The day after the reading I found myself by chance at a Christian meeting, and perhaps it was this that really set things off and caused the detonation that has released so much commotion and energy that I am now heading towards you with all my faculties. It is a monstrous act of violence to begin something. I cannot begin. I’m simply jumping over what ought to be the beginning. Nothing is as powerful as silence. Were we not all of us born into talk, it would never have been broken.

Mr V., I am not speaking of the evening when we heard your poems. I am speaking of the other one. I am driven to say: who – yes, I can find no other way of expressing it now – who then is this Christ who meddles with everything. Who knows nothing about us, nothing about our work, nothing about our needs, nothing about our joys as we achieve, go through and summon them up nowadays – and who nevertheless, it seems, always demands to be the first person in our life. Or are these things just words put in his mouth? What does he want of us? He wants to help us, they say. Yes, but among us he comes across as peculiarly at a loss. The conditions he lived in were so very different. Or does it in fact not have much to do with the circumstances – if he came in here, into my room, or visited me out in the factory, would everything immediately be changed, would all be well? Would my heart begin to pound and as it were move up a level and on towards him? My instinct tells me that he cannot come. That it would have no sense. Our world is a different one not just on the outside – it offers him no access. He would not shine through a ready-made coat, it is not true, he would not shine through. It is no coincidence that he went around in a seamless garment, and I believe that the core of light within him, what made him shine so strongly, day and night, has now long been dispersed and distributed differently. But that I think would be the least we could require of him if he was so great, that he somehow come out without remainder, yes, quite without remainder – leaving no trace … (The Letter from a Young Worker)