Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (2 May 1772 – 25 March 1801) also known as Novalis
Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg was a young, German romantic, searching for meaning. On the one hand there was religion, philosophy and poetic imagination, on the other were his studies in mathematics, chemistry and the operation of salt mines.
In 1795 he fell in love with a 12 year old girl, Sophie von Kuhn. He arranged to marry her when she was sixteen, but she died shortly after her 15th birthday. Her death left him distraught.
Epiphanies
He wrote: We think we know the laws that govern our existence. We get glimpses, perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime of a totally different system at work behind them. One day, when I was reading between Rippach and Lutzen, I felt the certainty of immortality, like the touch of a hand……As things are, we are the enemies of the world and foreigners to this earth.
Vision of a young man in the church yard: He said aloud. The external world is the world of shadows. It throws its shadows into the Kingdom of Light. How different they will appear when this darkness is gone, and the shadow-body has passed away. The universe, after all, is within us. The way leads inwards always inwards.
These brief moments when it seems another world breaks into normal existence are epiphanies that left him with a deep, unsatisfied longing.
Vision at Sophie's grave
From Hymns to The Night.
Once when I was shedding bitter tears, when, dissolved in pain, my hope was melting away, and I stood alone by the barren mound which in its narrow dark bosom hid the vanished form of my life, lonely as never yet was lonely man, driven by anxiety unspeakable, powerless, and no longer anything but a conscious misery.
As there I looked about me for help, unable to go on or to turn back, and clung to the fleeting, extinguished life with an endless longing: then, out of the blue distances from the hills of my ancient bliss, came a shiver of twilight and at once snapped the bond of birth the chains of the Light. Away fled the glory of the world, and with it my mourning the sadness flowed together into a new, unfathomable world
Thou, Night-inspiration, heavenly Slumber, didst come upon me the region gently upheaved itself; over it hovered my unbound, newborn spirit. The mound became a cloud of dust and through the cloud I saw the glorified face of my beloved. In her eyes eternity reposed I laid hold of her hands, and the tears became a sparkling bond that could not be broken.
Into the distance swept by, like a tempest, thousands of years. On her neck I welcomed the new life with ecstatic tears. It was the first, the only dream and just since then I have held fast an eternal, unchangeable faith in the heaven of the Night, and its Light, the Beloved.
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