Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

him, nor fire burn him, isa type of us all.” The onlyreality that will not dodgeus is death. “Marriage (inwhat is called the spiritualworld) is impossible,because of the inequalitybetween every subject andobject. … There will be thesame gulf between everyme and thee as between theoriginal and the picture. …”The universe is still thebride of the soul, but onthe far side of the gulf—norealized will, no doubleof man. “The discovery‘that we exist’ is called theFall of Man. … Perhapsthese subject-lenses have nopower; perhaps there are noobjects. … ” Life is a bubble,a sleep within a sleep; dream follows dream with no end to illusion throughwhich we cannot penetrate to know objects themselves. Not our life butrather our perception is threatened, for nature does not like us to observeher directly. Rather than unlocking faculties of our soul, she would haveour relations to anything, anyone else be oblique, askew. “I know that theworld I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think.”Seasons, temperament, impose a limiting world we do not wish.Yet the complementary voice knows that life, being a mixture of apower and form, will not bear an excess of either. This voice knows that,although in the view of nature temperament is final,into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, throughwhich the creator passes. … At one whisper of these high powers weawake from ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it intoits own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves to so base a state.171