Hannah Arendt: "Thinking without a banister"

 There's this other thing, which Draenos brought up ... "groundless thinking." I have a metaphor which is not quite that cruel, and which I have never published but kept for myself. I call it thinking without a banister--in German, Denken ohne Geländer. That is, as you go up and down the stairs you can always hang on to the banister so that you don't fall down, but we have lost the banister. That is the way I tell it to myself. And this is indeed what I try to do. - Arendt, Hannah. Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding 1953 - 1975. ed. Jerome Kohn. Schocken Books, 2018: v.