Book: The glass bead game

The curse of the current generation.

There is no measure in grief, and there is no measure in joy.

Their invisible face is always calm.

And the temple, and the song, and love, and the word.

To him their pattern would be wonderful and strange.

Three dimensions will be too much.

We don't know what he expects from us.

Another may be a star of the first magnitude in ability, willpower, perseverance, but he is so well centered that he rotates in the system to which he belongs, without any friction or unnecessary expenditure of energy. Another has the same talents, even more beautiful, but his axis does not pass exactly through the center, and he spends half of his strength on eccentric movements, which weaken him and disturb those around him.

A gust of wind preceding a thunderstorm that is about to burst, driving us into the house and also trying to snatch the door handle from our hands, or an acute toothache when it seems that all the troubles, suffering and conflicts of the world are concentrated in your jaw, these are things in the reality and meaning of which we may perhaps someday doubt, but at the moment when we feel them, these things do not allow any doubt and are extremely real.

Even if you did not walk, but were led, even if there was no unauthorized overstepping of limits, but only a rotation of space around the one standing in its center, the virtues still continued to exist and retained their value.

His path went in a circle, or in an ellipse, or in a spiral, whatever you like, but not in a straight line, for straightness was characteristic only of geometry, and not of nature and life.

Times of terror and great calamity may come. But if there is happiness in adversity, then it can only be spiritual - looking back to save the culture of the past, looking forward to represent the spirit with cheerful cheerfulness in an era that would otherwise be entirely in the power of matter.

We need teachers more than all others, people who, instilling in young people the ability to find the right criteria, serve as an example of reverence for the truth, obedience to the spirit, and service to the word.

If, in the struggle of interests and slogans, truth is in danger of being as devalued, mutilated and raped as an individual person, as a language, as an art, as everything organic or skillfully cultivated, then our only duty is to resist and save the truth, that is, our desire to truth as our highest dogma.