A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN TWO CORNERS
forces. And the intellectual mood that at present so torments and
obsesses you-your acute sense that the cultural heritage you bear is
an enormous burden-derives essentially from experiencing culture
not as a living treasury of gifts, but as a system of the subtlest com–
pulsions. No wonder: for culture has actually attempted to become
a system of compulsions. But for me it is the ladder of Eros and a
hierarchy of devotions. And around me there are so many things and
persons that inspire me with veneration, from man and his tools, and
his great labor, and his insulted dignity, to the minerals, that I find
it sweet to drown in this
sea-naufragar mi e dolce in questo mare
-in other words, to drown in God. For my venerations are free–
none is obligatory, and each is open and accessible, and in each my
mind rejoices. True, each veneration, as it passes into love, discovers
with the keen eye of love an inner tragedy and a tragic guilt in every–
thing that has severed itself from the sources of being and is isolated
in itself: under each rose of life there appears the outline of the
cross from which it flowered. But even this is the longing for God–
the attraction of the moth-soul to the fiery death. He who does not
know this fundamental attraction, he, in the true and profound words
of Goethe, is sick with another longing, even though he may never
remove his mask of gaiety-he is a "gloomy visitor on the dark
earth."
Our true freedom, our noblest happiness and noblest suffering
are always with us, and no culture can take it away from us. In–
firmity of the flesh is worse, for the spirit is valiant, while the flesh
is weak; a man is more defenseless before want and disease than be–
fore dead idols. He cannot shake off the hateful yoke of deadening
tradition
if
he seeks to abolish it by violence, because it will grow on
him
again of itself-just as the hump is inseparable from the camel
even when he throws his load from his back-but the spirit liberates
itself from this yoke only by taking on another "light yqke." True,
you say to man enslaved by his own riches: "Become" (
Werde),
but it seems that you are forgetting Goethe's condition: "first die"–
stirb und werde.
But death,
i.e.,
the rebirth of the individual, is pre–
cisely his longed-for liberation. Bathe in the waters of a spring-and
be consumed in flames. This is always possible-any morning, since
the spirit awakens with every dawn.
V.I.
955
