Duino Elegies : The Eight Elegy

The creature gazes into openness with all its eyes. But our eyes are as if they were reversed, and surround it, everywhere, like barriers against its free passage. We know what is outside us from the animal’s face alone: since we already turn the young child round and make it look backwards at what is settled, not that openness that is so deep in the animal’s vision. Free from death. We alone see that: the free creature has its progress always behind it, and God before it, and when it moves, it moves in eternity, as streams do. We never have pure space in front of us, not for a single day, such as flowers open endlessly into. Always there is world, and never the Nowhere without the Not: the pure, unwatched-over, that one breathes and endlessly knows, without craving. As a child loses itself sometimes, one with the stillness, and is jolted back. Or someone dies and is it. Since near to death one no longer sees death, and stares ahead, perhaps with the large gaze of the creature. Lovers are close to it, in wonder, if the other were not always there closing off the view..... As if through an oversight it opens out behind the other......But there is no way past it, and it turns to world again. Always turned towards creation, we see only a mirroring of freedom dimmed by us. Or that an animal mutely, calmly is looking through and through us. This is what fate means: to be opposite, and to be that and nothing else, opposite, forever. If there was consciousness like ours in the sure creature, that moves towards us on a different track – it would drag us round in its wake. But its own being is boundless, unfathomable, and without a view of its condition, pure as its outward gaze. And where we see future it sees everything, and itself in everything, and is healed for ever. And yet in the warm waking creature is the care and burden of a great sadness. Since it too always has within it what often overwhelms us – a memory, as if what one is pursuing now was once nearer, truer, and joined to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. Compared to that first home the second one seems ambiguous and uncertain. O bliss of little creatures that stay in the womb that carried them forever: O joy of the midge that can still leap within, even when it is wed: since womb is all. And see the half-assurance of the bird, almost aware of both from its inception, as if it were the soul of an Etruscan, born of a dead man in a space with his reclining figure as the lid. And how dismayed anything is that has to fly, and leave the womb. As if it were terrified of itself, zig-zagging through the air, as a crack runs through a cup. As the track of a bat rends the porcelain of evening. And we: onlookers, always, everywhere, always looking into, never out of, everything. It fills us. We arrange it. It collapses. We arrange it again, and collapse ourselves. Who has turned us round like this, so that, whatever we do, we always have the aspect of one who leaves? Just as they will turn, stop, linger, for one last time, on the last hill, that shows them all their valley - , so we live, and are always taking leave.