Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled
by it, especially during uncreative moments. When you are fully
creative, try to use it, as one more way to take hold of fife. Used
purely, it too is pure, and one needn't be ashamed of it; but if you
feel yourself becoming too familiar with it, if you are afraid of
this growing familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, in
front of which it becomes small and helpless. Search into the depths
of Things: there, irony never descends and when you arrive at the
edge of greatness, find out whether this way of perceiving the world
arises from a necessity of your being. For under the influence of
serious Things it will either fall away from you (if it is something
accidental), or else (if it is really innate and belongs to you) it
will grow strong, and become a serious tool and take its place among
the instruments which you can form your art with.
....We must accept our reality as
vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must
be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage
that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most
unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact
that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm
to life; the experiences that are called it apparitions, the whole
so-called "spirit world," death, all these Things that are
so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been
so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might
have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God.
But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the
reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship
between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted
out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a
fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only
indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to
case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity
before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don't think we can
deal with. But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't
exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the
relationship with another person as something alive and will himself
sound the depths of his own being. For if we imagine this being of
the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most
people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the
window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.
In this way they have a certain security. And yet how much more human
is the dangerous insecurity that drives those prisoners in Poe's
stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be
strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are
not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there
is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into
life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover,
through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life
so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we
can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no
reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not
against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has
abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must
try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with
the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the
difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become
our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those
ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths
about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into
princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who
are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.
Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence,
something helpless that wants our love.
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