- The serene heart.-- The main excuse which is given on behalf of trust is that it can put the soul at ease and lenify the conscience. Yet there exists those souls and those consciences which can be quieted and put to ease only through distrust, through deceit, and through secrecy. It is in these souls that Goethe’s piece of wit, die verteufelt humane Iphigenie, [size=50]1[/size] finds its answer. To this class of soul belongs the poets, who lie with a good conscience and who distrust with a serene heart.
[size=85]1. Devilish humaneness.
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167. Blindness.-- It is the act of creation alone which may bring a man into touch with powers beyond his immediate grasp. It thus deepens our vision. It is for this reason that Milton could never learn to appreciate Shakespeare; the light which he succeeded in relinquishing from his own depths could only be cast upon objects which bore some analogy with his nature. With these new, vital impulses that he discovered within himself he also discovered a new love- a love, however, which was bound to reject everything that did not conform to its expectations; an impulse bound to revile everything which it could not recognize. Contemplation, on the other hand, widens the scope of our vision and equalizes all that falls within it, at the expense of blinding us to the springs of personality which characterize the artist. In either case, artist or thinker, we must accept blindness: in the first case, to everything which is not our own, and in the latter, to everything which we are.
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The true redemption.-- Love sees all things through the veil of passion-- consequently all is bathed in innocence for it. Passion for the sake of passion is innocence.
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The renouncers.-- The philosophers and the poets, much more so than the religious, are the true teachers of that virtue of renunciation. Plato was said to have burned his plays the moment the philosophical instinct arose within him; so too must the philosopher sacrifice his knowledge on behalf of the poet within him. The true poet was born a philosopher, the true philosopher born a poet. To renounce all the beauty of illusion for knowledge and to renounce knowledge for all the beauty of illusion- how immeasurably more difficult than to sacrifice the world for God.
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Art and history.-- Art borrows much of its subject matter from history, but history often borrows even more from art. As Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects. " For us mortals, fantasy, art, and dream are ever the nourishing milk which everything must partake of to a lesser or greater degree, from our own recollections, to the histories of Herodotus, to the Illiad.
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The sole desire.-- One who has reflected upon the heart, with all its secret springs and channels, cannot help but notice what vain seeming there is in all of it. The desire for things to be as they once were, that is the only true desire. Through it alone things attain to beauty, and in all that we love and want most desperately to clasp against our heart we only sing the praises of our youth. It is upon it that we have fed, like the aphid, until we bear the color of its flower in our whole being.