clockwork: the hands of the seasons or the fingers of eternal darkness? Death is an absolute. But considering that my own mote of humanity hit the lottery of life, seeing that all Creation down to the tiniest element has come to life for me, in that case, in this terra lucida , this paradise of feelings and senses, this preposterous Walt Disney production, let me live my lot to the utmost! No, he couldn’t conceive of it like this, either. This was too simplistic as well. It amounted to remaining external, to living on surfaces. We don’t just remain at the door, we enter the abode, and take ownership of it, adopt it, declare that it’s ours, we desire it, and we take pleasure in doing so. We weep after those who have left us, falling at their feet to say, “Do not leave!” We don’t simply let things separate from us.
We aren’t just passive guests at a table; perhaps we’re always creating and producing the things in our midst. None of us accepts life as an arbitrary condition of material circumstances. Even thinkers devoted to analyzing this have stayed in the game until the very end. Everything comes from us, comes with us, happens through us.
Neither death nor life exists. We exist. Both are inherent in us. All other things are just immense or tiny accidents passing in the mirror of time. A mountain on Mars erupts and disintegrates. Streams of molten rock harden on the lunar surface. New solar systems appear like the massive droplets of milk shimmering in the light of the sun amid the Milky Way. Coral reefs form at the bottom of the seas, and stars implode in colorful and fiery pyrotechnics in the shadow of the moon, like April flowers scattering in the wind. The bird eats the worm; in the bark of a tree, a hundred thousand larvae mature and a hundred thousand insects mingle into the earth. These are all phenomena that occur involuntarily. They’re refractions illuminating, and occasionally darkening, that vast, rare, matchless pearl we call Creation, that solitary blossom of time, that lotus of the ages.
Only for mankind does time, monolithic and absolute, divide in two; and because time, this dim lantern, this sooty radiance, struggles to burn within us, because it introduces a complex calculus into the simplest things, because we measure its passing by our shadows on the ground, it divides life from death, and like a clock’s pendulum, our consciousness swings between the two polarities of our own creation. Humanity, this prisoner of time, is but desperate, trying to escape to the outside. Instead of losing itself in time, instead of flowing along with all else in a broad and continual riverrun, humanity tries to perceive time externally. Thus, time becomes a mechanism of torment. One lunge and we’re at the pole of death, everything’s over. Since we’ve split the unity of whole numbers, since we’ve consented to being fractions, we should resign ourselves to fragmentation. Momentum, however, sweeps us to the other pole; we’re in the midst of life, we’re full of vitality, we’re once again the plaything of our hurtling inertia; but yet again, by its very nature, the balance tips irrefutably toward death, and torments increase exponentially.
Fate took shape intrinsically because humanity fled beyond the limits of time through the intellect, resisted the order of love, and sought stability in the midst of profound change. Humanity’s actual fate was being slave to the light cast by a small night-lamp used only for seeing in shadows; being slave to an apparatus that tended to turn the shadows and darkness into a dungeon; in other words, being slave and sycophant to a small disembodied homunculus of light. However, the essential homunculus was born of reaction and synthesis between fire and water. It had more insight. The experiences that formed it also made it cognizant of its regrets and of the impossibilities surrounding it. Thus, as Goethe wrote, it knew to crash into sea nymph Galatea’s
We aren’t just passive guests at a table; perhaps we’re always creating and producing the things in our midst. None of us accepts life as an arbitrary condition of material circumstances. Even thinkers devoted to analyzing this have stayed in the game until the very end. Everything comes from us, comes with us, happens through us.
Neither death nor life exists. We exist. Both are inherent in us. All other things are just immense or tiny accidents passing in the mirror of time. A mountain on Mars erupts and disintegrates. Streams of molten rock harden on the lunar surface. New solar systems appear like the massive droplets of milk shimmering in the light of the sun amid the Milky Way. Coral reefs form at the bottom of the seas, and stars implode in colorful and fiery pyrotechnics in the shadow of the moon, like April flowers scattering in the wind. The bird eats the worm; in the bark of a tree, a hundred thousand larvae mature and a hundred thousand insects mingle into the earth. These are all phenomena that occur involuntarily. They’re refractions illuminating, and occasionally darkening, that vast, rare, matchless pearl we call Creation, that solitary blossom of time, that lotus of the ages.
Only for mankind does time, monolithic and absolute, divide in two; and because time, this dim lantern, this sooty radiance, struggles to burn within us, because it introduces a complex calculus into the simplest things, because we measure its passing by our shadows on the ground, it divides life from death, and like a clock’s pendulum, our consciousness swings between the two polarities of our own creation. Humanity, this prisoner of time, is but desperate, trying to escape to the outside. Instead of losing itself in time, instead of flowing along with all else in a broad and continual riverrun, humanity tries to perceive time externally. Thus, time becomes a mechanism of torment. One lunge and we’re at the pole of death, everything’s over. Since we’ve split the unity of whole numbers, since we’ve consented to being fractions, we should resign ourselves to fragmentation. Momentum, however, sweeps us to the other pole; we’re in the midst of life, we’re full of vitality, we’re once again the plaything of our hurtling inertia; but yet again, by its very nature, the balance tips irrefutably toward death, and torments increase exponentially.
Fate took shape intrinsically because humanity fled beyond the limits of time through the intellect, resisted the order of love, and sought stability in the midst of profound change. Humanity’s actual fate was being slave to the light cast by a small night-lamp used only for seeing in shadows; being slave to an apparatus that tended to turn the shadows and darkness into a dungeon; in other words, being slave and sycophant to a small disembodied homunculus of light. However, the essential homunculus was born of reaction and synthesis between fire and water. It had more insight. The experiences that formed it also made it cognizant of its regrets and of the impossibilities surrounding it. Thus, as Goethe wrote, it knew to crash into sea nymph Galatea’s
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