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Any nostalgia I feel is literary. I remember my childhood with tears, but they’re rhythmic tears, in which prose is already being formed. . . . I feel nostalgia for scenes. Thus someone else’s childhood can move me as much as my own; both are purely visual phenomena from a past I’m unable to fathom, and my perception of them is literary. They move me, yes, but because I see them, not because I remember them.
Disquietude, p 125
And the man fell silent, looking at the sunset.
But what good is a sunset to one who hates and loves?
PERHAPS THOSE WHO ARE GOOD AT SEEING ARE POOR AT FEELING
Perhaps those who are good at seeing are poor at feeling
And do not enchant because they don’t know how to act.
There are ways for doing all things,
And love also has its way.
Those whose way of seeing a field is by seeing the grass
Cannot have the blindness that makes a man stir feelings.
I loved, and was not loved, which I only saw in the end,
For one is not loved as one is born but as may happen.
She still has beautiful lips and hair, like before.
And I am still alone in the field, like before.
I think this and my head lifts up
As if it had been bent down,
And the divine sun dries the small tears I can’t help but have.
How vast the field is and how tiny love!
I look, and I forget, as the world buries and trees lose their leaves.
Because I am feeling, I cannot speak.
I listen to my voice as if it belonged to another.
And my voice speaks of her as if this other were speaking.
Her hair is yellow-blond like wheat in bright sunlight,
And when she speaks, her mouth utters things not told by words.
She smiles, and her teeth gleam like the river’s stones.
18 NOVEMBER 1929
I WANT MY VERSES TO BE LIKE JEWELS
I want my verses to be like jewels,
Able to endure into the far future
Untarnished by the death
That lurks in each thing,
Verses which forget the hard and sad
Brevity of our days, taking us back
To that ancient freedom
We’ve perhaps never known.
Here in these friendly, far-removed shadows
Where history ignores us, I remember those
Who carefully weave
Their carefree verses.
And remembering you above all others,
I write beneath the veiled sun
And drink, immortal Horace,
Superfluous, to your glory.
5 AUGUST 1923
I multiplied myself to feel myself,
To feel myself I had to feel everything,
I overflowed, I did nothing but spill out,
I undressed, I yielded,
And in each corner of my soul there’s an altar to a different god.
from time's passage <3
BUT IT’S NOT JUST THE CADAVER
But it’s not just the cadaver,
It’s not just that frightful person who’s no one,
That abysmal variation on the usual body,
That stranger who appears in the absence of the man we knew,
That gaping chasm between our seeing and our understanding—
It’s not just the cadaver that fills the soul with dread
And plants a silence in the bottom of the heart.
The everyday external things of the one who died
Also trouble the soul, and with a more poignant dread.
Even if they belonged to an enemy,
Who can look without nostalgia at the table where this enemy sat,
At the pen with which he wrote?
Who can see without sincere anguish
The coat in whose pockets the dead beggar kept his (now forever absent) hands,
The now horridly tidied-up toys of the dead child,
The rifle the hunter took with him when he vanished beyond every hill?
All of this suddenly weighs on my foreign comprehension,
And a death-sized nostalgia terrifies my soul.
But the Tobacco Shop Owner has come to the door and is standing there.
I look at him with the discomfort of a half-twisted neck
Compounded by the discomfort of a half-grasping soul.
He will die and I will die.
He’ll leave his signboard, I’ll leave my poems.
His sign will also eventually die, and so will my poems.
Eventually the street where the sign was will die,
And so will the language in which my poems were written.
Then the whirling planet where all of this happened will die.
Put time to good use!
But what’s time that I should put it to use?
Put time to good use!
Not a day without a few lines . . .
Honest and first-rate work
Like that of a Virgil or Milton . . .
But to be honest or first-rate is so hard!
To be Milton or Virgil is so unlikely!
from a note in the margin
(Lady who so often rode in the same compartment with me
On the suburban train,
Did you ever become interested in me?
Did I put time to good use by looking at you?
What was the rhythm of our silence in the moving train?
What was the understanding that we never came to?
What life was there in this? What was this to life?)
also from a note in the margin
No! All I want is freedom!
Love, glory, and wealth are prisons.
Lovely rooms? Nice furniture? Plush rugs?
Just let me out so I can be with myself.
I want to breathe the air in private.
My heart doesn’t throb collectively,
And I’m unable to feel in jointly held society.
I’m only I, born only as I am, full of nothing but me.
Where do I want to sleep? In the backyard.
Without any walls, just the great conversation,
I and the universe.
And what peace, what relief to fall asleep seeing not the ghost of my wardrobe
But the black and cool splendor of all the stars in concert,
The great and infinite abyss above
Placing its breezes and solaces on the flesh-covered skull that’s my face,
Where only the eyes—another sky—reveal the world of subjective being.
opening stanza of no! all i want is freedom [from 1930]