Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863) was a German poet and dramatist from Wesselburen in Dithmarschen. In November 1842, shortly after arriving in Copenhagen, he records a question that seems at first to have little to do with his journey. He has been describing the crossing, his stay at a hotel and the difficulty of finding private lodgings. Once he has moved in, his thoughts turn to the people he has left behind in Hamburg. From the painful intensity with which he remembers them, a short paragraph takes him all the way to earth and stone.
Hebbel asks three questions in succession. The first begins with his own capacity to experience pain and pleasure. Three expressions trace the way in which it might be spent. Burning suggests the flame itself. When the embers die down, we can picture the ashes cooling. The third expression, a consuming or wasting away, invites us to think about what the fire has been feeding on. What would be left to see if a living creature had spent its entire capacity for feeling?
Could life be merely a burning, a dying down of the embers, a gradual consuming of our capacity for pain and pleasure? Has everything that surrounds us as an element at rest, as earth and stone, already been alive? Shall we too become earth and stone, and will history be over when everything rests and falls silent?
– Friedrich Hebbel, Friedrich Hebbels Tagebücher, 1885, p. 295.[1]
The stillness of a stone now takes on a past. Something in which we can detect no stir of feeling today might once have had a history of its own. In his last question Hebbel reverses the direction of the thought. Having imagined that a stone might once have been alive, we are asked to picture ourselves becoming earth and stone. His closing verb, “falls silent”, still holds the memory of a voice. Silence strikes us most forcibly where somebody was once to be heard. Hebbel leaves his questions standing. On the same printed page, a letter from Copenhagen begins.
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Believe one who has tried: you shall find a fuller satisfaction in the woods than in books. The trees and the rocks will teach you that which you cannot hear from masters.
Bernhard von Clairvaux (1090/91–1153)
English translation by Samuel J. Eales
Such stillness! Into the rocks sinks the voice of the cicadas.
The age of bodies lies in their rigidity. Every act of becoming solid is a process of time, of history.
Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810)
Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physikers · p. 81
Our translation
A crystal grows together more deftly and regularly than a bee builds or a spider weaves.
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803)
Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit · p. 163
Our translation
Give the crystal the power of forming ideas. Its highest plan for the world will be crystallisation, its divinity the most beautiful form a crystal can take.
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.
In blue crystal The pale man dwells, his cheek leaning against his stars; Or he bows his head in purple sleep.
But the earth’s shaping power does not confine itself to one figure. It knows the whole of geometry and is practised in it.
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630)
Strena seu de nive sexangula · 1611 · p. 23
Our translation from the Latin
Having rejected all these views, we say with Constantine and certain others that the power of a stone arises from its very kind and substantial form.
Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280)
De mineralibus · 1519 · unpaginated
Our translation from the Latin. Abbreviations in the source text expanded.
Many of those mineral crystallisations, such as clusters of spar, glass-head ore and flowers of iron, often yield forms as beautiful as art could ever conceive; and the glory in the cave of Antiparos is merely the product of water seeping through beds of gypsum.
Yet it does not ward off influence from without; warmth and light penetrate the impenetrable.
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