Novalis (1772–1801), the German poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, sends three people up a hill by the river with a breakfast basket in Heinrich von Ofterdingen. They are Mathilde, her father Klingsohr and young Heinrich, who has fallen in love with her. From the hill they all see the same landscape. Yet for Heinrich the presence of his two companions has changed how near even distant things appear. The view opens up like a landscape within himself.
People are crystals for our inner life. They are nature made transparent.
– Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 1820, p. 163.[1]
Klingsohr prepares the comparison. A body can obstruct light, break it into colours or even light up other things. What it does depends on its own particular character. Heinrich replies with his two sentences about crystals. Immediately afterwards he calls Mathilde a pure sapphire. There are two things he admires in this stone. One can see through it, and the light it gives off still has a character of its own. It is the gentleness of this light in particular that makes him think of Mathilde.
An example from their walk suggests how far the comparison reaches beyond Heinrich’s love. A farmer whose crops are suffering from adverse weather might see the very same view quite differently. Even his account of it changes what a listener sees. Hence the importance of those last words about people being crystals “for our inner life.” A second person has come between the landscape and its observer. What their joy or anxiety discloses might never have been found by looking at the landscape alone.
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Here all the little blades of grass and wood and stone and all things are one.
Meister Eckhart (um 1260–vor 1329)
Meister Eckharts mystische Schriften. In unsere Sprache übertragen von Gustav Landauer · p. 126
Our translation from Gustav Landauer’s German rendering
The great mother is the earth. The stones in the earth’s body, I think, are what is meant by her bones. These are what we are told to throw behind our backs.
Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE–17/18 CE)
Metamorphoses · 1951 · p. 30–31
Our translation from the Latin
Perhaps this block of marble is only a heap of infinitely many living bodies, or like a lake full of fish, although the eye can ordinarily distinguish these animals only in bodies that have partly decayed.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)
Brief an Antoine Arnauld vom 30. April 1687 · 1846 · p. 96–97
Our translation
When you bend down towards all this activity, it is almost as if you could overhear the hidden history of how plants grow and the quiet beating of the mountain’s heart.
Very little. One makes marble out of flesh, and flesh out of marble.
Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
Œuvres complètes de Diderot, tome II. Philosophie · p. 105
Our translation
The fleeting sunbeam has been captured and enclosed in your mysterious core.
Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863)
Excerpt. Our translation from the German edition of 1904
I thank you, silent stone, and bend down towards you: I owe you my life as a plant.
The precious stones which are the foundations denote truths Divine shining through in the ultimate of order.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772)
Arcana Coelestia · 1938 · p. 318
Clause from the cited English edition. Initial capital supplied.
The finest artist has no conception that a single block of marble does not enclose within its excess. Only the hand that obeys the intellect can reach it.
And he the bard, a crystal soul Sphered and concentric with the whole.
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