[566W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 335-336]
[P. 335] {FEUER} “The ethereal sphere, from which the god is yearning to descendto men, had stretched itself, through Christian longing, to inconceivable bounds of space. To the Hellenes, it was still the cloud-locked realm of thunder and the thunderbolt, from which the lusty Zeus moved down, to mix with men in expert likeness: to the Christian, the blue firmament dissolved into an infinite sea of yearning ecstasy, in which the forms of all the gods were melted, until at last it was the lonely image of his own person, the yearning Man, that alone was left to greet him from the ocean of his phantasy. One primal, manifold repeated trait [P. 336] runs through the Sagas of those peoples who dwelt beside the sea or sea-embouching rivers: upon the blue mirror of the waters there draws nigh an Unknown-being, of utmost grace and purest virtue, who moves and wins all hearts by charm resistless; he is the embodied wish of the yearner who dreams of happiness in that far-off land he can not sense. This Unknown-being vanishes across the ocean’s waves, so soon as ever questioned on his nature.” [566W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 335-336]
[567W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 339-341]
[P. 339] {FEUER} “In Tannhaeuser I had yearned to flee a world of frivolous and repellent sensuousness, -- the only form our modern Present has to offer; my impulse lay towards the unknown land of pure and chaste virginity, as toward the element that might allay a nobler, but still at bottom sensuous longing: only a longing such as our frivolous Present can never satisfy. By the strength of my longing, I had mounted to the realms where purity and chastity abide: I felt myself outside the modern world, and mid a sacred, limpid aether which, in the transport of my solitude, filled me with that delicious awe we drink-in upon the summits of the Alps, [P. 340] when, circled with a sea of azure air, we look down upon the lower hills and valleys. Such mountain-peaks the Thinker climbs, and on this height imagines he is ‘cleansed’ from all that’s ‘earthly,’ the topmost branch upon the tree of man’s omnipotence: here at last may he feed full upon himself, and, midst this self-repast, freeze finally beneath the Alpine chill into a monument of ice: as which, philosopher or critic, he stonily frowns down upon the warm and living world below. The desire, however, that had driven me to those heights, was a desire sprung from art and man’s five senses: it was not the warmth of Life, I fain would flee, but the vaporous morass of trivial sensuousness whose exhalations form one definite shape of Life, the life of modern times. Upon those heights, moreover, I was warmed by the sunny rays of Love, whose living impulse alone had sped me up. And so it was, that, hardly had this blessed solitude enwrapt me, when it woke a new and overpowering desire, the desire from peak to valley, from the dazzling brilliance of chaste Sanctity to the sweet shadows of Love’s humanest caresses. From these heights my longing glance beheld at last – das Weib: the woman for whom the ‘Flying Dutchman’ yearned, from out the ocean of his misery; the woman who, star-like, showed to ‘Tannhaeuser’ the way that led from the hot passion of the Venusberg to Heaven; [P. 341] the woman who now drew Lohengrin from sunny heights to the depths of Earth’s warm breast.” [567W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 339-341]
