7/14/2022

To take in an extraordinary town and a more than pleasant landscape with someone in such a frame of mind is a rare privilege; and when I look back on those tender and at the same time passionate spring days, they appear to me as the only holiday I ever had in my life. The time was so laughably brief, to another it would have sufficed only for a few impressions; to me, not used to spending days of such freedom, it appeared vast. Yes, it almost seems wrong to go on calling time what was more nearly a new state of being free, truly felt as a space, a being-surrounded by openness, no passing or transience. I was catching up on my childhood then, if I can put it that way, and a part of my early youth, all that there had never been time to carry out in my life; I looked, I learned, I understood – and from those days also stems the experience that it is so easy for me, so truthful, so – as my friend would have expressed it – unproblematic, to say ‘God’. (The Letter from a Young Worker)