"In artistic work, the elevated places of doubt are a land of hunger and cold. Even the creator, when she loses her orientation, becomes lost here in dark moments of weariness, in the soul's moments of loneliness and dryness; she knows the feverish illusion of freedom which deceives the one who ascends in these places; but here she is mute. She creates, not as an indifferent observer of the cosmic drama, but only as a participant, a player, sacrificing herself. She blossoms, not as a severed branch, but only in her connection with the family of life. Only in the effect of the stream which lights all suns and develops all countries, which creates history, raises and leads crowds, builds and shatters empires, works in the invisible with dazzling splendor and which makes the whole species awaken in a single being, do the creator's eyes become illuminated and her tongue untangled. She creates only in a state of grace, in the fervid burgeoning of faith.
"But who will grasp the wealth of this faith by words alone? Like bark in a surge of growth, words chap, break off, and fall away, and new ones are formed underneath, in accordance with one law, under one sun. Its dogmata are abysses, definitions have a thousand meanings; where all words have fallen silent, terror and love, pain and passion still speak. Mystery is alive here, miracle the sole reality; at every step, hopes fly upward like frightened birds. Here, obedience is freedom, immortality a certainty, rebirth a path, death an illusion. The black, fiery wine of every inspiration has ripened on these mysterious vineyards. Does something change in its radiance if we know not whose hand bestows it upon us from the invisible world? Was it not faith which set the courage of our teachers afire, that they wrenched themselves from the trifling, flattering pleasures of the earth, from the toils of their ironic, deceptive smiles and their frightened, ever-cautioning reason, and that they walked, in heroic humility, along a narrow footpath between open chasms of madness, to places where no one had set foot before them? And lo, to the blessing of our kind they found happiness where no one had ventured to search for it, the spirits of the tempest arose in the place where they stood; that which they touched ripened sweetly in their hands, and they subdued even reason, so that, made merry, it shone on their paths, which they had feared.
"The nations divide the earth between them in their blood; the princes of the marketplaces rule over their work, seizers of power, metals, waters, fire; the suffering communities join in unity; empires, embracing the whole globe, are created in the subconscious of the millions; gigantic metropolises are raised beyond the horizon; one after another, the hidden forces of the earth fall into human hands like reins: and beyond everything that seethes here, in a magical effervescence of regenerations, in the depths, by the spiritual hearths, labors the creator, the artist, the scientist, the thinker, the loving one, the saint, the visionary, insensible to the mortifying glare in the madness of their faith, sinking with happiness and humble anguish over their bounty, confused by the mesmerization of the unfriendly spirits, which must be constantly dispelled by an abundance of love, if work is to be possible; given to vertigo at every glance downwards and back, stirred by the nearness of the ages which await their work. Unknown to all and also to themselves, without any possible rewards for the very highest they bring, they pile thought upon thought, intuition alongside intuition, dream upon dream.
"But do not mourn them in their madness – the madness of seekers. Do not judge them if they delude themselves and go scorned among the people. Nothing is lost in the spiritual world; even a rejected stone will find its place in the builder's hands, and a burning house will save the life of one who has strayed. Every clearly expressed thought makes the dream of all people on earth easier. And the hidden work, at which both the artist and the genius of science, both the thinker and the saint alike labor, changes the entire life of the earth; creates new links between beings, new glowing foci in the battle of the spirits; prepares new effulgences of passion; remakes sensations; forms, shatters and also heals bodies; revives their magical capacities; proclaims new moments of history from afar; organizes humanity; and reaches beyond the visible world."
- from Otokar Brezina's "Hidden History"
