Sunday, August 7, 2011





If I knew how this leaf had sprung from its sprig,
I would keep silent: there is knowledge enough.

~ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Epigrams


He saw his world as an arena where das Gleitende - a gliding, swirling - held sway, and he eventually constructed his art as one that tried not to fix but to blend, and he did so not by imposing law, but by revealing the hidden forms in which the parts of life are bound to each other. This harmony was, in Hofmannsthal's own words, "the ceremony of the whole."

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~ Text: From the introduction to The Whole Difference: Selected Writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal

~ Images: Jules Girard, sprigs of a fir tree magnified,1868; Peter Lackerbauer, crystallization, 1868