Seulement la terre qui obéit, sait bien qu'elle tourne en rond, tandis que nous vers l'infini nous précipitons. Translation: But the obedient Earth well knows that she moves round and round, whereas we hurtle down toward infinity.
O smile, going where? O upturned look: new, warm, receding surge of the heart--; alas, we are that surge. Does then the cosmic space we dissolve in taste of us? Do the angels reclaim only what is theirs, their own outstreamed existence, or sometimes,...
Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For beauty's nothing but the beginning of terror we're still just able to...
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me against his heart: I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just abl...
Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future lessens . . . . Superabundant existence wells in my heart.
But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem: they might point to the catkins hanging from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain descending on black earth in early spring. --- And we, who always think of happiness rising, w...
Isn’t it time that, loving, we freed ourselves from the beloved, and, trembling, endured: as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be, in its flight, something more than itself?
Isn't it time that, in love, we freed ourselves from the loved one and, trembling, endured: as the arrow endures the string, collecting itself to be more than itself as it shoots?
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
Look: the trees exist; the houses we dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only we pass by it all, like a rush of air. And everything conspires to keep quiet about us, half out of shame perhaps, half out of some secret hope.
For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breathe ourselves out and away; with each new heartfire we give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us: you're in my blood, this room, Spring itself is filled with you . . . To what end? He can...
But not you, O girl, nor yet his mother, stretched his eyebrows so fierce with expectation. Not for your mouth, you who hold him now, did his lips ripen into these fervent contours. Do you really think your quiet footsteps could have so convulsed him...
a kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.
Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home. Speak and attest. More than ever the things we can live with are falling away, and ousting them, filling their place, a will with no image. Will beneath crusts which readily crack whenever the act i...
We only pass everything by like a transposition of air.
Isn’t it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abidi...
weren’t you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.)…
And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally,...
E tutto congiura a tacere di noi, in parte come vergogna, o forse come speranza indicibile.
