(perhaps by chance).

Finally—we know this—life’s little wisdom is to wait (but to wait in the proper, pure state of mind), and the great grace that is bestowed on us in return is to survive . . .

How tremendous both life and death are as long as one does not incessantly consider both of them to be part of one greater whole while making hardly any distinctions between them. But this is precisely a task for angels and not our task, or rather ours only as an exception that might occur during moments that have been brought into existence slowly and painfully.

You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but according to its depth. One does not have to do what comes next if one feels a greater affinity with that which happens later, at a remove, even in a remote distance. One may dream while others are saviors if these dreams are more real to oneself than reality and more necessary than bread. In a word: one ought to turn the most extreme possibility inside oneself into the measure for one’s life, for our life is vast and can accommodate as much future as we are able to carry.

Life has long since preempted every later possible impoverishment through its astoundingly immeasurable riches. So what is there for us to be afraid of? Only that this should be forgotten! But all around us, within us, how many ways of helping us remember!

The following realization rivals in its significance a religion: that once the background melody has been discovered one is no longer baffled in one’s speech and obscure in one’s decisions. There is a carefree security in the simple conviction that one is part of a melody, which means that one legitimately occupies a specific space and has a specific duty toward a vast work where the least counts as much as the greatest. Not to be extraneous is the first condition for an individual to consciously and quietly come into his own.

I want to thank you briefly for your letter; I can understand all of it quite well and can even follow you into your sadness, into this sadness that I know so deeply and which may of course be explained . . . And yet this sadness is nothing but a sensitive spot within us, always the same spot, one of those that can no longer be located once they begin to ache so that we fail to recognize and treat it when we are numb with pain. I know all of this. There is a kind of joy that is quite similar—and somehow we might have to get beyond both of them. I just recently thought that when I spent a few days climbing the steep mountains of Anacapri and was so filled with joy up there, so strenuously joyful in my soul. We let go of one or the other always yet again: this joyfulness and that sadness. We still do not own either of them. What do we amount to as long as we can get up and a wind, a gleam, a song wrought of the voices of a few birds in the air can seize us and do whatever it wants with us? It is good to hear all of this and to see it and to seize it, not to become numb toward it but on the contrary: everything is to be felt in countless ways in all its variations yet without losing ourselves to it. I once said to Rodin on an April day filled with spring: “How this [springtime] dissolves us and how we have to contribute to it with our own juices and make an effort to the point of exhaustion—don’t you also know this?” And he, who surely knew on his own how to seize spring, with a quick glance: “Ah—I have never paid attention to that.” That is what we have to learn: not to pay attention to certain things, to be too concentrated to touch in some sensitive spot the things that can never be reached with one’s entire being, to feel everything only with all of life—then much (that is too narrow) will be excluded but everything important will take place . . .

Life is so very true, when taken in its entirety, that even the lie (if it does not emanate from base motives) gloriously shares in this unwavering truth.

Life goes on, and it goes past a lot of people in a distance, and around those who wait it makes a detour.

Do not believe that everything strong and beautiful will end up as something “ugly and ordinary,” as you put it at this moment of inner turmoil—it cannot end this way because it does not end at all if it was something strong and beautiful. It continues to work its effects in unceasing transformations; it is only that these transformations frequently so vastly exceed our capacity to grasp and endure them. Frequently, when we are frozen by an event or if an event sheds its leaves and petals in front of our eyes in some other violent way, we dig up the soil around it in horror and shrink back from the ugliness of its roots where that which looks to us like transience lives. We have such a limited capacity to be just toward all phenomena and we are so quick to call ugly, as if turning spitefully and vengefully against ourselves, anything that simply does not correspond to the notion of beauty to which we subscribe at that moment. This is often nothing more than a—though often nearly intolerable—shifting of our attention; the clustered appearances of life are still so terribly disconnected and incompatible for our perception. Take a walk in the woods on a spring day. It’s enough for us to allow our gaze to wander briefly into another category of existence to be facing destruction and disintegration rather than to be looking at life, and to perceive instead of joy, desolation; to feel instead of harmonious vibrations petrified, even exiled, from any insight and participation and commonality. But what does this say against spring? What against the forest? What against us? What, finally, against our possibilities to relate to and to recognize each other? Wherever our attention is thus redirected in our soul, in our interiority, it is of course all the more assaulting and disturbing— but one would call this shift “ugly and common” only if one recognized it as nothing but a conventional disillusionment or disappointment and not as the task to grasp an unceasingly particular, unique and incomparable metamorphosis in all of its peculiar reality.

Wherever we expect something great, it is of course not this or that particular thing that we expect, and it is altogether impossible to count on and expect anything at all since what is at stake is the unexpected, the unforeseen. There is no one less puzzled by the slowness of this process since the experience of my days is measured according to the great intervals of artistic growth.

How peculiar, the way life works.