If this were not a bit arrogant, one would like to position oneself outside of it all, on the opposite side of everything that happens just in order not to miss anything at all—even there one would still remain rooted in life’s true center, maybe there even more so than elsewhere, there where all things come together without having a proper name. But ultimately we are also quite attracted and taken in by names, by titles, by the pretexts of life, because the whole is too infinite and we recover from it only by naming it for a while with the name of one love, no matter how much this passionate delimitation then puts us in the wrong, makes us culpable, murders us . . .

Ah, we count the years and introduce divisions here and there and stop and begin anew and waver between these options. But everything that we encounter is so very much of one piece, and so intimately related to everything else, and has given birth to itself, grows, and is then raised so much to come into its own, that we basically just need to be there, if only unassumingly, if only authentically, the way the earth is there in its affirmation of the seasons, light and dark and wholly in space, longing to be supported by nothing but that web of influences and forces where the stars feel secure.

We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric: giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know.

Even the past is still a being in the fullness of its occurrence, if only it is understood not according to its content but by means of its intensity, and we—members of a world that generates movement upon movement, force upon force, and seems to cascade inexorably into less and less visible things—we are forced to rely upon the past’s superior visibility if we want to gain an image of the now muted magnificence that still surrounds us today.

It is, after all, one strength within the human with which we achieve everything, a single steadfastness and pure direction of the heart. Whoever possesses that strength ought not to lose himself to fear.

How is it possible to live since the elements of this life remain entirely beyond our grasp? If we are continually inadequate in love, insecure in making decisions, and incapable in our relation to death, how is it possible to exist? I did not succeed in this book [The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge], although it was born out of deepest inner commitment, to put into words my complete amazement at the fact that human beings have dealt for millennia with life (not even to mention with god) and still face so ineffectually these basic, most immediate, and, in truth, mere tasks (for what else is there to do today and for how much longer?) like so many baffled novices caught between terror and evasion. Is this not incomprehensible? Every time I allow myself to be astonished by this fact I feel myself entering a state of the highest consternation and even a kind of horror, but behind this horror there is something familiar, intimate, and of such intensity that my feelings fail me in deciding whether it is burning hot or icy cold.

It is possible that our nature indeed often takes revenge on us for the inappropriateness and foreignness of what we ask of it, and that between us and our surroundings there run cracks that remain not wholly on the surface. But why did our forebears read about all of those foreign things: by letting these things grow inside them into dreams, wishes, and vague fantastic images, by tolerating that, their heart changed gears, spurred on by some adventurousness or other; when standing at the window with boundless and misunderstood distance inside them and with a gaze that turned its back almost contemptuously on the courtyard and garden out there, they effectively conjured up all of that which we now have to deal with and basically make up for. When they lost sight of their surroundings, which they no longer perceived, they lost sight of all of reality. What was nearby seemed boring and mundane and what was far depended entirely on their mood and imagination. And closeness and distance were forgotten in this way. This is how it became our task not even to decide between proximity and distance, but to assume both and to reunite them as the one reality, which in truth has no divisions or closure and which is not common when it is nearby, but romantic when it is a bit further off, and not boring right here and over there quite entertaining. They were so terribly intent on distinguishing between what was strange and what was common back then; they did not notice how much of each is everywhere most densely intertwined. They saw only that whatever was near did not belong to them, and so they thought that anything of value that can actually be owned they would find abroad, and they longed for it. And their intense and inventive longing seemed proof to them of its beauty and greatness. For they still held on to the view that it is possible for us to take something into ourselves, draw it in and swallow it, while in fact we are so filled up from the beginning that not the tiniest thing could be added. Yet everything can have an effect on us. And all things affect us from a distance, the near as well as the remote things, nothing touches us; everything reaches us across divisions. And just as the most remote stars cannot enter us, the ring on my hand cannot do so either: everything that reaches us can do so only the way a magnet summons and aligns the forces in some susceptible object; in this way, all things can effect a new alignment within us. And in view of this insight, do proximity and distance not simply vanish? And is not this our insight?

I believe that one is never more just than at those moments when one admires unreservedly and with absolute devotion. It is in this spirit of unchecked admiration that the few great individuals whom our time was unable to stifle ought to be presented, precisely because our age has become so very good at assuming a critical stance.

Something is true only next to something else, and I always think the world has been conceived of with sufficient space to encompass everything: that which has been does not need to be cleared from its spot but only needs to be gradually transformed, just as whatever is yet to occur does not fall from the skies at the last moment but resides always already right next to us, around us and within our heart, waiting for the cue that will summon it to visibility.

It seems to me that the only way one can be helpful is to extend one’s hand to someone else involuntarily, and without ever knowing how useful this will be. If love becomes all it can be through willpower, willpower can achieve even more when one wants to help. But the gods alone can procure help, and when they make use of us to accomplish their acts of charity they like to plunge us into impenetrable anonymity.

Even on days when fate wishes to bestow boundless gifts on them, most people make mistakes in accepting: they don’t accept straightforwardly and consequently lose something while doing so, they take with a secondary purpose in mind, or they accept what is given to them as if they were being compensated for something else.

And yet life is transformation: all that is good is transformation and all that is bad as well. For this reason he is in the right who encounters everything as something that will not return. It does not matter whether he then forgets or remembers, as long as he had been fully present only for its duration and been the site, the atmosphere, the world for what happened, as long as it happened within him, in his center, whatever is good and what is bad—then he really has nothing else to fear because something else of renewed significance is always about to happen next. The possibility of intensifying things so that they reveal their essence depends so much on our participation. When things sense our avid interest, they pull themselves together without delay and are all that they can be, and in everything new the old is then whole, only different and vastly heightened.

We of the here and now are not satisfied for one moment in the time-world nor attached to it; we constantly exceed it and pass over to earlier ones, to our origins, and to those that seem to come after us. In that greatest “open” world everyone is not exactly “contemporary” precisely since the disappearance of time causes them all to be. Transience everywhere plunges into a deep being. And thus all the forms found here are to be used not only within temporal limits but as far as possible to be placed by us into those superior realms of significance in which we participate.