But the fear of the inexplicable has not
only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the
relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been
lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow
place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that
causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such
unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable
experience, which we don't think we can deal with. But only someone who is ready
for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most
incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something
alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. For if we imagine this
being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most
people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one
narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a
certain security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous insecurity that
drives those prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible
dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We,
however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and
there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as
into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands
of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold
still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from
everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our
world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it
has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to
love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle
which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears
to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.
How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all
races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into
princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only
waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything
that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our
love.
...
For it is not only indolence that
causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such
unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable
experience, which we don't think we can deal with. But only someone who is ready
for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most
incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something
alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. For if we imagine this
being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most
people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one
narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a
certain security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous insecurity that
drives those prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible
dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We,
however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and
there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as
into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands
of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold
still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from
everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our
world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it
has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to
love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle
which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears
to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.
How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all
races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into
princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only
waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything
that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our
love.