The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot.

To come to agree with what is great and to allow it to be valid is nothing but an insight; to celebrate it, however, is exuberance because there what is great appears transfigured and cannot be surpassed. To apply it in one’s interactions with others constitutes wisdom and spells the utmost success. But the task of all tasks is to transform what is insignificant into greatness, what is inconspicuous into radiance; to present a speck of dust in a way that shows it to be part of the whole so that one cannot see it without also instantly seeing all of the stars and the heavens’ deep coherence to which it intimately belongs.

The widely asked question whether one “believes in god” (as we hear it today) seems to me based on the wrong premise, as if god could be reached at all by means of human striving and overcoming. The term belief has acquired the meaning of something strenuous; especially within Christianity it has assumed this connotation to a degree that one might fear that a kind of reluctance toward god is the soul’s original state. But nothing could be less true. Anyone may take stock of the moment when his interaction with god originates in inexpressible rapture; or he might seize in profound reflection upon one often inconspicuous instant where he had first been moved by god, independent of the influences of his surroundings and often in opposition to them. It will be difficult to identify a life where this experience does not strongly impose itself sooner or later, but it imposes itself with such immeasurably gentle force that most people, being pressured by more explicit realities, do not register it. Or at least it does not enter their mind that this could be a fact of religion because they have been raised to receive religious stimuli only within shared conventions and not where their most solitary and proper essence is in question. And just as the development of a relation to god is blocked by the attitude of religious communities and churches, which preempt the individual’s experience with their statutes and promises and actually distract him from those occasions that would prompt him to become productive in a religious sense, the individual is similarly swept away by the course of conventions in his attitude toward death and frequently lacks the strength to remain at the spot where he could develop his own death experiences in relation to the defining events of his life. The question regarding a “life after death” becomes meaningless as soon as we have to admit that what we summarize with the term life includes only the experiences of the here and now which remain attached to this “here” and to our senses of its perception to such a degree that we would have to find a completely different designation for any “other” life. Such a designation is already given with the term death, which without presumptive-ness or curiosity we may assume to mean everything outside of our earthly existence. Throughout time there have always been those who thought that they had sufficient proof that this so-called death signifies an end, a condition of decay and the harsh disintegration of all living matter, but the very opposite opinion has also always found its supporters and defenders, and they have gone so far as to define death as a more intensive degree of life. Its immobility is then cited as proof of the greater intensity of vibration to which death, consequently more alive than we are, is subject. Our everyday perception would not contradict this: for instance, we still feel the movements of a high-speed train with our entire body while according to our experience we should have to interpret the vastly greater speed of the earth as a standstill.

To me (since you ask), it has seemed probable from my youth that death is nothing less than the opposite and refutation of life; my inclination always tended toward making it into the center of life as if we would be housed and sheltered in it quite well as if in the greatest and most profound intimacy. I cannot say that any experience has ever contradicted this assumption; yet I have also always refrained from imagining this being-in-death in any way, and all existing descriptions of a “beyond” have always left me quite indifferent. The tasks of our earthly existence are so numerous and the millennia of human existence, so far from mastering them, still seem so stuck in early discoveries that nothing seems to authorize us under these circumstances to guess the shape of any future condition instead of unreservedly applying ourselves to the present that is imposed on us for such a short time. I do not mean that we should ignore the secrets around us; but we should consider it our duty to understand how they relate to our current condition and not imprudently give up a point of view where all of our presently available advantages coincide. We do not even know yet how far we can reach from here but surely we increase our tension to the same degree to which we stabilize our position here.

When I entered your business in Winterthur for the first time, I felt quite distinctly but could not yet express what now moves me anew in reading this book [the history of a Swiss trading company]: the idea of trade in its humane immediacy and purity. This language used by continents among themselves whose carriers are the things that we use and value; these materials and what can be extracted and derived from them with care. And how this idea throughout its infinite application and inevitable complication over the centuries has forfeited none of its originality and youthfulness: how the lure of what is strange and remote remains one of its driving forces; the heartfelt curiosity in the joy of trading and the inexhaustible astonishment to encounter a product brought here from far away that is so different, so essentially valuable, so pure in its setting, so at one with its scent. And also this joy: to trade it in for something native that appears, according to its climate, more basic and inconspicuous.

If someone were to burst into song at the spot intended for him, even if that meant while working a machine or using a plow (which would be a quite privileged position!), that is of course acceptable; and yet it would be wrong to invoke people’s professions constantly in order to invalidate the position of someone who writes as an artist (I avoid the horrid term author of fiction). Nobody would dream of pushing a rope maker, carpenter, or shoemaker away from their craft and “into life” so that they would become better rope makers, carpenters, or shoemakers. Musicians, painters, and sculptors likewise should be permitted to work in ways in which they are meant to work. Only in the case of the writer, the craft appears so insignificant, so accomplished from the beginning (anyone can write) that some are of the opinion that a writer left alone with his task would immediately indulge in free play! But what an error! To know how to write, god knows, is no less “difficult craftsmanship”—all the more so since the material used by other artists has from the beginning been set apart from its daily use, while the poet’s task is heightened by the peculiar obligation to distinguish his word thoroughly and essentially from the words used in plain exchange and communication. No word in a poem (I here mean each and or the or a) is identical with the same-sounding word in a conversation. Its conformity to a purer set of laws and the way a word in verse or artistic prose is placed into a greater context and constellation: all these transform each word deep in the core of its nature, and render it useless, unusable for mere exchange, untouchable and lasting.

Art is directed against nature: it is the most passionate inversion of the world, the return path from infinity where all honest things now face us. There, on this path, they can now be seen in their entirety, their faces come closer and their movements become more distinct—but who are we to be allowed to proceed in this direction facing them all, to carry out this eternal reversal that deceives them by making them believe that we had already arrived somewhere, at some destination, and that now we can leisurely retrace our steps?

Places, landscapes, animals, things: in reality all of this knows nothing of us—we pass through it the way an image passes through a mirror. We pass through: this sums up our entire relation, and the world is shut off like an image; there is no place where we can enter. And yet this is why all of this is of such great help for us: the landscape, this tree leafed through by the wind, this thing surrounded by the afternoon and occupied with itself, like all things— because we cannot pull any of this with us into our uncertainty, into our danger, into our obscure and unenlightened heart, this is the reason why all of this helps us. Have you never noticed that this is the magic of art and its tremendous and heroic strength: that it mistakes us for this most alien dimension and transforms it into us and us into it, and that it shifts our suffering into things and reflects the unconscious and innocence of all things back into us out of rapidly turned mirrors?

Fame is nothing but the sum of all the misunderstandings that cluster around a new name .