生命之树啊，当冬天来临的时候，你会怎样?我们意见不一致。都不像鸟儿一样齐声迁徙。我们被追上了，逾期了，我们冲进风里，落在地上，掉进冷漠的池塘里。开花和凋谢我们理解为一体。狮子在某个地方游荡，在他们的辉煌中，完全没有意识到任何弱点。但是，当我们完全专注于一件事时，已经感受到另一件事的压力。仇恨是我们的第一反应。而恋人，他们不是永远在侵犯彼此的界限吗?尽管他们承诺了空间、狩猎和家园。 Then, for a sketch drawn at a moment's impulse, a ground of contrast is prepared, painfully, so that we may see. For they are most exact with us. We do not know the contours of our feelings. We only know what shapes them from the outside. Who has not sat, afraid, before his own heart's curtain? It lifted and displayed the scenery of departure. Easy to understand. The well-known garden swaying just a little. Then came the dancer. Not he! Enough! However lightly he pretends to move: he is just disguised, costumed, an ordinary man who enters through the kitchen when coming home. I will not have these half-filled human masks; better the puppet. It at least is full. I will endure this well-stuffed doll, the wire, the face that is nothing but appearance. Here out front I wait. Even if the lights go down and I am told: "There's nothing more to come," -even if the grayish drafts of emptiness come drifting down from the deserted stage -even if not one of my now silent forebears sist beside me any longer, not a woman, not even a boy- he with the brown and squinting eyes-: I'll still remain. For one can always watch. Am I not right? You, to whom life would taste so bitter, Father, after you - for my sake - slipped of mine, that first muddy infusion of my necessity. You kept on tasting, Father, as I kept on growing, troubled by the aftertaste of my so strange a future as you kept searching my unfocused gaze -you who, so often since you died, have been afraid for my well-being, within my deepest hope, relinquishing that calmness, the realms of equanimity such as the dead possess for my so small fate -Am I not right? And you, my parents, am I not right? You who loved me for that small beginning of my love for you from which I always shyly turned away, because the distance in your features grew, changed, even while I loved it, into cosmic space where you no longer were...: and when I feel inclined to wait before the puppet stage, no, rather to stare at is so intensely that in the end to counter-balance my searching gaze, an angel has to come as an actor, and begin manipulating the lifeless bodies of the puppets to perform. Angel and puppet! Now at last there is a play! Then what we seperate can come together by our very presence. And only then the entire cycle of our own life-seasons is revealed and set in motion. Above, beyond us, the angel plays. Look: must not the dying notice how unreal, how full of pretense is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is to be itself. O hours of childhood, when behind each shape more that the past lay hidden, when that which lay before us was not the future. We grew, of course, and sometimes were impatient in growing up, half for the sake of pleasing those with nothing left but their own grown-upness. Yet, when alone, we entertained ourselves with what alone endures, we would stand there in the infinite space that spans the world and toys, upon a place, which from the first beginnniing had been prepared to serve a pure event. Who shows a child just as it stands? Who places him within his constellation, with the measuring-rod of distance in his hand. Who makes his death from gray bread that grows hard, -or leaves it there inside his rounded mouth, jagged as the core of a sweet apple?.......The minds of murderers are easily comprehended. But this: to contain death, the whole of death, even before life has begun, to hold it all so gently within oneself, and not be angry: that is indescribable.