#duino elegies

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 –"