To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy.
When I spoke of “beauty”, I was thinking of Rilke’s notion that the beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrible, and of Hölderlin’s idea that the beautiful can unite extreme opposites in intimacy.
Man stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened.
