Verborgen/Geborgen

Because the child must be protected against the world, his traditional place is in the family, whose adult members daily return back from the outside world and withdraw into the security of private life within four walls. These four walls, within which people’s private family life is lived, constitute a shield against the world and specifically against the public aspect of the world. They enclose a secure place [Raum des Verborgenen], without which no living thing can thrive. This holds good not only for the life of childhood but for human life in general. Wherever the latter is consistently exposed to the world without the protection of privacy and security [Geborgenen] its vital quality is destroyed.

In the public world, common to all, persons count, and so does work, that is, the work of our hands that each of us contributes to our common world; but life qua life does not matter there. The world cannot be regardful of it, and it has to be hidden [verborgen] and protected [geborgen] from the world.

Everything that lives, not vegative life alone, emerges from darkness and, however strong its natural tendency to thrust itself into the light, it nevertheless needs the security [Geborgenheit] of darkness to grow at all.

Hannah Arendt, ‘The Crisis of Education’ in Between Past and Future, 186-7.