Marginalia on Mahler (On the 25th Anniversary of his death, May 18, 1936)

Why Mahler wrote the “Songs on the Death of Children,” set to the Rückert poems, became clear to me when, for the first time in my life, a loved one died. This feeling — to be bent together to the breaking point in a powerful arc between tenderness for what is nearest and loss into what is most distant — does not have its measure in the individual misfortune which transports children into the realm of the dead. Yet the dead are indeed our children. The aura of the unfinished, which, as a halo of sacredness, surrounds those who have died prematurely, does not flicker out even in the case of adults

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