Living breath

It is unintelligible to me how our century can lose itself so deeply in the shadows, in the obscure workshops, of that which relates to art without even wanting to recognize the broad, bright light of unimprisoned nature. The greatest heroic deeds of the human spirit which it could only do and express in impact with the living world have turned into school exercises in the dust of our school-prisons, the masterpieces of human poetic art and oratory into childish tricks from which aged children and young children learn empty phrases and cull rules. We grasp their formalities and have lost their spirit, we learn their language and do not feel the living world of their thoughts. It is the same with our judgments concerning the masterpiece of the human spirit, the formation of language in general. Here dead reflection is supposed to teach us things which were only able to ensoul the human being, to summon him, and form him further, from the living breath of the world, from the spirit of great, active nature. Here the dull, late laws of the grammarians are supposed to be the most divine thing, which we revere while forgetting the true divine linguistic nature which formed itself in its core with the human spirit – however irregular this true divine linguistic nature may seem. The formation of language has retreated to the shadows of the schools, whence it no longer achieves anything for the living world – consequently it is said that there never even was a bright world in which the first formers of language had to live, feel, create, and poetize. I appeal to the sensitivity of those who do not fail to recognize the human being in the root of his forces, and what is forceful, powerful, and great in the languages of the savages, and the essential nature of language in general.