What love was as a word was so much more to him than love was as a feeling. Towers, bodies, you could only dwell in. What was “dwelling”? It’s l’homme to l’homme, you might say, Kohler, back in that imaginary country. I was torn between the Stoics and the ethics of Spinoza . . . changed my hand, altered every character into something German.

Though he declared that trees, birds, blossoms, buildings, patiently awaited seeing, he knew, too, that words, with greater urgency, claimed our devoted saying.

But in a modern State, you don’t have to hate the man you’re murdering; that’s no longer necessary; orders are permissions, cancel pangs, promote remissions—don’t they? Read the Marquis, Kohler.

Consider Heydrich, Tabor. Heydrich, the technician, who hated the men he murdered no more than the pistol hates the suicide who sucks its barrel. It’s a job: going BANG! Yes. Consider Heydrich, the technician, who loved the woman he screwed no more than the frigged prick loves its frigger. An act like eating, it represents a need, and satisfying that need is just a job: oh, ooh ooh aaah! o-o-h. Umm. Ausgesetzt . . . Outcast on the mountains of the heart . . . You don’t smoke? Like you, it makes me cough and stains the fingers—here—on the innersole of the index. Ah, Kohler, I have few pleasures now—my age, my illness.

Listen, Herschel, I’m not wrong about Heydrich. He didn’t hate the Jews. He just loved his work.

So I set down rules for my behavior, then like a soldier kept them, assigning grades and fixing to my narrow chest awards: blue green gold red silver stars in celebration and atonement of my cowed fidelity and fearful stamina until before me burst my Sunday self in light, opening the ahs of thousands.

Octopi, Mad Meg would mutter. Scorpionfish.

There’s no height to the hills of the heart, Rainer. Na mountain flower or muscle grows there; slopes slide without rising, and joy is a downfall; there’s an end but never a start.

Yes, it is eye who sees so; it is I who says so.

Hobbes, yes—strange armada-stricken man—should have said we ought to give up all our feelings to the National Passion, artificial sovereign of the inner self, emotional Leviathan, for what are rights that anyone should care about them; what are merely outward powers? it’s what’s inside us that we count:

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Out of the solitude of poetry, Rilke composed our loneliness. Hier blüht wohl einiges auf; aus stummen Abstruz blüht ein unwissendes Krautsingend hervor. Seeds sing like lutes strollers played in past ages. Blood no one believes in blusters out a flower. But I know of no departures in fragrance. No victories iris their flags up in vases.

A cannonball, once cannoned, the Great Jew said, may feel quite free within its own trajectory: it rises as we all do, then descends without agony or remorse or warning like a fool.