heroism will seem to be lost, but don’t mind that. Do you not know the infinite streams of life which flow from a silent and heroic love, flowing out in wave after wave beyond humanity to the orbit of the remotest of the stars? Do you not know that the silent and triumphant love of a happy pair of lovers is a fount of mysterious energy that irradiates a whole people and all generations to come to the end of time? Do you not know what it is to guard the sacred fire of life, fanning it to ever brighter flame in simple and silent worship? Love, the simple act of loving, without deeds, is itself a heroic deed. Come and renounce all your deeds in my arms—the dim obscurity of your repose in my arms will be a seed-time which will bear fruit in the deeds and glory of others to whom your very name will be unknown. When even the echo of your name is no longer borne upon the air, when there is no longer any air to bear the echo of it, the embers of your love will warm the ruins of perished worlds. Come and give yourself to me, Alonso, for though you should never ride abroad redressing wrongs, your greatness will not be lost, for in my heart nothing is lost. Come, rest your head upon my heart and I will carry you thence to the rest that has no ending.”

No Man Knows The Other

Hermann Hesse, In the Mist = Im Nebel, tr. Harry Steinhauer:

        Strange, to wander in the mist!
        Every bush and stone is lonely,
        no tree sees the other,
        each one is alone.

        The world was full of friends for me,
        when my life was still bright;
        now, when the mist falls,
        not one is visible any longer.

        Truly, no one is wise,
        who does not know the dark,
        which inescapably and softly
        separates him from them all.

        Strange, to wander in the mist!
        To live is to be lonely.
        No man knows the other,
        each one is alone.