And the human being, meanwhile, is entirely satisfied with approximately and scarcely knowing the earth and leaves the wide worlds above to waver and to change their ways. Does it not seem as if we are still positioned quite low since our gaze is so consistently fixed on the ground?
We have to be committed not to miss or neglect any opportunity to suffer, to have an experience, or to be happy; our soul arises refreshed from all of that. It has a resting place at those heights that are difficult to reach, and it is at home where one can advance no further: up there we have to carry it. But as soon as we put it down for dead at those extreme spots it awakens and takes flight into skies and celestial depths that from now on belong to us.
I confess that I consider life to be a thing of the most untouchable deliciousness, and that even the confluence of so many disasters and deprivations, the exposure of countless fates, everything that insurmountably increased for us over the past few years to become a still rising terror cannot distract me from the fullness and goodness of existence that is inclined toward us. There would be little sense in approaching you with good wishes if each wish were not preceded by this conviction that the goods of life arise pure, undamaged, and, at their very bottom, desirable out of upheaval and ruin.
ON BEING WITH OTHERS
To Be a Part, That Is Fulfillment for Us
To be a part, that is fulfillment for us: to be integrated with our solitude into a state that can be shared.
All disagreement and misunderstanding originate in the fact that people search for commonality within themselves instead of searching for it in the things behind them, in the light, in the landscape, in beginning and in death. By so doing they lose themselves and gain nothing in turn.
Injustice has always been a part of human movements; it is inherent to them. If one knows a way into the future one must not lose time by avoiding injustices; one simply has to overcome them through action.
This is one of the most unconditional tasks of friendship: to be pure in every No, wherever one is not absolutely flooded with the most infinite Yes.
If one could only look back at every human countenance that had even just once seriously and openly turned toward us, without any self-reproach for having betrayed or overlooked it. But one lives in the density of one’s own body, which imposes its particular measure already in purely physical terms (because after all there is nothing to go on but this physical I), and since one lives, I think, in the awkwardness of this body and confined and imprisoned by the surrounding world in which one moves . . . one is not always as free, as loving, and as innocent as one should be able to be according to one’s proper resources and convictions. And frequently insecurity and distractedness limit us further. What bighearted confidence in oneself would be needed to respond to every voice that reaches us with the truest sense of hearing and the most undistracted reply.
But there is something that I do not grasp. Do you know it? How as a young person, as a young girl, can one go off in order to take care of unknown, sick people? I very much would like to admire such behavior, and I have the sense that one cannot admire it nearly enough. But something in this conviction bothers me. I am concerned that our times are responsible for such disproportionate decisions. Is there not something in them that dissolves for many generous and strong intentions their natural point of application? You should imagine that this touches me quite in the same way as the fact that all the greatest paintings and art objects are now in museums where they no longer belong to anyone. Of course, we are told: This is where they belong to everyone. But I cannot get used to this commonality at all; I never manage to believe in it. Are all of the most valuable things truly meant to end up in this commonality? This seems to me, and here I cannot help myself, as if one opened a small flask of rose oil outside and there left it uncorked: surely its strength is now somewhere in the open air but so dispersed and spread out that this most intense of all scents must now be considered lost for our senses. I am not sure if you recognize what I mean.
Before a human being thinks of others he must have been un-apologetically himself; he must have taken the measure of his nature in order to master it and employ it for the benefit of others like himself.
And yet, and yet: how hopeful each individual person is every time again, how real, how well intentioned, how rich. When one then looks at the confused and dreary crowd, it is impossible to grasp that the individual loses himself there in this way as if without a trace.
As soon as two people have resolved to give up their togetherness, the resulting pain with its heaviness or particularity is already so completely part of the life of each individual that the other has to sternly deny himself to become sentimental and feel pity. The beginning of the agreed-upon separation is marked precisely by this pain, and its first challenge will be that this pain already belongs separately to each of the two individuals. This pain is an essential condition of what the now solitary and most lonely individual will have to create in the future out of his reclaimed life.
If two people managed not to get stuck in hatred during their honest struggles with each other, that is, in the edges of their passion that became ragged and sharp when it cooled and set, if they could stay fluid, active, flexible, and changeable in all of their interactions and relations, and, in a word, if a mutually human and friendly consideration remained available to them, then their decision to separate cannot easily conjure disaster and terror.
When it is a matter of a separation, pain should already belong in its entirety to that other life from which you wish to separate. Otherwise the two individuals will continually become soft toward each other, causing helpless and unproductive suffering. In the process of a firmly agreed-upon separation, however, the pain itself constitutes an important investment in the renewal and fresh start that is to be achieved on both sides. People in your situation might have to communicate as friends. But then these two separated lives should remain without any knowledge of the other for a period and exist as far apart and as detached from the other as possible. This is necessary for each life to base itself firmly on its new requirements and circumstances. Any subsequent contact (which may then be truly new and perhaps very happy) has to remain a matter of unpredictable design and direction.
If you find that you scare yourself upon recognizing that you become unbridled and terrifying and even a torment for the other person whom you have conquered in love, then you might wish to conjure a mental counterimage showing that the conquest and ownership of another human being—so that one could use this person then for one’s own (often so fatefully conditioned) pleasure— that the use of another human being does not exist, must not exist, cannot exist—and you will regain the distance and awe that will compel you to adjust your excitement according to the measures established during your courtship.
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