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.

Dearest Soul

Martin Heidegger's letter to Elfride (his future wife), 13 Dec., 1915 (found in: Martin Heidegger, Letters to his Wife 1915-1970, tr. R. D. V. Glasgow (UK/USA: Polity Press, 2008), 4-6):

Come, Dearest Soul, and rest against my heart, I want to look for ever into the depths of your fairy-tale eyes and thank you—Dearest Soul—it is given to me to experience ever new, wonderful things in you—you are mine—& am I to bear this unutterable happiness, are my hands sacred enough tremblingly to clasp yours, is my soul, harried through all the throes of doubt, a worthy shrine wherein your love may dwell for all eternity?

My great happiness weighs me to the ground—in the end, it is above all those of a philosophical nature who experience such uncommon happiness in all its fullness. The philosopher sees the ultimate in all things, experiences the deepest foundations of all existence, thrills in this god-born wondrous happiness—Dearest Soul, I can only accept this wonderful thing with the painful reverence that is ultimately deeper than what we call joy; why do people often weep for happiness? why, when I read your angelically pure poem drenched in the sunshine of fairy-tales, intoxicated with the felicity of childhood, could I not help but fling myself down & close my eyes?—were they the throes of eternity that chased wildly through my soul & then suddenly left behind in me that silence of the stormless mountain, in which all objects grow towards the infinite?

Yes, & so, Dearest Soul, let me accept all happiness with great reverential, prayerful humility & always be ailing with this happiness, for then I am gladdest, happiest & strongest, in this great weight of experiencing I can feel the problems lie heavy on my soul like gigantic boulders; and this burden, which draws its force from the eternal, unleashes the opposing force in me & I feel my sinews tauten & I reach for the heavy hammer of the interminable search for knowledge which gropes forward through dark tunnels of abstraction—& suddenly it comes whistling down & the rock face cracks asunder, the shards fly into the depths & the blue of the sky laughs in on us & profusion of blessing gushes over us & you, Dearest Soul, lean trembling on my shoulder & can still feel the shake of my arm, which is yet infused with the weight of the hammer—

Dearest Soul, and now I must go down on my knees before you, lay your wondrous hand, transfused with blessing, on my tortured brow—and forgive your boy, forgive me for being so full of restlessness on Sunday, I am human & as such hurled into the antagonism of the sensual and the spiritual; but with you it is given to me to experience what is beyond the antagonism, where all tensions are resolved, where everything is sacred & all darkness is banished—Dearest Soul, I'll for ever be your debtor—

I ought to rest now, but no, I cannot. Resting on your bosom, I would gladly recount every last detail of my modest life—

But perhaps you have already beheld me in the intuition of your soul—a simple boy, living with modest, pious people in the country, a boy who could still see the glass globe by the light of which his grandfather sat on a three-legged stool and hammered nails into shoes, who helped his father with the cooperage & forced the hoops into place around the barrels, the hammer-blows resounding through the small, winding alleys; who savoured all the wonderful poetry open to a sexton's son, lay for hours up in the church tower & gazed after the swifts & dreamt his way over the dark pine forests; who rummaged about in the dusty old books in the church loft & felt like a king among the piles of books which he did not understand but every one of which he knew & reverentially loved.

And when that boy, who would get the key to the tower from his father & could choose which of the other boys was allowed up with him & so had a certain prestige & power & was always the leader in all the raids and games of soldiers, the only one allowed to carry the iron sabre; when that boy came home from Latin at the young vicar's and often brought mistakes with him, he would cry his heart out on his good mother's shoulder, though she herself could not give him any help—the little brooder had to 'study' & was allowed to go to grammar school on Lake Constance & in the fifth form when he brought home nothing less than a 'Schiller' as first prize, he was even in the local paper & from then on, as people still say today, he was never again seen in the holidays without a book. And he delved & sought & became quieter and quieter & already he had a vague ideal—the scholar—in his mind—though his pious, simple mother hoped for a 'priest'—it was a struggle for him to win the right to live purely on knowledge, to make his mother believe that the philosopher too can achieve great things for men & their eternal happiness—how often did she ask her son, 'what is philosophy, do tell me', & he couldn't give an answer himself— [. . .]

