I remember one wintry January evening I was hurrying home from the Vyborg side (of the Neva river). At the time, I was still very young. When I reached the Neva, I paused for a moment and cast a piercing glance along the river into the smoky, frosty, murky distance that had suddenly turned crimson with the last purple of the sunset burning out on the misty horizon. Night was falling over the city and the entire immense expanse of the Neva, swollen with frozen snow, was strewn with a myriad of endless sparks of spindly hoarfrost under the last rays of the sun. it was bitterly cold… frozen steam poured from tired horses and scurrying people. The tense air trembled at the slightest sound; columns of smoke rose like giants from all the roofs on both embankments and rushed upwards through the cold sky, twining and untwining along the way, making it seem as if new buildings were rising above old ones and a new city was forming in the air… It seemed, finally, that this whole world with all its inhabitants, strong and weak, with all their dwellings, shelters of the poor or gilded mansions (of the rich), at that twilight hour resembled a fantastic, magical vision, a dream which in turn would vanish instantly and rise up like steam into the dark-blue sky. Some strange thought suddenly stirred within me. I shuddered and at that moment my heart seemed to be flooded with a warm rush of blood that boiled up suddenly from the surge of a powerful, previously unknown sensation. It was as if at that moment I came to understand something that until then had only been stirring vaguely within me, and had yet to be comprehended; it was as if my eyes were open to something new, to a completely new world, unfamiliar to me and known only from obscure rumors and some mysterious signs. I suppose it was precisely at that moment that my existence began….

Extract from 'Petersburg Visions in Prose and Verse' 1861

‘It was as if a host of shining, singing spirits had left the room, so that it seemed suddenly to become quiet and empty; I jumped up, looked around me, and could have fancied myself in a grave if my mothers knitting needles had not made a friendly noise. I went out into the open air; the old hill town, the rocks, forest, river and lake, and the mountain range in its richly varied shapes lay in the mild radiance of the March sun, and as my glance took in all this, I felt a pure, enduring pleasure that I had not experienced before. It was the self surrendering love towards all that has come into being and exists, which respects the right and the significance of every single thing and is sensible of the coherence and the profundity of the world. This love stands higher than the artistic stressing of certain details for a selfish purpose, which always leads eventually to paltriness and caprice; it stands higher too than enjoyment and discrimination according to moods and romantic predilections and this love alone can give a uniform and lasting glow. I saw everything now, and all was new, beautiful and strange; and I began to see and to love the form, but also the content, the nature, and the history of things.’

Extract from Green Henry, Gottfried Keller, 1855.

‘We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history, and as it were, examining close up the peak period of glory in the history of a language; in minutes we had traced the path which had taken it several centuries. And I was powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many generations, reaches it highest point, which already contains the germ of decay, and the whole intelligently articulated structure begins to droop, to degenerate, to totter towards its doom and at the same time the thought abruptly shot through me, with a joyful, startled amazement, that despite the decay and death of that language it had not been lost, that its youth , maturity and downfall were preserved in our memory, in our knowledge of it and its history, and would survive and could at any time be reconstructed in the symbols and formulas of scholarship as well as in the recondite formulations of the glass bead game. I suddenly realized that the in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the glass bead game, everything actually was all meaningful, that every symbol and combinations of symbols led not hither and yon not to single examples, experiments and proofs, built into the centre, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between yin and yang, holiness is forever being created’.

Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

She gazed Wonderingly into the darkness, and saw only a spot of red on the icon and the flicker of light of the stove on Liharevs face. The darkness, the chime of the bells, the roar of the storm, the lame boy, Sasha with her fretfulness, unhappy Liharev and his sayings-all this mingled together, and seem to grow into one huge impression, and God’s world seemed to her fantastic, Full of marvels and magical forces. All that she heard was ringing in her ears, and human life presented itself to her as a beautiful poetic fairytale without an end.

Chekhov, On The Road