"[Bonhoeffer's] nature remains undiscovered unless he is encountered as a person. He himself accepted the truncated nature of his vocation and writing as his destiny: 'The longer we are uprooted from our professional activities and our private lives, the more it brings home to us how fragmentary our lives are compared to those of our parents (or grandparents, etc.)… What chance have many of us today of producing a real magnum opus? How can we do all the research, the assimilation and sorting out of material which such a thing entails?... That means that culture has become a torso. The important thing today, however, is that people should be able to discern from the fragment of our life how the whole was arranged and planned. For there are some fragments which are only worth throwing into the dustbin, and even a decent hell is far too good for them. But there are some fragments whose importance lasts for centuries, because their completion can only be a matter for God, and therefore they are fragments which must be fragments. I think for example of the Art of the Fugue. If our life is but the remotest reflection of such a fragment, if in a short time we accumulate a wealth of themes and weld them together into a pleasin harmony and keep the great counterpoint going all through… then let us not bemoan the fragmentariness of our life, but rather rejoice in it.' "