A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN TWO CORNERS
I repeat, the crux of the matter is not the compulsiveness of
which you write, but the temptation; and temptation is more com–
pulsive than violence. Abstract reason, through the temptation of
objective truth, imposes its discoveries on the individual. You say
that after throwing off the burden, we shall inevitably begin to amass
it over again. Thus, there is no difference of opinion-we cannot get
rid of our reason and we cannot change its nature. But I know and
believe in the possibility of another thrust of creativeness and an–
other culture that will not congeal each cognition into a dogma, that
will not dry every blessing into a mummy and every value into a
fe~h.
Mter all, I am not alone-within these stone walls many
are being suffocated. And you, a poet, would you have become ac–
customed to living here without protest if you did not possess the
happy gift of soaring away by inspiration, at least occasionally and
for a short while, beyond the walls, into a free expanse, into the
realm of spirit? I follow your flights with envious eyes, yours and
those of other contemporary poets: there is an expanse, and mankind
has wings! But my eyes-or is it their fault?- see something else too:
the wings have grown heavier, and the flight of Apollo's swans is
not high. Indeed, how can the poet preserve the force and freshness
of innate inspiration in our enlightened era? At the age of thirty
he has read so many books, has so often discoursed on philosophical
themes, and has become so saturated with the abstract intellectuality
of
his
companions!
And here I will take occasion to answer your last appeal. That
rebirth of the personality, its true liberation of which you speak in
the end, the
Flammentod
of Goethe, is also an elan and a flight of
spirit related to poetic aspiration, but incomparably bolder and more
resolute. That is why such events are so rare in our days, incompar–
ably rarer even than artistic works of genius. "The cultural heritage"
presses upon individuality with a weight of sixty atmospheres-–
and its yoke, by virtue of its temptation, is indeed a light yoke;
the majority do not feel it at all, and he who does feel
it
and rushes
upward- let
him
try
to break through that density! For all of it is
not above his head, but in himself; he is plainly heavy in himself, and
perhaps only the wings of genius can raise his spirit above his own
heavy consciousness.
M.G.
959
