Die Liebe kommt und geht, und man kennt sich vorher nicht aus, und man kennt sich nachher nicht aus, und am allerwenigstens kennt man sich aus, wenn sie da ist.

Life and the work on the mountain had left their mark. Everything about him was warped and crooked. His back seemed to be heading down towards the earth in a tight curve, and he increasingly had the feeling that his spine was growing up over his head. On the mountain his foothold was still firm, and not even the strong autumn downwinds could make him lose his balance, but he stood like a tree that was already rotten inside.

Scars are like years, he said: one follows another and it’s all of them together that make a person who they are.

People were evidently looking for something in the mountains that they believed they had lost a long time ago. He never worked out what exactly this was, but over the years he became more and more that the tourists were stumbling not so much after him but after some obscure, insatiable longing.

It’s a messy business, dying,′ he said. ‘As time goes on there’s just less and less of you. It happens quickly for some; for others it can drag on. Starting from birth you keep losing one thing after another: first a finger, than an arm, first a tooth, then a whole set of teeth, first one memory, then all your memory, and so on and so forth, until one day there’s nothing left. Then they chuck what’s left of you in a hole and shovel it in and that’s your lot.

He couldn’t remember where he had come from, and ultimately he didn’t know where he would go. But he could look back without regret on the time in between, his life, with a full-throated laugh and utter amazement.

Man creates life with the strength of his loins, and takes life with the strength of his arms.

He had already been so long in the world: he had seen it change and seem to spin faster with every passing year, and he felt like a remnant from some long-buried time, a thorny weed still stretching up, for as long as it possibly could, towards the sun.

Narben sind wie Jahre, meinte er, da kommt eines zum anderen und alles zusammen macht erst einen Menschen aus.

Heutzutage ist es vielleicht sowieso besser, nicht allzu viel Ahnung zu haben. Die Ahnungslosigkeit ist ja praktisch das Gebot der Stunde, das Nichtwissen das Leitmotiv der Zeit. Da kann man auch schon einmal hinschauen, ohne was gesehen zu haben. Oder hinhorchen und trotzdem nichts verstehen.