The Poet's Guide to Life Read Online

And schools continue only what the parents had already begun. It is a systematic battle against the child’s personality. It despises the individual, his wishes and desires, and it considers its task to push this individual down to the level of the masses. One need only read the life-stories of all great individuals; they became great always in spite of school and not because of it.

As peculiar as this may sound under current conditions, in school life has to undergo a transformation. If life is anywhere to become broader, deeper, more human, this has to happen in school. Afterward, it quickly hardens in professions and fates, no longer has time to change, and has to work its effects the way it is. In school, however, there is time and quietness and space: time for every kind of development, quiet for every voice, space for all of life and all of its values and things.

A series of unspeakable errors has turned school into the opposite: increasingly, life and reality have been pushed out of it. School was supposed to be nothing but school, and life was something completely different. It was supposed to come only later, after school, and it was supposed to be something for adults (as if children were not alive, as if they were not in the center of life).

Due to this incomprehensible, unnatural strangulation, school has died off. All of its content has ossified into rigid clumps because it lacked the movements of life.

All knowledge that school has to offer ought to be distributed enthusiastically and generously, without restriction and reservations, unintentionally and by an impassioned individual. All subjects ought to deal with life as the one subject matter that is intended by all the other ones. Then all subjects would at their outer limits touch once again upon the great contexts which continually give birth to religion.

Don’t children endure the most violent upsets so incredibly because they live in a state without expectation or suspicion and do not know that transformations can suddenly erupt?

I would like to believe that very small children experience themselves through tremendous intensities of pleasure, pain, and sleep. Later, then, there are periods when being in physical pain remains just about the only example of our own intensity, given how distractedly life deals with us.

Children are at rest in love (was I ever allowed to?), but then they are also pure in the state of deception that it would be possible to belong to someone. And whenever they say “mine,” they do not make a claim of ownership but hold something tight and then let go, or when they actually hold on, then it is god—to whom they are still obscurely linked—who pulls everyone else toward him through these innocently open arms.

This is what it means to be young: this thorough faith in the most beautiful surprises, this joy in daily discovery.

Just think: is childhood not difficult in all of its unexplained contexts? Are the years of girlhood not difficult—don’t they pull the head like so much long and heavy hair into the depth of great sadness? And nothing is supposed to change; if life then suddenly becomes more bearable, more carefree, and more joyful for many, this is only the case because they have stopped taking it seriously and actually bearing it and feeling it and filling it with their most authentic selves. This is not progress as life intends it. This is a renunciation of all of its expanses and opportunities. What is asked of us is that we love what is difficult and learn to handle what is difficult and heavy. In difficulty there are the benign forces, the hands that work on us. In the midst of difficulty we are meant to experience our joy, our happiness, our dreams: there, against the depth of this background, they become visible and only there we may recognize their beauty. And only in the darkness of difficulty our precious smile attains its meaning: only there it shines with its deep and dreamy light, and in the brightness that it spreads momentarily we behold the wonders and treasures all around us.

With only slight exaggeration I would say that we are not; we continually constitute ourselves anew and differently at the intersection of all those influences that reach into the sphere of our being.

There is no possibility of catching up with anything we missed, given how the world is both outside and inside so very full of that which is always most immediate.

ON NATURE

It Knows Nothing of Us

It is difficult to live in this world because there exists little love between nature and man and between man and god. Man does not need to love either nature or god—but he has to comport himself in relation to him the same way nature does.

We play with dark forces that cannot be captured with the names we give them, like children playing with fire, and it seems for a moment as if all energy had rested dormant in all objects until now, until we arrived to apply it to our fleeting life and its requirements. But, again and again throughout millennia, those forces shake off their names and rise like an oppressed class against their little masters, or not even against them—they simply rise and the various cultures slide off the shoulders of the earth, which is once again great and expansive and alone with its oceans, trees, and stars.

What does it mean that we transform the outermost surface of the earth, that we groom its forests and meadows and extract coal and minerals from its crust, that we receive the fruits from the trees as if they were meant for us, if we were only to recall even a single hour when nature acted beyond us, beyond our hopes, beyond our lives, with that sublime highness and indifference that fill all of its gestures. It knows nothing of us. And whatever human beings might have accomplished, not one has yet reached such greatness that nature shared in his pain or would have joined in his rejoicing. Sometimes nature accompanied great and eternal hours of history with its mighty, roaring music, or the winds seemed to stop when a decision was pending, all nature standing still with bated breath, or it would surround an instant of harmless social happiness with waving blossoms, swaying butterflies and leaping winds—but only in order to turn away the next moment and to abandon the one with whom it had just seemed to share everything.

The final and most profound element of which the great objects of art have been made exists in all of nature; it grows with every field, every skylark knows of it, and nothing else but it forces the trees into full bloom. Yet in nature it is concealed (while in objects of art it is held up in a breathless silence—like a monstrance); it is scattered about and nearly lost (while art objects contain it: gathered, recovered, preserved forever). And the difficult, arduous path of our development, obstructed in hundreds of ways, entails the recognition of greatness, spiritual necessity, and infinity ultimately in those areas where it cannot be captured in a single glance, where it is nearly impossible to seize it altogether except if one toils like Cinderella. Life is severe and unyielding like the step-mothers and evil queens of the fairy tale, but it also harbors those sweet and diligent forces that ultimately will finish the tasks for those who are patient and good but who cannot master them alone.

What we experience as spring, god views as a fleeting, tiny smile that passes over the earth. The earth seems to be remembering something, and in the summertime she tells everyone about it until she grows wiser during that great autumnal silence with which she confides in those who are alone. Even when taken together, all the springs that you and I have experienced are not enough to fill even one of god’s seconds.