W. by Steve Sem-Sandberg

Author:Steve Sem-Sandberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2022-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

IV.

The Candlemaker

Conversely, however, the bodily life, which is received into the consciousness and which cannot be experienced without it, is susceptible to attack by every human sickness (if, indeed, it is not actually being attacked) and, depending on the extent and nature of the diseased state, may indeed become diseased, since the entire man is only one life.

(Heinroth, 1818)

(Sing for me)

1. Love is a child. It walks barefoot or wears white socks. It knows nothing of thresholds or walls, and only of windows through which the beloved can enter.

2. Love has a laugh that begins in the eyes but ends in the belly. It understands nothing, only that its beloved is coming.

(The beloved’s certain departure cannot love comprehend. Love cannot comprehend that anyone must depart.)

3. For love, everything happens, even what has already happened and what will happen, as if it were happening now and for the very first time. This is why, for love, there is nothing but joy.

4. Love knows all about what is happening, but it is innocent of it all.

5. Love has warm, soft hands and eyes that see stars at night and trees that can only grow if the sun is in their eyes and so do not know that they are growing.

6. Love is blind and blinds but it beguiles and is not beguiled. It casts no shadow. Nothing conceals it or keeps it hidden.

7. Love says to death: you exist but you cannot take me.

8. Love says to death: I too have a darkness. But love’s darkness is the opposite of the darkness of the grave. In love’s darkness all is stitched together anew, all the seams that have split, all the threads that have been torn off.

(And so you are born again, Little Heart.)

9. Love casts its own light on the world. Come, it says, I’ll explain it to you. But love explains nothing. It only shows you what you already know. That lips are hot, hearts throb, and the groin is warm; that nothing is used up just because it has been done once or a thousand times. Everything can always be done again. It is not time that measures the weight and power and age of love, only the body that remembers what it has always known.

10. God is happy. He wears a hat on His head that resembles a crown.

So, it was at the start of this year, right around when the light changes, that he climbed ashore on the far bank of the Memel River. Who was he then? A person who no longer recognizes himself? A settlement where someone else had settled, someone he doesn’t know and to whom he normally wouldn’t dare show himself? But how do you go about not being seen by someone you carry inside you? He doesn’t know. All he knows is that he must keep away from other people. If he meets anyone on the road, a horse-drawn carriage or a fellow lone wanderer, he skirts into the forest or turns off on a field and if this isn’t possible he keeps his eyes on the ground.

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