THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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certainty of Being, yet in such a way that, through non­renunciation as at the same time through the stated ambiguous hovering above which nevertheless aims with
wishful emotion, wishful solution, through its tendency­object in other words, music was able to give the strongest preappearance of what has come good. Of a
humanly possible Elysium for which there is as yet no concretion, but in which there is no mythology either. The utopian distance strikes into the immediacy of musical
self­contact, the nearness of this musical landscape is in turn charged with significances of an extremely humanized distant world. Music thus has that paradoxical
perspective that its objects appear ever greater, and therefore nearer, the more they move towards the horizon on which music lies and forms hope. Even the rest
announced by Palestrina has become insufficient in face of the much further ranging wishful and volitional phenomenon of Beethoven. But it too remains in turn a
corrective for an andante­finale, however rarely possible, whose arrival causes the music to sound both silent and great.
Contact of the interior and the boundless in the spirit of music: Kleist's ideal landscape; Sistine Madonna
Even portrayed happiness is reluctant to be known and agreed beforehand. It thus points in an unfamiliar direction, not just into the narrowness which we know or into
the expanse which belongs to greatness. But in both of these a third destination also rises, one which is pointed out not least in musical terms: the unfathomable. This
category unites cave and expanse, interior and perspective, containing and surpassing both. The interior is paradoxical, it does of course contract seductively into the
narrow, near, and secret, but at the same time it contains significant horizon in this narrowness. Images of spatial contraction, of the formation of houses and interior
space as a whole ultimately share in an intensive element which, when added to it, first makes the expanse incapable of losing itself and substantial. Thus no interior
remains simply this, and no significant idyll resigns itself as happiness to confinement; in both there is also the opposite of, or the switch into, the universe. In other
words, into an amalgamated universe, with golden space and golden time, into small infinity. And the great image of expanse on the other hand: the perspective of
infinity, this conversely does not merely proceed to expanse. The content of longing in distance and the oceanic element in perspective do not remain simply