It is our duty, therefore, to recognize the elevating action of the great goods of creation, their mission to liberate us from lower attachments and to guide us towards God, and accordingly to lay ourselves open to their operation. A great enemy of true simplicity is our dependence on peripheral considerations—such as human respect, the pleasure derived from being spoiled, a comfortable life, freedom from cares, this or that cherished habit, and so forth. The more we are captivated by peripheral interests, the less simple our life will be. Some people are so anxious to have the proper utensil, instrument, or contrivance on hand at every occasion and in every possible emergency (nor will that object do unless it is their personal property) that they never have time or energy left for attending to really great and relevant things. They are completely enchained by their concern about a multitude of superficial affairs to which they are fettered by many small ties. The slightest disturbance in their accustomed comfort deprives them of peace.

But imagine our heart being touched and lit up by some high value—the chain is burst; all the marginal preoccupations are swept out of sight and are no longer able to tie us down. Whenever some high good in our life appears threatened—a beloved person, for instance, has fallen gravely ill or our own life is in danger—we at once become aware of the pettiness and futility of all those paltry things to which we have formerly attached so great importance. How willingly would we renounce all of them, if only we could thereby save that one precious good! Or again, suppose that we are initiated into a new realm of beauty, or gain insight into a great central truth—then, too, we rise above all shallow things; we increase in freedom, and so also in simplicity.

This liberating power of a high value or a deep experience is most strikingly manifested whenever a person’s heart is inflamed with a noble passion of love. At one blow, what has been his habitual world breaks down. It is this which finds its plastic expression in the first act of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, when, having drunk the philter, Tristan cries out of his “dream ill-omened of Tristan’s honor.” All the world of outward honor and renown suddenly appears so sunk into immateriality that he is no longer able even to recall its meaning. In this sense, again, he refers in the second act to himself and Isolde as being “enveloped by night.”

With the surge of this great love, which lifts them both into a new and higher world, a new principle of value has entered into their lives, in the sight of which all things that peopled their former “day-worlds” are condemned to evanescence. These things do not fit into their new “night-world.” As lovers they have acquired a new simplicity.