I observe that the first warm spring days tear something in me; you feel it in yourself too. When nature awakens to life again, but our own lives and the historical bonds in which we live remain stuck in unresolved tension, we feel this contradiction particularly strongly; or perhaps it isn’t anything other than desire, and then it’s quite good that we feel it strongly again; as for me, I must definitely say that I have lived for many, many years not without goals, tasks, and hopes that completely absorbed me, but nevertheless without personal desire; and perhaps that is exactly how one ages prematurely. Everything began to become too “factual”; nearly everyone today has some goals and tasks, everything is immensely objectified and materialized, but who dares today to have a strong personal sentiment, a real desire; who will strive and waste energy to preserve desire within, to cultivate it and let it bear fruit? (…) But we want to rejoice in what can still captivate us a bit more powerfully, and consider the pain associated with it as wealth. High tensions create strong sparks (or is that inconsistent according to physics? In that case, translate it into the correct language!).
(Dietrich Bonhoeffer /1906–1945/, note from a Nazi prison, to a friend, April 11, 1944;
quoted from the book Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Resistance and Submission, Letters from Prison. Kalich 2023)
