The Blue Flower

Yes that’s so, Justen, but you mustn’t ask too much of language. Language refers only to itself, it is not the key to anything higher. Language speaks, because speaking is its pleasure and it can do nothing else.’

‘Sophie, I am a poet, but in four years I shall be an administrative official, receiving a salary. That is the time when we shall be married.’
‘I don’t know you!’
‘You have seen me. I am what you see.’
Sophie laughed.

was at first amazed when I received your letter, but since they have done away with Robespierre in Paris I have become so used to extraordinary happenings that I soon recovered.

‘I’m willing it to snow, mother. Then we could all amuse ourselves.’
‘Let time stand still until she turns round,’ said Fritz, aloud.

every transaction there must be a record, and of that record you must be able to lay your hand immediately on a written copy. T

The civilised world could not exist without its multitude of copying clerks, and they in turn could not exist if civilisation did not involve so many pieces of paper.’

have no craving to be rich, but I long to see the blue flower. It lies incessantly at my heart, and I can imagine and think about nothing else.

works of the Dutch philosopher Franz Hemsterhuis – it had been about the problem of universal language, a time when plants, stars and stones talked on equal terms with animals and with man. For example, the sun communicates with the stone as it warms it. Once we knew the words of this language, and we shall do so again, since history always repeats itself. ‘

allowed herself to wonder whether he was obliged, on medical advice, to take much opium? For toothache, of course, everyone had to take it, she did not mean that. But she soon found out that he took at most thirty drops at bedtime as a sedative, if his mind was too active – only half the dose, in fact, that she took herself for a woman’s usual aches and pains.

Fritz tried to explain that he had seen not their everyday, but their spiritual selves. He could not tell when these transfigurations would come to him. When the moment came it was as the whole world would be when body at last became subservient to soul.