All at once, at the Porta Romana, he hesitated. The two rows of houses stretched toward him like arms, and all at once they took hold of him and pulled him into the city. And the city lanes became ever narrower and murkier, and as he entered his house, he knew himself to be in dark hands from which he could not escape. He fled into the main room and from there into the low chamber, hardly two paces long, where he was in the habit of writing. Its walls pressed in on him, and it was as though they were fighting against his disproportionate size and squeezing him back down into his old, limited form. And he allowed it. He forced himself to his knees and let them shape him. He felt within himself a humility he had never known and even had the wish somehow to become small. And a voice came:

“Michelangelo, who is in you?”

And the man in the confined chamber laid his head heavily in his hands and said softly, “You, O Lord, who else?”

And then things broadened out around God, and He lifted His face, which was over Italy, freely upward and looked around Him: in their cloaks and miters, the saints were standing there and the angels were going about among the thirsting stars with their songs like vessels full of glistening spring water, and to heaven there was no end.

My crippled friend raised his gaze and allowed the evening clouds to draw it with them across the sky. “Is God there, then?” he asked.

I made no answer. Then I leaned over to him and said, “Ewald, are we here, then?” And we held each other warmly by the hand.

How the Thimble Came to Be the Dear Lord

How the Thimble Came to Be the Dear Lord

As I stepped back from the window, the evening clouds were stilled there. They seemed to be waiting. Ought I to tell them a story too? I made the suggestion to them. But they did not hear me at all. In order to make myself understood and to reduce the distance between us, I called out:

“I am an evening cloud too.” They paused in their movement; obviously they were observing me. Then they extended their fine, translucent reddish wings toward me. That is the way that evening clouds greet one another. They had recognized me.

“We are over the earth,” they explained, “to be more exact, over Europe. And you?” I hesitated. “There’s a country there. . . .”

“What does it look like?” they inquired.

“Well,” I replied, “twilight with things in it.”

“That’s the same with Europe too,” laughed a young cloud.

“Possibly,” I said, “but I have always heard that the things in Europe are dead.”

“Yes, of course,” another one remarked scornfully. “What kind of nonsense is that—things that are alive?”