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What is the part other people play in my work, as I search for the truth and try to write?
Jaspers: Truth is in communication
From: Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, tr. W. Earle İNoonday Press
Page 6
You, neighbor God, if sometimes in the night / I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so / only because I seldom hear you breathe; / I know: you are alone. / And should you need a drink, no one is there / to reach it to you, groping in the dark. / Always I hearken. Give but a small sign. / I am quite near.
Between us there is but a narrow wall, / and by sheer chance; for it would take merely a call from your lips or from mine / to break it down, / and that without a sound.
The wall is builded of your images.
They stand before you hiding you like narres, / And when the light within me blazes high / that in my inmost soul I know you by, / the radiance is squandered on their frames.
And then my senses, which too soon grow lame, / exiled from you, must go their homeless ways.
From Rilke, The Book of Hours, here translated by B. Deutsch, İNew Directions. See also Rilke, Letter to a young poet
Cf. by Jaspers, The Spirit of Europe | Pascal, Method & purpose | Rilke, Letter to a Young Poet | Plato, Whom are we talking to? | Kierkegaard, My work as an author | Emerson, Self-knowledge | Gibson - McRury, Discovering one's face | Emerson, We differ in art, not in wisdom
