It

It stayed up with her in the soft night when everyone else on her street had gone to bed; slunk around her legs like a cat. The morning after it reared up in front of her like a forgotten responsibility. It was in the intimacy of sex and the violence of confrontation. It was what comforted, unmade or transfigured her when she wasn’t coasting bored through life. It was in the exhilaration of sinews and nerves. It was closer than the vein in her neck; it was something she couldn’t begin to approach. It was the dawning deep down in things. It was the immense black space at all sides, which knows nothing of us. Even in tiny doses she reeled from it.

Inner space

The bird is a creature that has a very special feeling of trust in the external world, as if she knew that she is one with its deepest mystery. That is why she sings in it as if she were singing within her own depths; that is why we so easily receive a birdcall into our own depths; we seem to be translating it without residue into our emotion; indeed, it can for a moment turn the whole world into inner space, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between her heart and world’s.

Rilke