"I have nothing that I may call my own.
Distant and dead are my loved ones, and I hear nothing more of them from any voice.
My business on earth is over. I set to work full of will; I bled over my labor, and made the world not a penny richer.
Ingloriously and alone I return, and wander through my fatherland that lies all around me like a garden of the dead, and perhaps awaiting me is the knife of the hunter, who holds us Greeks for his pleasure just as he does the game of the forest.
But you still shine, sun of the heavens! You still grow green, holy earth! Still the rivers rush into the sea, and shady trees rustle at midday. Spring’s song of bliss sings my mortal thoughts to sleep. The fullness of the all-living world nourishes and satiates my starving being with intoxication.
O blessed nature! I do not know what befalls me when I raise my eyes before your beauty, but all the pleasure of heaven is in the tears that I weep before you, the beloved before his beloved.
My whole being falls silent and hearkens when the tender surge of the air plays about my breast. Often, lost in the wide blue, I look up at the ether and into the holy sea, and I feel as if a kindred spirit opened its arms to me, as if the pain of solitude dissolved into the life of the divinity.
To be one with all – that is the life of the divinity, that is the heaven of man.
To be one with all that lives, to return in blessed self-oblivion into the All of nature, that is the summit of thoughts and joys, that is the holy mountain height, the place of eternal repose, where the midday loses its swelter and the thunder its voice and the boiling sea resembles the billowing field of grain.
To be one with all that lives! With these words virtue removes its wrathful armor, the spirit of man lays its scepter aside and all thoughts vanish before the image of the world’s eternal unity, just as the rules of the struggling artist vanish before his Urania; and iron fate abdicates its power, and death vanishes from the union of beings, and indivisibility and eternal youth bless and beautify the world.
I often stand at this height, my Bellarmin! but a moment of reflection hurls me down. I reflect and find myself as I was before, alone, with all the pains of mortality; and the asylum of my heart, the world’s eternal unity, is gone; nature closes her arms and I stand like a stranger before her and do not comprehend her.
O! had I never gone to your schools. Knowledge, which I pursued down into the shaft, and from which in my youthful folly I expected confirmation of my pure joy, has corrupted everything for me.
Among you I became so perfectly rational, learned so thoroughly to distinguish myself from what surrounds me that I am now isolated in the beautiful world, cast out of the garden of nature, where I grew and bloomed, and am drying up under the midday sun.
O man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he thinks, and when enthusiasm is gone, he stands there like a wayward son whom the father has driven out of the house and regards the meager pennies that pity gave him for the journey."
gummygunk
2087
turnnoffyourmind
stormborns
