Hyperion to Bellarmin... Friedrich Hölderlin & CG Jung






CG Jung's Red Book


Do you know how Plato and his Stella loved each other?
So I loved, so I was loved. Oh, I was a fortunate lad! It is pleasant when like and like meet in friendship; but it is divine when a great man draws littler men up to him.

A gracious word from a valiant heart, a smile under which the searing glory of the spirit hides itself, is little and is much, is like a magical password that conceals death and life in its simple syllable, is like living water that comes welling from the inmost recesses of the mountains, imparting the secret strength of the earth to us in its every crystal drop.

But how I hate all the barbarians who imagine that they are wise because there is no more heart left in them! All the self-important monstrosities who slay and desecrate beautiful youth a thousand times over with their dwarfing, meaningless discipline!

I had grown up like a grapevine without a prop, the wild shoots trailed aimlessly over the ground. You know how many a noble power perishes in us because it is unused. I wandered like a will-o'-the-wisp, caught at everything, was caught by everything, but only for a moment; and my unskilled powers wore themselves out for nothing. I felt that everything failed me everywhere, yet I could not find any goal. Such was I when he found me.

He had long applied all his patience and his art to his material, the so-called cultivated world; but his material had been and remained stone and wood, even if under compulsion it outwardly assumed the noble form of man; but that meant nothing to my Adamas.