I looked around in the unknown year, aware that few are
those who come from so far, I was saturated with
sunlight as a plant with water.
That was a high year, fox-colored, like a crosscut redwood
stump or vine leaves on the hills in November.
In its groves and chambers the pulse of music was beating
strongly, running down from dark mountains, tributaries
entangled.
A generation clad in patterned robes trimmed with little bells
greeted me with the banging of conga drums.
I repeated their guttural songs of ecstatic despair walking by
the sea when it bore in boys on surfboards and washed
my footprints away.
At the very border of inhabited time the same lessons were
being learned, how to walk on two legs and to pronounce
the signs traced in the always childish book of our
species.
I would have related, had I known how, everything which a
single memory can gather for the praise of men.
O sun, o stars, I was saying, holy, holy, holy, is our being
beneath heaven and the day and our endless communion.
—Czeslaw Milosz, “The Year”
(translated by the author and Richard Lourie)
***
Greetings on this eve of the New Year!
May it be a blessed one for us all.
Today we’re announcing a new and unique title in The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner in English series, which is now available. You can read more about it below, and I hope you do!
And here’s another reminder that our 2023 holiday sale ends tonight.
There is, though, no deadline for gifts, and responses to our end-of-year appeal are still being gratefully received—always in awe and appreciation of your thoughtful kindnesses.
With warmest wishes of light and strength for the New Year
—and beyond!
—John-Scott
New in the Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner
On Philosophy, History, and Literature
Lectures at the Worker Education School and the Independent College,
Berlin, 1901–1905
Author’s summary and summaries of 34 lectures, 1901–1905;
with reports on Rudolf Steiner’s activity in the
“Giordano Bruno Association,” 1902 (CW 51)
Wide-ranging, illuminating, and entirely unique within Rudolf Steiner’s Collected Works, this volume consists of lectures given at the Worker Education School and at the Independent College in Berlin (with a lengthy appendix on his activity in the Giordano Bruno Association). In part one of the volume, Steiner lays the foundation for what he calls “historical symptomatology”—that is, the study of the deeper causes behind history through their symptomatic expression in concrete historical events. Part two contains, on the one hand, lectures on the philosophies of the medieval and early modern mystics and, on the other, a brilliant homage to the great thinker and dramatist Friedrich Schiller.
This book is a must-read for both long-time students of Steiner’s work and newcomers seeking a different, enlivened and enlivening approach to philosophy, history, and literature.
