Gottfried von Strassburg was a German-speaking poet from Alsace, active around 1200. The dates of his birth and death are unknown. In his Tristan, Tristan and Isolde find shelter away from court in a grotto. A reader who enters with them sees a bed of crystal in the middle of the chamber. The narrator later returns to that bed, almost as though he were taking his readers through the grotto a second time. On this visit the properties of the things inside deserve a closer look. Each has something to say about love.
Love too should be crystalline,
transparent and clear all the way through.– Gottfried von Straßburg, Tristan, 1855, p. 216.[1]
The two adjectives in the second line of Gottfried’s verse begin with the same syllable, durch, meaning “through”. To hear the sound twice is almost to follow the movement of an eye that meets the surface and then looks a little further in. Applied to the lovers, that suggests a state in which each can show the other what would ordinarily remain hidden.
The narrator has prepared his readers for this change of perspective. A round chamber offers no corner in which to conceal a trick. Its breadth gives the imagination a way of grasping the unbounded power of love. The crystal bed has a quality that even the most perfect curve could never convey. The eye can pass through the substance it is made from. Yet this bed stands deep inside a rock, concealed from the court. Tristan and Isolde need shelter from the outside world in order to meet each other openly here.
Search
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.
Phone: +43 677 628 66 628 | 
Cart