At last two legs come through the night. The step of two woman legs in my ear: I don’t want to look. My ear stands like a gateway on the street. Never will I be so at one with a woman as with this unknown figure whose steps disappear ever deeper in my ear.
Then two women. The one sordidly slinking along, the other stamping with the disregard of age. I look down. Black. The clothes of old women have a form all their own. These two are bound for church. At this hour, the soul has long since been taken into custody, and so I won’t have anything more to do with it.
Sheep, As Seen in Another Light
As to the history of sheep: Today man views the sheep as stupid. But God loved it. He repeatedly compared man with sheep. Is it possible that God was completely wrong?
As to the psychology of sheep: The finely chiseled expression of exalted consciousness is not unlike the look of stupidity.
On the heath near Rome: They had the long faces and the delicate skulls of martyrs. Their black stockings and hoods against the white fur reminded of morbid monks and fanatics.
When they rummaged through the low, sparse grass, their lips trembled nervously and scattered the timber of a quivering steel string over the earth. Joined in chorus, their voices rang out like the lamentations of prelates in the cathedral. But when many of them sang together, they formed a men’s, women’s and children’s choir. In soft swells they lifted and lowered their voices; it was like a wandering train in the darkness, struck every other second by light, and the children’s voices then stood on an ever-returning hill, while the men strode through the valley. Day and night rolled a thousand times faster through their song and drove the earth onward to its end. Sometimes a solitary voice flung itself up or tumbled down in fear of damnation. Heaven’s clouds were recreated in the white ringlets of their hair. These are age-old Catholic animals, religious companions of mankind.
Once again in the South: Man is twice as big as usual in their midst and reaches like a church spire up toward heaven. Beneath our feet the earth was brown, and the grass like scratched-in gray-green stripes. The sun shone heavy on the sea as on a lead mirror. Boats were busy fishing as in Saint Peter’s time. The cape swung the view like a running board up toward heaven and broke off into the dark yellow and white sea as in wandering Odysseus’ day.
Everywhere: When man approaches, sheep are timid and stupid; they have known the beatings and stones of his insolence. But if he stands stock still and stares into the distance, they forget about him. They stick their heads together then, ten or fifteen of them, and form the spokes of a wheel, with the big, heavy center-point of heads and the otherwise-colored spokes of their backs. They press their skulls tightly together. This is how they stand, and the wheel that they form won’t budge for hours. They don’t seem to want to feel anything but the wind and the sun, and between their foreheads, the seconds striking out eternity that beats in their blood and signals from head to head like the hammering of prisoners on prison walls.
Sarcophagus Cover
Somewhere to the rear of the Pincio, or already in the Villa Borghese, two sarcophagus covers of a common sort of stone lie out in the open between the bushes. They constitute no rare treasure, they’re just lying around. Stretched out on top of them, the couple who once as a final memento had themselves copied in stone, are at rest. One sees many such sarcophagus covers in Rome; but in no museum and in no church do they make such an impression as here under the trees, where as though on a picnic, the figures stretched themselves out, and seem just to have awakened from a little sleep that lasted two thousand years.
They’ve propped themselves up on their elbows and are eyeing each other. All that’s missing between them is the basket of cheese, fruit and wine.
The woman wears a hairdo of little curls — any minute now she’ll arrange them according to the latest fashion from the time before she fell asleep. And they’re smiling at each other: a long, a very long smile. You look away: And still they go on smiling.
This faithful, proper, middle-class, beloved look has lasted centuries; it was sent forth in ancient Rome and crosses your glance today.
Don’t be surprised that even in front of you it endures, that they don’t look away or lower their eyes: This doesn’t make them stone-like, but rather all the more human.
Rabbit Catastrophe
No doubt the lady had just the day before stepped out of the window display of a department store; her doll’s face was so dainty, you would have liked to stir it up with a teaspoon just to see it in motion. But you yourself wore shoes with showy, slick, honeycomb soles, and knickers as if tailor-made to measure. At least you delighted in the wind. It pressed the dress against the lady and made a sorry little skeleton of her, a dumb little face with a tiny mouth. Of course she feigned a dauntless look for the benefit of the observer.
Little jackrabbits live unawares beside the white pleats and the thin-as-teacups skirts. Dark green like laurel, the island’s epic surrounds them. Flocks of seagulls nest in the heath hollows like snow blossoms swept by the wind. The lady’s little, white-fur-collared, miniature, long-haired terrier is rummaging through the bush, its nose a finger’s width above the ground; far and wide there’s no other dog to sniff out on the island, there’s nothing here but the vast romance of many little, unknown paths that crisscross the island. In this solitude the dog grows huge, a hero. Aroused, he barks dagger-sharp and bares his teeth like some sea monster. Hopelessly, the lady purses her lips to whistle; the wind tears the tiny attempt at a sound from her mouth.
I’ve already covered glacier paths with just such an impetuous fox terrier; we humans smoothly on our skis, him bleeding, his belly collapsed, cut up by the ice, and nonetheless enlivened by a wild, insatiable bliss. Now this one here has picked up the scent of something; his legs gallop like little sticks, his bark becomes a sob. It’s amazing at this moment how much such a flat, sea-swept island can remind one of the great glens and highlands of the mountains. The dunes, yellow as skulls and smoothed by the wind, sit like craggy peaks. Between them and the sky lies the emptiness of unfinished creation. Light doesn’t shine on this and that, but spills out over everything as from an accidentally overturned bucket.
One is always astonished that animals inhabit this solitude. They take on a mysterious aspect; their little, soft, wooly and feathery breasts shelter the spark of life. It’s a little jackrabbit that the terrier is chasing. A little, weather-beaten mountain type; he’ll never catch him, I bet. A memory from geography class comes to mind: island? Are we actually standing here on the peak of a high ocean mountain? We ten or fifteen idly observant vacationers, in our colorful madhouse jackets, as the fashion prescribes. I change my mind again and say to myself, it would all be nothing but inhuman loneliness: Bewildered as a horse that has thrown its rider is the earth wherever man is in the minority; moreover, nature proves itself to be not at all healthy, downright mentally disturbed in the high mountains and on tiny islands. But to our amazement, the distance between the dog and the hare has diminished; the terrier is catching up, we’ve never seen such a thing: a dog catching up with a hare! This will be the first great triumph of the canine world! Enthusiasm spurs on the hunter, his breath sobs in gulps, there’s no longer any doubt that in a matter of seconds he will have caught his prey. The hare pirouettes. Here I recognize in a certain softness, because the crucial cut is missing in its turn, that it’s not a grown rabbit at all, but a harelet, a rabbit child.