34. The Beginning and the End of the Earth
GA 68b/1907-12-16/p045
·1907-12-16
·
English
MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Da keine professionellen Stenogramme vorliegen, handelt es sich oftmals um notizenhaft festgehaltene Zusammenfassungen oder Berichte.» (Since no professional shorthand transcripts exist, these are often summaries or reports kept in the form of notes.). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 68b). The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
Now imagine that we have not just one but a whole lot of such water balls, of which we treat only a part, as just described. In another, we let the first ice ball fall out of the water mass; because it is separated, no complicated ice ball can form from it. It always remains so simple. At ever further stages, we allow ever more complicated ice balls to fall out, [at the next stage again more]: Thus, in addition to the most complicated ice formations that have emerged from the entire mass of water, we have such formations that fall out of the mother water at an earlier, less complicated stage.
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