“Only the transitory lends itself to description; but what we feel, surmise but will never reach (or know here as an actual happening), the intransitory behind all appearance, is indescribable. That which draws us by its mystic force, what every created thing, perhaps even the very stones, feels with absolute certainty as the centre of its being, what Goethe here — again employing an image — calls the eternal feminine — that is to say, the resting-place, the goal, in opposition to the striving and struggling toward the goal (the eternal masculine) — you are quite right in calling the force of love. There are infinite representations and names for it . . “
From the letters of Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911), born on this day
King Edward Street Chapel 