My breast is closed against all vexation
on account of personal mortifications and affronts, against all
exaltation on account of personal merits; for my entire personality
has long since vanished and been swallowed up in the contemplation of
the end.
* * * * *
Bodily sufferings, pain and sickness, should such befal me, I cannot
avoid to feel, for they are events of my nature, and I am and remain
nature here below. But they shall not trouble me. They affect only the
Nature with which I am, in some strange way, connected; not myself,
the being which is elevated above all Nature. The sure end of all
pain, and of all susceptibility of pain, is death; and of all which
the natural man is accustomed to regard as evil, this is the least so
to me. Indeed, I shall not die for myself, but only for others, for
those that remain behind, from whose connection I am severed. For
myself, the hour of death is the hour of birth to a new and more
glorious life.
Since my heart is thus closed to all desire for the earthly, since,
in fact, I have no longer any heart for the perishable, the universe
appears to my eye in a transfigured form. The dead inert mass which
but choked up space has vanished; and, instead thereof, flows, and
waves, and rushes the eternal stream of life, and power, and deed--of
the original life, of thy life, O Infinite! For all life is thy life,
and only the religious eye pierces to the kingdom of veritable beauty.
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