Aphoristic Writings, Notebook, and Letters to a Friend, by Otto ...

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All words that are connected to a certain extent with the word life, have the letter
“L”:
Life, love, pleasure, voluptuous, laugh, lightness, lightly, lisp, light, luxury, liberty
(lubet, Latin), volo (I will = βούλοµαι), bloom, lighten, lax, liven, loose, large, flux,
flute, lily, lynx, limber, slippery, sleek, glide, guile, γλυxύς, µέλι, lotus, relieve,
λαµπω, lux, lumen, λύχνος, lick, lambent, lappet (soft linen), lamb and glue, because
λ �is the most frictionless consonant and the most strongly opposed to the friction of
the totality and uniformity (Rappaport).
Against this can certainly be cited:
Load, leather, learning, lame, letum, languish, left.
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Core trait of all that is human: seeking for reality. Where reality is sought and
found establishes all differences between people.
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What man experiences are elements respectively lifted out of an infinite, temporal,
spatial, material, colourful, aural diversity. For this reason there are primarily two
things possible: he seeks reality as a whole, in the totality of the universe and its
infinite connexion; or for him, reality is every discrete, so to speak punctuated
element of the universe. It is exactly the same world, quantitatively identical, equally
infinite; but for the one, a part is always just a part, and only real insofar as it is
created collectively with everything else. The other embraces the same world, but
every discrete element exists for him as real in itself, and he seeks the part with the
greatest reality of all.
Applied to the religious (since both types can be pious): to the latter, the sun itself
or an historical figure itself, or the Madonna herself, can be the Divine in and of itself.
For the other, a discrete thing will always only become God so far as it is symbolic for
the whole, and the more so, the more things hang together in it.
Applied to the sexual: to the one, the individual woman is real; he is the sadist:
The sadist is very attractive to women because she is the greatest conceivable reality
for him (cf. Sex and Character, 1 st ed. pp.397-401) To the masochist, on the other
hand, the individual woman is never real, he always seeks for something other than
the woman in her. That is why he is not attractive to women.
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