Striving and the Grace of Silence
In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (New Zurich Newspaper) there was yesterday an article on Praise of Silence, a talk of the author Ralf Rothmann, who received the Max-Frisch-Price of the Town of Zurich. In the text there were some interesting statements, one allegedly by Max Frisch: “You have to aspire for the perfect, otherwise you go crazy.” And another by Mahatma Gandhi: “The mission of every man towards the world is to become a saint, not more and not less.” Even if we don’t succeed, our endeavour has to go into this direction. Rothmann adds: “For you cannot exist without the real feeling of unity with all, that is with the cosmos, you become a cripple with body and soul, and nothing helps if you don’t realise it your whole life long. We have to want the perfect, otherwise you go gaga. And even if it cannot be successful, if our thoughts and works will never become perfect – or endeavour can be so.
And about creativity Ralf Rothmann said: “What really wants to come to light, you don’t have to press. It happens, it grows, it flourishes – everyone who writes or paints or composes has this experience. It is really grace, it comes to us – most beautifully when we don’t think of it, when we forget our ideas and concepts for a moment and, for example, peel an apple. It comes to us out of silence, out of quietude, for you have to desist from speech in order that the world speaks again with you. This might seem to be paradox, especially when a writer says this, but we are conditioned up to the most tiniest, we are even still framed if we ‘go overboard’, and our materialistic basic attitude, which doesn’t even spare language, has made us forget that nothing, really nothing has a name, that there is in reality neither inside nor outside and that the body lives in the soul and not the other way round. Only silence teaches us this.”
See also the post on Experiencing Silence.
