Dear Brother,
“You gain in old age what you once longed for in youth.” I have often heard you quote this line from both poetry and truth; let it serve as a preface to your seventieth birthday. We outstrip our dreams. I still recall the early conversation we had after first reading James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales: there is nothing better than an experienced ranger who can sit by the camp‑fire and recount his adventures. Among the ‘jewels’ of his tattoos, scars, and scratches, no adventure was lacking; and, looking back, even the scratches cast such matters in another light. I say this without irony—or as much as is permitted between brothers who honor Socrates not merely as a mentor but as a hoplite in the front rank, a model in thought: one must take scars seriously, and errors no less.
Must we be old—perhaps very old—before we can see life as a whole? Then a person accepts the voice of fate without hesitation: So you must be, there is no escape; every dream conceals more than it shows. A dreaming child—once wishing to be a trapper or a sailor, now imagining a flight to Mars or Venus—realizes, essentially, that what he longs for, and perhaps more, will be given to him. What stirs him is not the images and deeds that the shifting fashions of the times offer, but the urge to test himself that creates those images. And the chance to test—or even prove—himself is granted. We have grown too old to equate that with success.
Since I began with “fulfilment,” let me mention another wish we shared: islands. Coral reefs, Robinsons, treasure islands… One day we would reach some unknown or legendary island. For a while Iceland held our imagination captive. Before that longing, rather than the sagas (whose discovery would delight us much later), we had read Jules Verne’s utopian novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth. You will remember: it begins with the discovery of a report claiming that Snorri Sturluson descended into Hekla’s depths and beheld the marvels of a pre‑world where dragons and dinosaurs lived. When such a thrilling text fell into our hands, we could not restrain our impatience; we nearly turned the pages at the same instant, as if waves were breaking in succession.
Our Icelandic wish has now been fulfilled; we returned from that island scarcely two weeks ago. You can still sense that much remains to come from ancient Gaea. We travelled along Hekla and visited Sturluson’s farmstead. Were Jules Verne to hear that we took breakfast in London and lunch in Stuttgart, covering the distance in a little over an hour, he would be as astonished as Phileas Fogg. It was said that, in the age we were born, scholars had proved that human flight was impossible—though what they really meant was that the sort of flight Leonardo attempted with wings could not work.
The study of technology formed an important part of our work and our discussions. We concentrated on the two coals of perfection: the technological and the figure of the worker. As a world power, technology has not only a fore‑ground but also a back‑ground; not merely the height rising against the sky, but the depth that makes such height possible. It has an aspect that alters in light, and another kept from sight.
How long after the First World War did it take us to realize that this was not a struggle among nations or ideas, but something else that overlaid and blurred the fronts, making the threat common to all? Hence it was not this or that war that was lost, but war itself, the warrior’s war. It is a chapter in the destruction of a property‑based world; here more than a historical epoch ends—if the old saying is true, the Iron Age ends. God created three estates: knights, peasants, and priests. Small wonder, then, that these were most shaken by Nietzsche’s verdict; when the old passes, the son follows the father. A new third must enter; departure has come; we are in a rearguard action.
In our talks about the new Prometheans I often noticed a divergence in the distribution of light and shadow; this pleased me as a stereoscopic deepening of reality. Like those in Ultima Ratio, the Titan jest now seethes: all it hammers rusts… They indulged in foolish hopes. Its success was a great thing; now sheets and rods break everywhere, moulds lie about as heaps of raw patience. The rest will vanish too. They always create with what destroys them, and fall with the correcting burden.
Light falls on our turning point from both sides; this is unsurprising, for the point is not merely world‑historical but cosmic in nature. It amazes me that a human being can exist in it like a salamander in the fire without remaining fixed. The old is no longer valid, the new has yet to find its law: an interregnum, even the gods on holiday—much is lost within it, yet more is heralded.
Whoever treads such border paths often travels woodland tracks; as Heidegger reminds us, Holzweg is an ancient word for forest, and the paths resemble it. But the forest walker thus hears from above and below, right and left, east and west, the roots and the crowns where owls and wrens call. He may take this as confirmation that he stands in the unmeasured. There, as years pass and the urge to join polemics fades, one must trust one’s own composure. In youth, when will is strong, one debates passionately for and against, yet the desire and the time may wane.
So long as you play chess, you depend on moves aimed at your opponent; once you begin thinking about the game itself, the picture changes. Then the opponent’s move also appears in a different, necessary light. The word shifts from man to object, from dispute to language itself. Naturally, this does not hold in the worlds of commerce, work, and politics, where sharp edges are indispensable. But where thought and language become object—in the intellectual and artistic realm—there is no partisanship. At best one reaches, as the prologue to Faust says, the point where “applause alone stirs the heart.” It is a good sign if even the desire for rivalry can be mastered for a moment.
A friend and writer I value, Julien Grac, recently told me that once someone enters the Pantheon, everyone follows him; I agreed. You, too, have an academy of your own, and we possess more of them than we need. To avoid offending dear Clemens, who has joined us from Munich today, let me add one thing: whatever you wished for in youth, you have plenty of in old age.
Foremost, I do not wish to evade the tautology that age itself represents. To the young, growing old seems hard, almost disconcerting. I remember, at twenty‑three, thinking I would die if a devil appeared and guaranteed me thirty years—this was in the first war. What weighed me down was not fear of death, but time piling up with irresistible force. Meanwhile we have both climbed year over year, decade over decade, over chasms borne by life’s wave; thus we hope it will carry us across the last, the great, the heavy one as well. As Norbert von Hellingrath said when he fell, “Everyone accomplishes this.” It may take a little longer.
Above all, I wish your good days to continue—whether on the lakeshore where we spent happy years in your vineyard cottage, or in the Roman villa where I have so often welcomed you. For the first time I celebrate you not in your closest circle but before the public. I take this as a sign that your friends have multiplied. I have only skimmed a little foam today, which reminds me of one of your old poems I love:
“Lightly sketched costs nothing;
Yet forty years of toil and watch stand behind.
Today I skim but the froth—
Spirit and scent of poesy sweeten all.”
He who tuned the strings so purely for me was a master who knew me well, where everything my ear heard was noise. And one is both melody and instrument.
Many happy returns!