—my Dearest Soul scatters the roses on the steep mountain path up to the towering peaks of pure knowledge & most blissful experience in these two creatures whom God was leading along their paths, his inscrutable path, until suddenly, filled with the pangs of holy craving, they found one another; the two of them will build themselves a happiness in which spirit, purity, goodness rush together and, overflowing, pour forth into the languishing souls of those who thirst—

Dearest Soul, clasp your pure hands together & place them in mine—take my soul, it is yours—you saint—and let the flames and glowing heat come together and as they flare up consume one another in the longing for

αὐτὸ τὸ θεῖον καλόν μονοειδές 

'the divine itself in its unchangeable beauty'.

A Silence More Significant Than Any Story

Henry David Thoreau, Journal, January 11, 1857:

I never chanced to meet with any man so cheering and elevating and encouraging, so infinitely suggestive, as the stillness and solitude of the Well Meadow Field. 

Men even think me odd and perverse because I do not prefer their society to this nymph or wood-god rather. But I have tried them. I have sat down with a dozen of them together in a club, and instantly they did not inspire me. One or another abused our ears with many words and a few thoughts which were not theirs. There was very little genuine goodness apparent. We are such hollow pretenders. I lost my time.

But out there! Who shall criticise that companion? It is like the hone to the knife. I bathe in that climate and am cleansed of all social impurities. I become a witness with unprejudiced senses to the order of the universe. There is nothing petty or impertinent, none to say, «See what a great man I am!» There chiefly, and not in the society of the wits, am I cognizant of wit. Shall I prefer a part, an infinitely small fraction, to the whole? There I get my underpinnings laid and repaired, cemented, levelled. There is my country club. We dine at the sign of the Shrub Oak, the New Albion House. 

I demand of my companion some evidence that he has travelled further than the sources of the Nile, that he has seen something, that he has been out of town, out of the house. Not that he can tell a good story, but that he can keep a good silence. Has he attended to a silence more significant than any story? Did he ever get out of the road which all men and fools travel? You call yourself a great traveller, perhaps, but can you get beyond the influence of a certain class of ideas?

Philosophy: The Doctrine Of Longing

Friedrich von Schlegel, The Philosophy of Life, and Philosophy of Language, tr. A. J. W. Morrison (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847), lecture II., pp. 34-35, 37-38:

. . . longing—an indefinite feeling of profound desire, which is satisfied with no earthly object, whether real or ideal, but is ever directed to the eternal and the divine. And although it presupposes, as the condition of its existence, no special genius or peculiar talents, but proceeds immediately out of the pure source of the divinely created and immortal soul—out of the everlasting feelings of the loving soul—still, from causes which are easily conceivable, a pure development of this species is far rarer than even of the enthusiasm for art. No doubt, in certain happy temperaments, under circumstances favorable to their free expansion, this vague longing is peculiar to the age of youth, and is often enough observed there. Indeed, it is in that soft melancholy, which is always joined with the half-unconscious, but pleasant feeling of the blooming fullness of life, that lies the charm which the reminiscence of the days of youth possesses for the calm and quiet contemplations of old age. Here, too, the distinctive mark between the genuine and the spurious manifestations of this feeling is both simple enough, and easily found. For as this longing may in general be explained as an inchoate state—a love yet to be developed—the question reduces itself consequently to the simple one of determining the nature of this love. If, upon the first development and gratification of the passions, this love immediately passes over to and loses itself in the ordinary realities of life, then is it no genuine manifestation of the heavenly feeling, but a mere earthly and sensual longing. But when it survives the youthful ebullition of the feelings, when it does but become deeper and more intense by time, when it is satisfied with no joys, and stifled by no sorrows of earth—when, from the midst of the struggles of life, and the pressure of the world, it turns, like a light-seeing eye upon the storm-tossed waves of the ocean of time, to the heaven of heavens, watching to discover there some star of eternal hope—then is it that true and genuine longing, which, directing itself to the divine, is itself also of a celestial origin. Out of this root springs almost every thing that is intellectually beautiful and great—even the love of scientific certainty itself, and of a profound knowledge of life and nature. Philosophy, indeed, has no other source, and we might in this respect call it, with much propriety, the doctrine or the science of longing. But even that youthful longing, already noticed, is oftentimes a genuine, or, at least, the first foundation of the higher and truer species, although, unlike the latter, it is as yet neither purely evolved nor refined by the course of time.

. . . This beautiful longing of youth, a fruitful fancy, and a loving soul, are the best and most precious gifts of benignant nature, that dispenses with so liberal a hand, or, rather, not of nature, but of that wonderful Intelligence that presides in and over it. They form, as it were, a fair garden of hidden life within man. But as the first man was placed in the garden of Eden, not merely for his idle enjoyment, but, as it is expressly stated, “to dress it and to keep it,” so here also, when this law of duty is neglected, the inmost heart of the most eminent characters and of the most richly-endowed natures becomes, as it were, a Paradise run wild and waste. . . . 

