I relate this tiny episode, which I have experienced several times, for the sake of the speech of this almost unnoticeable sunrise and sunset of the spirit. In no other speech have I known so profoundly the fleeting nature of actuality in all its relations with being, the exalted melancholy of our fate, the change, heavy with destiny, of every isolated Thou into an It. For other events possessed between morning and evening their day, even though it might be brief; but here morning and evening flowed pitilessly mingled together, the bright Thou appeared and was gone. Had the burden of the world of It really been removed for the space of a glance from the animal and from myself? I myself could continue to think about the matter, but the animal had sunk back out of the stammer of its glance into the disquietude where there is no speech and almost
How powerful is the unbroken world of It, and how delicate are the appearances of the Thou!
So much can never break through the crust of the condition of things! O fragment of mica, looking on which I once learned, for the first time, that I is not something “in me”-with you I was nevertheless only bound up in myself; at that time the event took place only in me, not between me and you. But when one that is alive rises out of things, and becomes a being in relation to me, joined to me by its nearness and its speech, for how inevitably short a time is it nothing to me but Thou! It is not the relation that necessarily grows feeble, but the actuality
98 -of its immediacy. Love itself cannot persist in the immediacy of relation; love endures, but in the interchange of actual and potential being. Every Thou in the world is enjoined by its nature to become a thing for us, or at all events to re-enter continually the condition of things.
Only in one, all-embracing relation is potential still actual being. Only one Thou never ceases by its nature to be Thou for us. He who knows God knows also very well remoteness from God, and the anguish of barrenness in the tormented heart; but he does not know the absence of God: it is we only who are not always there.
The lover in the Vita Nuova rightly and properly says for the most part Ella and only at times Voi. The spectator of the Paradiso, when he says Colui, speaks from poetic necessity, and knows it. If God is addressed as He or It, it is always allegorically. But if we say Thou to Him, then mortal sense has set the unbroken truth of the world into a word.