And you, Clara Westhoff, how simply and well you endured, lived through the experience, and made it a forward step in your young existence! So great was your love that it was able to forgive the great dying, and your eye was so sure, even then, that it conceived beauty in all the new colors, feelings, and gestures of the earth, and that all coming to an end seemed for your feeling only a pretext under which Nature wanted to unfold beauties yet unrevealed. Just as the eyes of angels rest on a dying child, delighting in the similar transfiguration of its half-released little face, so without concern you saw in the dying earth the smile and the beauty and the trust in eternity."―from letter to Clara Westhoff Schmargendorf (Sunday, November 18, 1900) . Rainer Maria Rilke
About This Quote

The quote above is from the book by the same name by Theodor Fontane. It is a quote from a letter written by Fortuna in which she expresses her love and admiration for Clara in her last days. The quote refers to how Clara and Fortuna both loved and admired each other. They both loved the beauty of the world and were assured that beauty would live on after death, though it will never be able to be rediscovered.

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