#duino elegies

But were the eternally dead to prompt us to find a symbol, consider: they might well point us towards the catkins that hang in the bare hazel, or might suggest the rain that falls on the dark spring earth. - And we, thinking of happiness rising, would find our emotion almost bewildering us, seeing a happiness fall.

Even when the lights go out, even when someone says to me: "It's over---," even when from the stage a gray gust of emptiness drifts toward me,even when not one silent ancestor sits beside me anymore---not a woman, not even the boy with the brown squint-eye:I'll sit here anyway. One can always watch.

And we: spectators, always, everywhere, turned toward the world of objects, never outward. It fills us.  We arrange it.  It breaks down. We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.

"O upturned glance: / new, warm, receding ripple of the heart –"