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was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me.
People with courage and character always seem weird to other people. It was very uncomfortable to have a race of fearless, weird people running around,
I fled back to where I had earlier been happy and contented: to the lost paradise that was opening up again, to the bright world of my father and mother, to my sisters, to the fragrance of purity, to Abel’s desire to please God.
ghostly, and yet tremendously alive world, in Gethsemane and on Golgotha; and when I heard Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, the somberly powerful glow of sorrow from that mysterious world had washed over me with all its mystical thrills. Even today I find in that composition, and in the Actus Tragicus,4 the embodiment of all poetry and all artistic expression.
The thing in you that constitutes your life, already knows why. It’s so good to know this: that inside us there’s a self that knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves do.—But excuse me, I must get home.” Our
There was no duty for enlightened people, none, none, except this: to seek themselves, to become certain of themselves, to grope forward along their own path, wherever it might lead.—I was deeply affected by that, and for me that was the profit from that experience. I had often played with images of the future, I had dreamt of roles that might be meant for me, as a poet, perhaps, or as a prophet, or as a painter, or whatever else. That was all meaningless. I didn’t exist to write poetry, to preach sermons, to paint pictures; neither I nor anyone else existed for that purpose. All of that
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A person wasn’t allowed to choose any of that, he wasn’t allowed to want anything. He was only allowed to want himself, his own destiny. Pistorius had served me as a guide for the stretch of the path that led up to that point.
No matter what they chose to believe and think—they were ready, they were useful, the future could be formed from them. And no matter how inflexibly the world was clamoring for war and heroism, honor and other outmoded ideals, no matter how remote and unlikely every voice that apparently spoke up for humanity sounded, all of that was merely superficial, just as the question of the external and political aims of the war remained superficial. Deep down, something was evolving. Something like a new humanity.