. . . three forms of man’s higher effort—viz., longing, true love, and genuine enthusiasm . . . As . . . the thinking soul is the living center of the human consciousness, so, on the other hand, the loving soul is the middle point and the foundation of all moral life, as it shows itself in that soul-bond of love, which, while it constitutes marriage, is tied and completed therein. On this union, then, which, as historically represented, appears to be the true commencement of civilized life, it will be necessary to say a few words; and the present seems the most appropriate place for them. Now, both in philosophy and in all general speculation, there are many reasoners who would derive every thing from material sensations, and seek to degrade all that is regarded as high and noble by mankind. So here, also, in the world’s mode of judging of this union—which, however, all publicly-acknowledged principles regard as holy—it, and all that belongs to it, is accounted for by some evanescent passion, some sensual impression, or some interested view or other, while the existence of any thing like true and genuine love is absolutely denied. But, in the first place, in the case of a union which embraces the entire man—his sensuous as well as his rational, or, as I should prefer to say, his earthly no less than his spiritual nature and temperament—it can not fairly be urged in objection to it, that both the elements of his mixed constitution are present in it. On the contrary, it is obviously most unjust, in our estimate of it, violently to separate what, even in the least corrupted disposition and purest characters, are most closely interwoven, or, rather, fused together, and to subject them to an invidious and destructive analysis. This is not the way to determine the characteristics of a true and of a false love. The distinction between them must rather be sought by a simpler method, similar to that which we followed in the case of longing and enthusiasm—by considering merely the total result. A feeling of this kind may appear at the beginning never so violent; it may even amuse itself with a thorough mental hallucination, which betrays itself in its very outward aspect, with the profoundest veneration, nay, deification of its admired object; but in married life this intense admiration soon gives place to satiety or indifference, and imbittered by mutual distrust and misunderstanding, it terminates in incurable discord. In such a case the feeling, even in its ardent beginnings, was no true love, but simply passion. But in those happy unions, where the first passionate ardor of youth yields only to an ever-growing and still purer development of mutual good-will and confidence—while self-sacrifice and patient endurance, both in good and evil fortune, do but cherish the same deep affection and calm friendship—here, from the very first, it was true and genuine love. For, however much the outward appearances of human life may seem to contradict it, there is not in nature, and even in the higher region, any love without a return. And as all true love is reciprocal, so also is true love lasting and indestructible; or, to “speak as a man,” even because it is the very inmost life of humanity, it is, therefore, true unto death.

Something Worth Living For

Henry David Thoreau, Journal, March 31, 1852 (emphasis mine):

Why the moaning of the storm gives me pleasure. Methinks it is be cause it puts to rout the trivialness of our fair-weather life and gives it at least a tragic interest. The sound has the effect of a pleasing challenge, to call forth our energy to resist the invaders of our life's territory. It is musical and thrilling, as the sound of an enemy's bugle. Our spirits revive like lichens in the storm. There is something worth living for when we are resisted, threatened. As at the last day we might be thrilled with the prospect of the grandeur of our destiny, so in these first days our destiny appears grander. What would the days, what would our life, be worth, if some nights were not dark as pitch,—of darkness tangible or that you can cut with a knife? How else could the light in the mind shine? How should we be conscious of the light of reason? If it were not for physical cold, how should we have discovered the warmth of the affections? I sometimes feel that I need to sit in a far-away cave through a three weeks' storm, cold and wet, to give a tone to my system. The spring has its windy March to usher it in, with many soaking rains reaching into April. Methinks I would share every creature's suffering for the sake of its experience and joy. The song sparrow and the transient fox-colored sparrow,—have they brought me no message this year? Do they go to lead heroic lives in Rupert's Land? They are so small, I think their destinies must be large. Have I heard what this tiny passenger has to say, while it flits thus from tree to tree? Is not the coming of the fox-colored sparrow something more earnest and significant than I have dreamed of? Can I forgive myself if I let it go to Rupert's Land before I have appreciated it? God did not make this world in jest; no, nor in indifference. These migrating sparrows all bear messages that concern my life. I do not pluck the fruits in their season. I love the birds and beasts because they are mythologically in earnest. I see that the sparrow cheeps and flits and sings adequately to the great design of the universe; that man does not communicate with it, understand its language, because he is not at one with nature. I reproach myself because I have regarded with indifference the passage of the birds; I have thought them no better than I.