THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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not only fail to disturb but seem like a part of the ego; then, in the illusion of total fusion, the tensions between ego and non­ego completely fall away. Then the object
ceases to be one to be overcome by work, as is particularly the case in capitalist enterprise and in its relation to materials. Then there is even a hint, in the face of
nature, of that prelogically happy animism which Byron expresses as follows: ‘I live not in myself, but I become/Portion of that around me; and to me/High mountains
are a feeling.’ The holiday feeling in nature is thus not necessarily the lonely soul and its mother, despite the narcissism, and possibly solipsism underlying it. The Beingalone­with­oneself,
indeed, Being­alone­without­oneself in nature can rather have total object­occupation, only not one in fact so very much alienated from the self. The
free space beyond work then itself becomes one beyond hardship; in its repose, above all the inorganic kind, and the blue overhead it gives material for this. And
precisely this feeling of non­alienation in quietness, in the landscape which absorbs, has also always bestowed on nature its very particular character of refuge, the
character of peace. It joins — again at first only as a social category — the protest against artificiality, which the nature­lover believes he leaves behind him. Often with
self­deception, as when the ruling class administers the enjoyment of nature wholly as sleep. Often with defeatism, as when the bustle on the human plane is declared to
be incurably bleak and the great Pan is to resolve social contradictions. But often the repose of nature arrives on the scene as a real call for what is right, as a corrective
to everything tormented in which there is no health, and to everything artificial in which there is no blessing. Leisure, on its heights, would like to look as set apart as this
quiet working, as devoid of all trivialities. Together with the Muses who possibly inhabit these heights: the murmuring of the mountain­spring on Parnassus and Helicon
is in Greek mythology, with more than mythological significance, the natural basis of the Muses. And the quietness of nature, that which belongs to Olympus, was still
stressed as a basis of the immense, the elevated, and the sublime itself even when no animism whatsoever was preserved any more. The neo­Platonist Iamblichos
remarks that we can recognize the gods by their silence and human beings by their talk, and so the noise (the futile unrest) grows ever louder the further we withdraw
from the light of heaven. This is an experience of nature which has remained as it were naively alive even beyond mythology: precisely with regard to the heights, the
isolation of the heights. Up there, since the aesthetic discovery of the Alps, the great mountains hold their elapsion upright, surrounded by sun and silence. Above all the
upward­looking