Jean Paul (1763–1825), the German writer Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, asks in Selina what becomes of love for another person if death extinguishes that person’s entire inner life. In the section on belief in annihilation he tries to imagine the consequences all the way to their end. He takes his readers to a place particularly well suited to giving the appearance of abundant life.
The water of crystallisation that holds the structure together is the tear of a moment. Once it has dried up, the structure has fallen apart.
– Jean Paul, Selina oder über die Unsterblichkeit, 1827, p. 28.[1]
The place resembles the cave of Antiparos. Little woods with trunks of clear crystal rise from the floor. A path winds through the brushwood, and fruit and strings of flowers hang overhead. On a first reading one can almost imagine reaching out to touch them. Then Jean Paul adds two words that alter the whole scene. The fruit hangs stiff and cold. Nothing grows in this abundance, and no branch would yield to a hand. Even visitors to the cave are in danger of stiffening into crystal themselves.
The water that holds this structure together belongs both to the world of crystals and to the mourner’s eye. Once the tear has dried, the picture loses its power to endure. The speaker has just told a grieving person that neither a lock of hair nor a monument can restore the dead. Now he urges his visitor to leave the cave, look out over the green expanse and breathe freely. The two movements belong together. A reader approaching Jean Paul’s hope of immortality is first invited to feel, with a single breath, how narrow its imagined opposite has become.
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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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