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sentness-the sudden rearing of the life-process to a point where both
past and future are irrelevant. Thus the adventure gathers life within
itself with an intensity compared with which the event in its factuality
often becomes of relative indifference. Just as the game itself-not
the winning of money-is the decisive motive for the true gambler;
just as for him, what is important is the violence of feeling alternat–
ing between joy and despair, the almost graspable nearness of the
demonic powers that decide between both-so the fascination of the
adventure is again and again not the substance it offers but rather
the adventurous form of experiencing it, the intensity and excite–
ment with which it lets us feel life in just this instance. This is what
connects youth and adventure. What is called the subjectivity of youth
is just this: the material of life in its substantive significance is not
as important to youth as is the process carrying it, life itself. Old
age is "objective"; it shapes a new structure out of the substance left
behind in a peculiar sort of timelessness by the life which has slipped
by. The new structure is that of contemplativeness, impartial judg–
ment, freedom from that unrest which marks life as present. It is
all
this that makes adventure alien to old age and an old adventurer
an obnoxious or tasteless phenomenon. It would not be difficult to
develop the whole essence of adventure from the fact that it is the
form of life which is in principle inappropriate to old age.
Notwithstanding the fact that so much of life is hostile to ad–
venture, from the most general point of view adventure appears ad–
mixed with all practical human existence.
It
seems to be an ubiqui–
tous element. But it frequently occurs in the finest distribution, in–
visible to the naked eye, as it were, and concealed by other elements.
This is true quite aside from that notion which, reaching down into
the metaphysics of life, considers our existence on earth as a unitary
adventure. Viewed purely from a concrete and psychological stand–
point, every single experience contains a modicum of the character–
istics which, beyond a certain point, bring it to the "threshold" of
adventure. Here the most essential and profound of these charac–
teristics is the singling out of the experience from the total context
of life. In point of fact, the meaning of no single part of life is ex–
hausted by its belonging in that context. On the contrary, even when
a part is most closely interwoven with the whole, when it really ap–
pears to be completely absorbed by onflowing life, like an unaccented
