Sadness

What I aim for is, most concretely, sadness. I try to make the volume of the building so that it carries in it all feeling. To reach this feeling, I try to make the building so that it carries my eternal sadness. It comes, as nearly as I can in a building, to the point of tears.

I try to shape the volume so that its volume brings tears to my throat. I can feel, in me, the eternal sadness of all life welling up, to some small degree, in me. This is very highly concrete. I cannot do it in a trivial way. I cannot literally make the building laugh and cry. And it is not gloomy either. This sadness of tears, when I reach it, is also joy. The sky over the Bay Bridge, the lights of the cars, the rain, the existence on this earth. What makes it sad is that it comes closest, in the physical concrete beams and columns and walls, as close as possible, to the fact of my existence on this earth. It reminds me of it, it makes me take part in it. So when it happens, it is also a kind of joy, a happiness.

But to recognize it, I concentrate most on my sadness, and my tears.

(Page 246)

Notes mentioning this note


Here are all the notes in this garden, along with their links, visualized as a graph.