When we were young

From time to time we meet to measure our states of mind against one another. We have done this at least once a year for two decades no matter where in the world and how far apart we have been. No one else will do. It has to be us because we are part of each other. When we were young we wanted to go to the dogs and drag each other down. After we moved apart we wanted to disappear in solitude. We are bonded for good and ill and have to meet from time to time. One will contact the other. If then we do not meet we both feel we will not know ourselves fully. When we were young we were stupid and we knew we were stupid. We knew we were callow and to make sure we knew it our elders told us over and over again. But we could not help expressing our callowness and cringing at ourselves. We wanted to get older so we could benefit from hard-won experience. And now that we are growing older it is as we knew it would be when we were younger. We do look back on our younger selves and cringe at our past callowness and are thankful that we have grown older and can benefit from hard-won experience. And as we look back on our youth our current experiences become fresher because we do not see them from the point of view of a correctly imagined future when we will be able to see them from a truer perspective and because we do not struggle with received notions of youth. Experience is no longer infinitely reflexive. It is new because we enter into it fully from our present standpoints and because our standpoints are respected by our surroundings. So that in a very real sense we were older then than we are now and are younger now than we were then. Now we can meet and laugh though not quite in the way that we imagined we would when we were younger.

The vast night

It’s taken me years to begin to be able to understand Rilke. But today I thought I might be ready.

THE VAST NIGHT

Often I gazed at you in wonder: stood at the window begun
the day before, stood and gazed at you in wonder. As yet
the new city seemed forbidden to me, and the strange
unpersuadable landscape darkened as though
I didn’t exist. Even the nearest Things
didn’t care whether I understood them. The street
thrust itself up to the lamppost: I saw it was foreign.
Over there–a room, feelable, clear in the lamplight–,
I already took part; they noticed, and closed the shutters.
Stood. Then a child began crying. I knew what the mothers
all around, in the houses, were capable of–, and knew
the inconsolable origins of all tears.
Or a woman’s voice sang and reached a little beyond
expectation, or downstairs an old man let out
a cough that was full of reproach, as though his body were right
and the gentler world mistaken. And then the hour
struck–, but I counted too late, it tumbled on past me.–
Like a new boy at school, who is finally allowed to join in,
but he can’t reach the ball, is helpless at all the games
the others pursue with such ease, and he stands there staring
into the distance,–where–?: I stood there and suddenly
grasped that it was you: you were playing with me, grown-up
Night, and I gazed at you in wonder. Where the towers
were raging, where with averted fate
a city surrounded me, and indecipherable mountains
camped against me, and strangeness, in narrowing circles,
prowled around my randomly flickering emotions–:
it was then that in all your magnificence
you were not ashamed to know me. Your breath moved tenderly
over my face. And, spread across solemn distances,
your smile entered my heart.

(trans. Stephen Mitchell)

She destroyed his image

She destroyed his image. She destroyed their friends’ images. She destroyed her own image. She was left with an empty room and a handful of holiday trinkets. She destroyed those too. She lay on a rug and fell into a deep dreamless sleep. She awoke the next day. She went outside and saw him walking down the street. It was high noon. The sun was strong and everyone else in the town stayed inside. They walked together for a while in the bleaching light.