I will choose my own fall, which is ascension.

The heavens are not humane, but I’d forgotten compassion and love.

Every beloved object is the center of a garden of paradise.

The heavens may be far from humane, but I’d had about all I could take. So.

Why does Lao-tze say that to be born is to exit and to die is to enter?

Through the station went a goods train, spitting sparks from its chimney. Viktoria stood at the window and combed those sparks out of her hair.

I have calmed down a little and my work is going better than yesterday, so well, in fact, that it does itself and I can slip back into the womb of time, into my youth, when I ironed my trousers and shined my shoes, soles included, every Saturday, because when you’re young you love keeping clean, you love your self-image, an image you still have time to improve.

So I walk home like a burning house, like a burning stable, the light of life pouring out of the fire, fire pouring out of the dying wood, hostile sorrow lingering under the ashes.

For thirty-five years now I’ve been compacting old paper and books, living as I do in a land that has known how to read and write for fifteen generations; living in a onetime kingdom where it was and still is a custom, an obsession, to compact thoughts and images patiently in the heads of the population, thereby bringing them ineffable joy and even greater woe; living among people who will lay down their lives for a bale of compacted thoughts.

Our heads met, our eyes crossed paths, the window to the courtyard lay open, I whispered in his ear and he started crying in my hair, wept like a child, I stroked him, touched by his crying, that he opened up, as he truly was, rent his shirt and exposed his heart like the paintings of Jesus hung over the beds in country houses.