Penumbra Culture

Not the sun, nor shadow, is meant. It looks like discontent, the middle ground, and boredom, but means eternal peace and symmetry of rest, balance on the highest height of the intensity of warm and cold, above and below. The measure and equivalent of cheerfulness between the tragic and the comic, depth and height, the ideal of white clothes, the promenading under palms and sea, on the boulevard, in woods, over dunes and between vine fields and corn as well as on meadow paths. It is not the cellar nor a hot roof, but that which is grown, uncut, or brought up according to strict rules, from itself and ordered, like the form of the trees, the shape of the leaves, the twigs different side by side, branches, trunks, roots through the moss, the river in the meadows, in the rock through the land, the shore of the sea, aura of rays of every sort along with the others, where laughter becomes smiles, where getaways are possible, return certain and setting off a pleasure, and being together a reconciliation and sought for. Life as work, vital, thought as calm, music as redemption at the end. Against that, the revenge of reality, fear of the sun of cancer, like a curse of false happiness on the naked bodies of lost shame, in the stench of the masses, from traffic jams and the impulse of aggression, stultification through noise, like the art of wraparound windscreens, hardness without eyebrows, victory of the lack of freedom, the long victory from longing for window-opening for the light, through tax-exemption, and the business therewith. Consumption fodder, like the attack of the advanced farmer on the forest dwellers of his ape forebears, indifference of the intellect and the rage in the shadows of advertising types, the lack of opportunity for the cultured man — grown out of park- and house-forms — against bikini- and underwear-clad tourists who invade our cities, where they are at their most beautiful, as on the beaches and by the rivers of the world. Against that, what is the cooling moisture of the mild light on the mossy earth of the woods, which the spirit has talked about for centuries, and how difficult is the battle for it not to succumb? It is the spirit that nature nourished so that it would become art as culture, which has now degenerated into the leisure-time business.

The cheerfulness of the diversified shadow with the trembling sun behind was the only wish of the philosopher from the conqueror — when the former requested the latter to move away from the sun — so that he would not be further disturbed in his peace in his poor place, the last in the country.136