495 Our teachers.- In our youth we take our teachers and guides from the time in which we happen to live and the circle in which we happen to move: we are thoughtlessly confident that the times we live in are bound to have teachers better suited to us than to anyone else and that we are bound to find them without much trouble. For this childishness we have in later years to pay a heavy price: we have to expiate our teachers in ourself We then perhaps go in search of our true guides throughout the whole world, the world of the past included, but perhaps it is too late. And in the worst case we discover that they were living when we were young – and that we missed them.
The dark buildings surround me looking up this massive dark wall I do see light but the darkness is concrete and the light is just reflecting on tears falling down
492 Among south winds. -A: I no longer understand myself! Only yesterday I felt so wild and stormy and at the same time so warm, so sunny and bright in the extreme. And today! All is now motionless, flat, dejected, gloomy, like the lagoon of Venice: – I want nothing and draw a deep breath of relief at that, and yet I am secretly vexed at this wanting nothing. Thus do the waves splash back and forth in the lake of my melancholy.- 8: You have described a pleasant little illness. The next north-east wind will blow it away! – A: Why should it!
I cannot really go down anymore to all the rooms where the doors are closed I can enter them but there is an eerie silence even the dust hangs still in the air
I cannot go down there because I closed the doors because I am afraid to throw away the key
The English word dumb originally had nothing to do with intelligence. It meant unable to speak.
It comes from Old English dumb (pronounced roughly “doom”), meaning mute, silent, unable to speak. This in turn comes from the Proto-Germanic word dumbaz, which had the same meaning.
You can see related words in other Germanic languages:
Old Norse: dumbr – mute
Old High German: tumb – mute, dull
German: dumm – stupid (the meaning shifted)
Dutch: dom – stupid
Interestingly, English and Dutch took different paths:
In Old English, dumb continued to mean “mute” for centuries. Expressions like deaf and dumb referred to people who could not speak (though this is now considered outdated and often offensive because many deaf people are not mute).
Around the 18th and 19th centuries, dumb began to acquire the figurative meaning “slow-witted” or “stupid.” The idea seems to have been that someone who could not answer or speak appeared unintelligent, even though there is no real connection.
In Dutch and German, that semantic shift happened much earlier. Dutch dom and German dumm almost entirely lost the original meaning of “mute” and came to mean “stupid.”
This kind of semantic shift is common. Words describing physical conditions often develop figurative meanings. For example:
blind → “blind to the facts”
deaf → “deaf to criticism”
dumb → “stupid”
So the original sense of dumb was simply silent or unable to speak. The modern meaning of stupid is a much later development.
491 Another reason for solitude!– A: So you intend to return to your desert?- B: I am not quick moving, I have to wait for myself- it is always late before the water comes to light out of the well of my self, and I often have to endure thirst for longer than I have patience. That is why I go into solitude- so as not to drink out ofeverybody’s cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think as I really think; after a time it always seems as though they want to banish me from myself and rob me of my soul – and I grow angry with everybody and fear everybody. I then require the desert, so as to grow good again.
