eikona

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is — solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate — ?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), might young people use the love that is given them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and gather for a long, long time still), is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives as yet scarcely suffice.

Ready-made knowledge can only be memorized; knowledge is not truly our own until we are capable of reproducing the given content in a form of our own making. Memorizing is but a negative condition; true...organic assimilation is impossible without inner transformation of what we learn. All rules for study are summed up in this one: learn only in order to create. Only by his divine capacity for production is man truly a man; without it, no more than a tolerably well-devised machine. He who has not—with the same high impulse as the artist who out of the raw material calls forth the image of his soul—his own invention, who has not fashioned the image of his science in all its parts and features in perfect harmony with the archetype, has not truly grasped it.

Here, [the German philosopher Georg W.F.] Hegel’s concept of objective spirit turns into the principle of information. Information enters between thoughts and things as a third value, between the pole of reflection and the pole of the thing, between spirit and matter. Intelligent machines — like all artifices that are culturally created — eventually also compel the recognition of spirit. Reflection or thought is infused into matter and remains there ready to be re-found and further cultivated. Machines and artifices are thus memories or reflections turned objective.

Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don't possess even ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn't mine: it's me.

Travel is for those who cannot feel. That's why travel books are always so unsatisfying as books of experience. They're worth only as much as the imagination of those who writes them, and if the writer has imagination, he can as easily enchant us with the detailed, photographic description – down to each tiny coloured pennant – of scenes he imagines as he can with the necessarily less detailed description of the scenes he thought he saw. All of us are near-sighted, except on the inside. Only the eyes we use for dreaming truly see.