But not in a Christian sense (from which I distance myself with increasing fervor) and instead in a purely earthly, deeply earthly, blissfully earthly consciousness it is our task to place what we see and touch here into the wider and widest context. Not into a beyond whose shadow darkens the earth but into a whole, into the whole. Nature and all of the objects of our daily use are preliminary and frail; as long as we are here, however, they are our possession and our friendship, accessories to our suffering and joy, just as they had been the intimates of our predecessors. It is thus our task not only not to malign and take down everything that is here but rather, because of the transience which we have in common with it, to comprehend and transform with an innermost consciousness these appearances and things. Transform? Yes, for it is our task to impress this provisional, transient earth upon ourselves so deeply, so agonizingly, and so passionately that its essence rises up again “invisibly” within us. We are the bees of the invisible. We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.

How good life is. How fair, how incorruptible, how impossible to deceive: not even by strength, not even by willpower, and not even by courage. How everything remains what it is and has only this choice: to come true, or to exaggerate and push too far . . .

All of our insights occur after the fact.

I basically do not believe that it matters to be happy in the sense in which people expect to be happy. But I can so absolutely understand the kind of arduous happiness that consists in rousing forces through a determined effort, forces that then start to work upon one’s self.

History is not all of humanity but only an index of the water levels, of the low tides and floods; it is not the rushing water itself, nor the current nor the river’s bed. The surges and destructions by which men are occupied, impassioned, elevated, and annihilated can be nothing but an allegory, like a retracing and vanishing of invisible architectures that constitute the true world-shape of our existence. In life, in all of its forms, the static principle, which is our ultimate concern, has been realized: the principle that does not consist in establishing ourselves continually anew in instability but in coming to rest in the center to which we return from each risk and change. There you rest like a die in a cup. Surely, an unknown gambler’s hand shakes the cup, casts you out, and out there you count upon landing either for a lot or very little. But after the die has been cast, you are put back into the cup and there, inside, in the cup, no matter how you come to lie, you signify all of its numbers, all of its sides. And there, inside the cup, luck or misfortune are of no concern, but only bare existence, being a die, having six sides, six chances, always again all of them—along with the peculiar certainty of not being able to cast oneself out on one’s own and the pride in knowing that it takes a divine wager for anyone to be rolled from deep within this cup onto the table of the world and into the game of fate. This is the actual meaning of A Thousand and One Nights and the root of its suspense for those listening to these stories: that the porter, the beggar, the herder of camels—anyone who was cast without adding up to much—is scooped back into the cup to be wagered once more. And that it is the world into which one tumbles, among stars, to girls, children, dogs, and garbage; that there is nothing unclear about the circumstances into which one may fall. There might be something too great or too evil, too deceptive or plainly doomed there . . . but one is dealing either with other dice or with the throws and ghosts that shake the cups and wager their own stake in doing so. It is an honest game, unpredictable, and always begun anew, beyond one and yet played in a way that no one is ever worthless even for an instant, or bad, or shameful: for who can be responsible for falling this way or that out of the cup?

How old one would have to become to have truly admired enough and not to lag behind with regard to anything in the world. There is still so much that one underestimates, overlooks, and misrecognizes. God, how many opportunities and examples that invite us to become something—and in response to those, how much sluggishness, distractedness, and half-will on our side.

What we all need most urgently now: to realize that transience is not separation—for we, transient as we are, have it in common with those who have passed from us, and they and we exist together in one being where separation is just as unthinkable. Could we otherwise understand such poems if they had been nothing but the utterance of someone who was going to be dead in the future? Don’t such poems continually address inside of us, in addition to what is found there now, also something unlimited and unrecognizable? I do not think that the spirit can make itself anywhere so small that it would concern only our temporal existence and our here and now: where it surges toward us there we are the dead and the living all at once.

I believe in old age; to work and to grow old: this is what life expects of us. And then one day to be old and still be quite far from understanding everything—no, but to begin, but to love, but to suspect, but to be connected to what is remote and inexpressible, all the way up into the stars.

How wonderful to grow old when one has worked on life like a true craftsman; then there are no memories left that have not become thing, then there is nothing that has passed away: everything is there, real, ravishingly real, it is there and is and has been acknowledged by and entered into something greater, and it is linked to the most remote past and impregnated with future.

Is it not peculiar that nearly all of the great philosophers and psychologists have always paid attention to the earth and nothing but the earth? Would it not be more sublime to lift our eyes from this crumb, and instead of considering a speck of dust in the universe, to turn our attention to space itself? Just imagine how small and insignificant all earthly toils would suddenly appear at the moment when our earth would shrink to the tiniest, swirling, aimless particle of an infinite world! And how the human being would have to grow in size on his “small earth”!

Peculiar. Each bird that builds its home under the roof beams first examines the spot it has chosen and over which a minuscule part of its life shall now be dispersed.