LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

all really lost God :17 Is it not much rather the case that you
have never yet possessed him : For when might that have been :
Do you believe a child can hold him, him whom men bear only
with difficulty, whose weight bows down the aged : Do you
believe that one who really has him could lose him like a little
stone, or do you not also feel that one who had him could but
be lost by him :—But when you realize that he was not in your
childhood, and not beforehand, when you surmise that Christ
was deluded by his longing and Mohammed betrayed by his
pride,—and when you feel with horror that he does not exist
now either, in this hour when we are speaking of him,—what
entitles you then to miss, as if he had passed away, and to seek,
as if he were lost, someone who has never been :

Why do you not think that he who draws near from all
eternity is still to come, that he is in the future, the final fruit
of a tree whose leaves we are : What prevents you from throwing
forward his truth into times yet to be, and living your life as a
painful and beautiful day in the history of a great gestation :
Do you not see, then, how everything that happens is for ever
a beginning, and might it not be His beginning, since beginning
is in itself always so beautiful 2 If he is the most perfect, must not
the inferior precede him, that he may choose himself out of
abundance and profusion :—Must he not be the last, in order to
embrace everything within himself, and what sense should we
have if he for whom we crave had already been :

As bees collect honey, so we take what is sweetest out of
everything and build Him. We start actually with the slight,
with the unpretentious (if only it is done with love), with work
and with resting after it, with a silence or with a little solitary
joy, with everything that we do alone, without helpers or
adherents, we begin him whom we shall not experience any
more than our forefathers could experience us. And yet they
are in us, those who have long since passed away, as natural
disposition, as burden on our destiny, as blood that throbs, and
as gesture that rises up out of the depths of time.

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