The circumstances of his life were marked
by that strange but rather common phenomenon—perhaps
in fact,
it’s true for all lives—of being tailored
to the image and likeness of his instincts
which tended towards inertia and withdrawal.
He even evaded the demands of his own instincts.
My soul has been reduced to a tied-up ball of thread,
and what I am and have been,
which is me,
forgot its name.
The dead.
I was baffled by this dual existence of truth.
All that remains is my feeling of gratitude towards the one who loved me.
Between me and life there were always sheets of frosted glass that I couldn’t tell
were there by sight or by touch; I didn’t live that life or that dimension.
We are distinguished from them by the
purely external detail of speaking and writing
by an abstract intelligence that distracts us from concrete intelligence,
and by our ability to imagine impossible things.
The night was colder and farther advanced under that
side of the deck awning lay the open ocean
trembling all the way out to where the
eastern horizon was growing sad and where a darker air
placing shadows of early night on the
obscure liquid line of the sea’s visible limit
hovered like haze on a hot day.