—I could never toss Love out the window.
My companion, my beggar, my monstrous girl! You care so little about these miserable women, their schemes—my discomfort. Seize us with your unearthly voice! Your voice: the only antidote to this vile despair.
A cloudy morning in July. The taste of ash floats in the air; the smell of sweating wood in a hearth—flowers rotting in water—havoc along walkways—drizzle of canals moving across fields—and why stop there—why not add toys, and incense?
I ran ropes from spire to spire; garlands from window to window; gold chains from star to star; and I dance.
The mountain pond smokes endlessly. What witch will rise against the whitening sunset? What violet foliage will fall?
While public funds are spent on brotherly bacchanals, a bell of rosefire rings in the clouds.
A black powder rains gently on my evening, kindling an agreeable taste for India ink. —I lower the gas-jets, throw myself on the bed, and, turned towards the shadows, I see you: my daughters—my queens!
O the warm February morning. How the sudden South rekindled our memories of unbearable poverty, of youthful miseries.
Henrika had on a brown-and-white-checkered cotton skirt straight out of the last century, a ribboned bonnet, and a silk scarf. It looked sadder than mourning. We took a walk in the suburbs. It was overcast, and the South wind stirred rank smells of ravaged gardens and starched fields.
All this couldn’t have wearied my wife as much as it did me. Along a high path, in a puddle left by the previous month’s flood, she pointed to some tiny fish.
The city, its smoke and noise, pursued us down the roads. O better world, a habitation blessed only by sky and shade! The South only reminds me of miserable childhood moments, summer despairs, the awful glut of strength and knowledge that fate has always denied me. No: we won’t spend summer in this cheap country where we’ll be little more than orphans betrothed. I won’t let these hardened arms drag a beloved image after them.
Crystal gray skies. A strange pattern of bridges, some straight, some arched, others falling at oblique angles to the first, their shapes repeating in the illuminated curves of the canal, all of them so long and light that the banks, heavily canopied, sink and shrink. A few of these bridges are still freighted with hovels. Others sport masts, flags, fragile parapets. Minor chords crisscross as ropes rise from shore. You can make out a red coat, maybe some other outfits, and musical instruments. Are the tunes familiar, bits of chamber music, remnants of national anthems? The water is gray and blue, broad as an arm of the sea. —Falling from the top of the sky, a white beam of light obliterates this comedy.
I am a transient, and not altogether unhappy, citizen of a metropolis considered modern, given every conceivable standard of taste has been avoided, in both interior decoration and exterior architecture, and even in the plan of the city itself. You’d be hard-pressed to find the barest trace of a monument to superstition here. Morality and Language have finally been refined to their purest forms! These millions of people who have no need to know one another conduct their educations, professions, and retirements with such similarity as to suppose that the length of their lives must be several times shorter than statistics would indicate for continentals. Moreover, from my window, I see new ghosts rolling through unwaveringly thick coal-smoke—our dark woods, our summer night! —a new batch of Furies approaching a cottage that is both my country and my fullest heart, as everything resembles it here. Death without tears, a diligent servant girl, a desperate Love, and a perfect Crime, whimpering in the muddy street.
On the right, the summer dawn stirs the leaves and mists and noises of this corner of the park, while on the left, embankments keep the wet road’s thousand little ruts in violet shadow. A stream of enchantments: Wagons filled with gilded wooden animals, poles, and motley tenting, drawn at full gallop by twenty dappled circus horses, and children and men riding amazing beasts: twenty gilded conveyances, flagged and flowered like ancient coaches, like something from a fairy tale, filled with children dressed for a country fair. There are even coffins, sporting ebony plumes, beneath night-dark canopies, behind the trot of massive blue-black mares.
Such cities! Alleghenies and Lebanons out of a dream, staged and scaled for a people their equal. Chalets of crystal and wood move on invisible pulleys and rails. Bordered by colossi and copper palms, ancient craters bellow melodiously through flames. Feasts of love ring out across canals strung behind the chalets. A pack of pealing bells calls from the gorges.
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