The Kindness of Strangers by Salka Viertel

Author:Salka Viertel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2018-04-03T12:27:20+00:00

As the sun descends

The indifferent watchman

Calls my hour.

What is alien cannot rescue me.

Oh! Where to turn?

Nowhere, but the place of choice. . .

That bare center.

Only a strict yes counts,

The trial spins,

The verdict is cast like lead!

Who can hold what leaves him?

Haste will soon flee the runner.

He turns around

And stands along the way

On his crown-point the road.*

No one understood this poem, no one could understand this grandiose, frightening feeling, that the Road before me is not stretched out horizontally anymore, but threatens vertically, from the firmament, the top of my head. The Road, which otherwise leads toward the future, points like an exclamation at my head.

This feeling has not left me for ten years. I am still under the sword, the inexorable Yes. It is still not fulfilled. The nervous groping, the search, continue. I am perhaps less nervous now, but sad. Berlin, Die Truppe, Dusseldorf and Hollywood . . . everything has been merely an experiment. Only you are the absolute Yes in my whole life, the only Yes I have never revoked.

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