THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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whom every gaze has perished of nearness thus exchange faces. As such Caspar David Friedrich's manner of painting is not like this, on the contrary: its constant
longing for expanse tears nearness and distance roughly apart, without a painted intermediate world between the two. But by this very means Kleist's creative
consternation in front of the picture can describe such a tremendous arc between nearness and distance, centre and circle. Kleist's soundless apocalypse contains the
spark of life anew, in an unfathomable abyss in which man and nature both are, and both no longer are. The eye disappears by looking at the picture, the viewer
disappears together with his distance, the picture injures the man standing outside it, ‘as if one's eyelids had been cut away’, but it also injures the sea, for ‘that on which
I was supposed to look out with longing, the sea, was completely missing’. Something it is hard to name appears, going out from the viewer to the Capucin, going back
from the sea to the dunes; both, Capucin and dunes, become one, the ‘lonely centre in the lonely circle’, the unfathomable abyss of the inconspicuous with ‘truly
Ossianic effect’. There is happiness in this, that of Thule, but again no agreed, arranged happiness at all, with a locality that can be catalogued, particularly not this. A
central wishful landscape arises all the more strangely, to the howling of foxes and wolves, at the edge of an ending world, in this laconicism: a subject­house, ‘with its
two or three mysterious objects’. As the only ones which remain in the lonely circle with the lonely centre, and furthermore certainly as Objects, but as those about
which there is nothing alien any more. So that we can equally, indeed more accurately speak of an object­house: and all the more so because of the depth­extension of
its natural Objects, of a house concentrating subject and object. Of all descriptions of pictures this one has most penetrated into the painted hiatus between subject and
object, has filled it with destruction and with an unusual night­ or mist­piece of Jerusalem.
Only we cannot see or breathe here, in this so very nearest remote region. Kleist's description is one of the most profound, but the familiar sun no longer rises, and
another one does not yet become visible. And Friedrich's sea­landscape can give only in such central impressions, such description powerfully experiencing things
through, that which great painting communicates in its own horizon: the unity of man and distance, the return of perspective into the manifold Mona Lisa and of the latter
into the perspective of the manifold edges of the world. Nevertheless, all humane­transcendental painted spaces become almost conventional compared with that
described by Kleist, with a single exception, the — space of the Sistine Madonna.