From a Notebook

This collection of Steffen’s diary entries offers glimpses into the nature of language, love, and life. Like a cupboard of medicines and elixirs, these small doses of wisdom have a healing, rejuvenating effect. – We would be less perturbed over the great catastrophes of mankind, over the pogroms and civil wars, over crime of all kinds, if we studied the faces which gaze at the bill-boards and headlines. There is an account of a murder case, for instance. The murderer is depicted. A warrant is issued for him. One person wishes to see him hanged, or is happy that he has escaped, another secretly hopes that he will alter his clothing and hair so that no one will recognize him; or perhaps someone even equips him with money and weapons in his imagination. All such fluctuating thoughts come and go without our being conscious of them. And already our gaze is caught by a new sensation. – We are inwardly taken possession of by everything out of such superficiality. Here is where karmic thought should enter in: What will eventually become of this human being, quite irrespective of whether he is caught or not?