I have just accomplished my Eighth (Symphony). - It is the largest work I have ever written. And so unique in contents and structure that I cannot write about it properly. - Just imagine the universe beginning to resound and to sing. These are no more human voices but circulating planets and suns.

It is a strange thing about interpretations of a work of art. The “intellectual” (i.e. the part of an interpretation which is totally understandable for the human brains is not at all the essential and in most cases only the veil which hides the real character of the work... If you would ask me which kind of rational interpretation I would give at the moment relative to the last verses from Faust, I might try to say something - but I am not totally sure if it is possible to make it intellcgible. I take the last four lines as a direct continuation of the preceding verses and as a summit of the whole pyramid which is depicted in Goethe’s immense work of art. “Faust” shows us a whole world of figures, situations, developments. All lead, at first only shadowy but from scene to scene with increasing intensity and mature to this “One” which is not to be expressed, hardly suspected, but internally felt. Everything is only an "allegory" for something which can only be expressed in an insufficient way. The transitory things can be described, but what we feel, suspect, and what we will never reach totally (this is the ‘phenomenon” of which Goethe speaks in his last verses), the “immortal” behind all mortal things is "undescribable". The "eternal feminine" which Goethe describes as an aim, as something which each creature, even the stones, ought to feel with unmistakable certainty as centre of its “entity” is the opposite, the antithesis of all desire and of all aspiration, in short: of the “eternal masculine". You are totally right by calling it the “power of Love”. There is an infinite number of names and descriptions for it. (Just imagine how a child, an animal, a human being on a lower stage of evolution or on a higher step calls it, thinks of it.) Goethe himself shows us an infinite succession of allegories: Faust’s enthusiastic search for Helena, going forth in the “Walpurgisnacht”, the diverse "entelechias" of lower and higher stages of life, from the “homunculus” up to the “mater gloriosa” of the end. Goethe’s ideas grow from scene to scene, more intentionally and clearly described and explained. The “mater gloriosa” is the personification of the “eternal feminine”. In his “chorus mysticus” Goethe personally addresses the auditory and says:
Everything transitory which I have shown you in these two parts of “Faust” is only an allegory, a parable - “insuffcient” in its mortal manifestation, but immortal and free from worldly “insufficience” in the other world. In the immortal world of God even this will become a “phenomenon”and we do not need any paraphrase nor comparison nor parable for it: there it is just “done” what I tried to describe to you, but which is really undescribable. I can only say it in another parable: the “eternal feminine” has lead us on our way to the other world of clarity, we are there and we rest, we possess everything which is desirable. The Christian calls this “eternal salvation” and I had to make use of this beautiful and sufficient mythological picture which is most adequate and accessible for this era of mankind.

I have just made a strange discovery. Each time when I was apart from you I was sitting at my drawer and thinking of you exclusively, - and so do I now. There is a hidden desire for you in my whole way of living. Freud was completely right: you have always been my light and centre of my life!