This hymn is the
immortalisation of voluptuousness. If the love-death is the
immortalisation of love unable to find satisfaction on earth, so its
counterpart, cosmic sensuousness is, in the last sense, orientalism.
Only a genius could invent a new, symbolic language to express feelings
so alien to the European. Earthly sensuality did not satisfy Novalis,
voluptuousness detached from man, voluptuousness in itself, was his
dream and his religion--the supremest creation ever achieved by
sexuality intensified into a cosmic emotion.
I think that I have now made clear the fact that the emotional life of
man is rooted in two elements, completely distinct from the beginning:
the sexual impulse and personal love. It is in studying the love of the
transcendental, that culminating point of so many feelings springing
from various sources, that the inherent contrast between the two
fundamental principles becomes most apparent; and that we realise why
they have always been intermingled both in theory and in reality.
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