THE ADVENTURE
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in which the mystical destination of two souls for one another and
for a higher unity finds a temporal expression. This duality might be
compared with the double existence of intellectual content. While
emerging only in the fleetingness of the psychic process, in the for–
ever moving focus of consciousness, its logical meaning possesses time–
less validity, an ideal significance which is completely independent
of the instant of consciousness in which it becomes real for us. The
phenomenon of adventure is such that its abrupt climax places its
end into the perspective of its beginning. However, its connection
with the center of life is such that it is to be distinguished from all
merely accidental happenings. Thus "mortal danger" lies in its very
style, so to speak. This phenomenon, therefore, is a form which by its
time-symbolism seems to be predetermined to receive the erotic
content....
In youth, the accent falls on the process of life, on its rhythm
and its antinomies; in old age, on life's substance, compared to which
experience more and more appears relatively incidental. This contrast
between youth and age, which makes .adventure the prerogative of
youth, may be expressed as the contrast between the romantic and
the historical spirit of life. Life in its immediacy-hence
also
in the
individuality of its form at anyone moment, here and now--counts
for the romantic attitude. Youth feels the full strength of the current
of life most of all in the pointedness of an experience torn out of
the normal run of things yet connected with the heart of life. Age,
on the other hand-if, as such, it has a characteristic, valuable, and
coherent attitude-carries with it a historical mood.
This
mood may
be broadened into a world-view or limited to the immediately
per–
sonal past; at any rate, in its objectivity and retrospective reflective–
ness it is devoted to contemplating a substance of life out of whioh
immediacy has disappeared. All history as depiction in the narrower,
scientific sense originates in such a survival of substance beyond the
present inexpressible process that can only be experienced. The con–
nections this process has established are gone, and must now, in re–
trospect, and with a view to constructing an ideal image, be re-estab–
lished by completely different means.
With thi.s shift of accent, all the dynamic premise of the adven–
ture disappears. Its atmosphere, as suggested before, is absolute pre-
