O rain, you autumn rain
And hills all veiled in grey
Trees weighed down with weary foliage!
It’s hard for the ailing year to leave
Gazing through the steamed-up windows.
Shivering in your dripping coat
You stand outside. And at the forest’s edge
There stagger from the bleached leaves
Drunken toads and salamanders.
Along the paths that run downhill
Endless waters stream and gurgle
Till they reach the grass and fig tree
Where they stand in patient pools.
And from the church tower in the valley
Tired and timid comes the sound
Of tolling bells for some dead villager
Being buried in the ground.
But you, dear friend, should not be grieving
For the neighbour being buried
Nor for summer’s pleasures passing
Nor for festive joys of youth!
All things are kept in pious memory
Preserved in word, picture and song
Ever ready to return in splendour
Dressed in newer and in finer robes.
Help to preserve, help to change
And the flower of faithful joy
Will blossom in your heart.
Age has many hardships—but it also has its gifts of grace, and one of them is the protective layer of forgetting, of weariness, of submission which allows things to grow between us and our problems and sufferings. There may be inertia, calcification, hideous apathy, but there can also be—illuminated a little differently by the moment—serenity, patience, humour, deep wisdom and Tao.
From Rigi-Tagebuch
(Rigi Diary) 1945
Old age helps you overcome many things, and if an old man shakes his head or murmurs a few words, then some see worldly wisdom in them, others merely ossification; whether his approach to the world is basically the result of experience and wisdom or simply the consequence of circulation problems remains undiagnosed, even by the old man himself.
From a letter written in November
1942 to Lajser Ajchenrand
Only when you grow old do you see the rarity of beauty, and what a wonder it really is when flowers bloom between factories and cannons, and poetry still lives between newspapers and stock-market reports.
From a letter written in November
1930 to Hans Carossa
For them, the young, their own existence, their searching and suffering, quite rightly is of prime importance. For the man who has grown old, the search was a false trail, and life has gone wrong if he has found nothing objective, nothing above himself and his cares, nothing absolute or divine to worship, in the service of which he can place himself, and the service of which alone can give his life meaning …
The necessity for youth is to be able to take itself seriously. The necessity for age is to be able to sacrifice itself, because above it is something that does take things seriously. I don’t like formulating doctrines, but I truly believe that a spiritual life must run and play between these two poles. For the task, desire and duty of youth is to become, and the task of the mature man is to surrender himself or, as German mystics used to call it, ‘to de-become’. One must first be a full person, a real personality, and one must have undergone the sufferings of this individualisation before one can make the sacrifice of this personality.
From a letter written in
January 1933 to M K