Travel Pictures by Heinrich Heine

Author:Heinrich Heine
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780981987309
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2017-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

7.

What a beating is we already know, but nobody has yet established what love is. A few natural philosophers have maintained it’s a kind of electricity. That is possible, since at the moment of falling in love we feel as if an electric flash suddenly leapt from the eye of our beloved and struck us in the heart. Oh, these bolts are the most perilous, and if anyone ever invents a lightning rod to protect against them I will honor him more than Franklin. If only there were little lightning rods one could wear on one’s heart attached to a weather vane that could deflect the terrible flame and send it in some other direction! Yet I fear that it is far more difficult to deprive little Cupid of his arrows than to steal Jupiter’s lightning or the scepter of tyrants. Besides which, not every love strikes like lightning; sometimes it lurks like a snake among roses, waiting for the first breach in the heart’s defenses to leap in; sometimes it’s only a word, a look, the account of an unlikely action that drops like an airborne seedling into our heart, lies dormant all winter long, till spring comes and the little seedling explodes into a flaming flower whose scent intoxicates the head. The same sun that incubates crocodile eggs in the Nile River Valley can at the very same moment ripen unto bursting the love seed in a young heart in Potsdam on the Havel – then come the tears in Egypt and Potsdam. But tears are still by no means an adequate explanation for what love is. Has no one fathomed its essence? Has no one solved the riddle? Perhaps such a solution would cause greater torment than the riddle itself, and the heart would be petrified and freeze in horror, as at the first sight of Medusa. Snakes curl around that terrible solution to the riddle. Oh, let me never know that key word, I still prefer by far the burning misery in my heart to a freezing of sensation. Oh, speak it not, you departed souls that amble painlessly as stone, but also insensate as stone, through the rose gardens of this world, and with pale lips sneer at this poor fool who prizes the scent of roses and dreads the prick of thorns.

But even if I can’t tell you, dear Reader, what love actually is, I could still relate in considerable detail how you act and how you feel when you’ve fallen in love in the Apennines. You act just like a lunatic, you dance over hills and on the sheer face of cliffs, convinced that the whole world is dancing with you. You feel as if the world had only been created this very day and you are the first living soul. How splendid it all is! I shouted for joy upon leaving Francesca’s house. How beautiful and precious is this new world! I felt as though I had to give every plant and

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