Dirty habit, too—ashes over everything.

Well, the rifle puts you at a stainless distance. At the same time, it permits a dangerous indifference, a lassitude toward duty, if it is not replaced by hatred at a higher level; thus we make an image of our enemy; or rather, Kohler, it’s our enemy we make; otherwise our soldier loses heart.

History has no truck with either loneliness or poetry, so out of loneliness I chose it, became intimate with multitudes, and studied time and distance with Mad Meg.

Myth murdering myth: that’s war these days.

Aber ungeborgen, hier auf den Bergen des Herzens . . .

Pretty Epictetus: we should live each day as one who goes in fear of ambush.

The Old Jew knew—see how he fooled us? When we replace our passions with ideas, it’s true, we no longer live in a human bondage.

I signed my name another way, improved my spelling, gave up dancing. Kohler, not even a pipe is allowed me now. My age. My illness.

Kohler! don’t go to doctors, Kohler—ever. They save your life by saying no.

in here it is dark

Frau Julie Weinmann, Frau Hanna Wolff, Sofia Nikolaevna Schill, Lisa Heise, Lotti von Wedel, Inga Junghanns,

oh reiner Widerspruch

Why should a rose be so remembered?

No flowers, Madame, I entreat you, their

presence excites the demons which fill the room.

Was it wise for all these titled husbands to indulge their wives with poets?

CASTLE CAVALCANTI

SARAZANA

1. 1. 1300

My dear Mandetta:

Change for the sake of change, Countess; do not leave me (Lou, love, do not leave), for you will find your background’s only moving like a standing train; your age itself will age, thighs thicken, eyes dim, darling, ears wane, hair gray; your life will window by you; you will see pale faces merely out there deep in magazines and anxious thoughts of somewhere they imagine they are going, just as you imagine all the latest fashions on you, page by page, while you travel toward a town or country lover who will want you otherwise, completely clothesless, not a coverlet between your skins, the buttons of your breasts quite loose by this time, teeth afraid, your whole body hanging by a thread (he will not mind, my dear, my Lou, death swallows like a dog, indifferently, whatever mouthful); still, if you stay with me, dear lady, we shall confine our growing to one place, and put eternal beauty in us, exchange our tired flesh for language, live anew in letters read and written daily just as long as passion lasts; not alone in us, but as it lingers on continually in man as worsening diseases do (they, Lou, always have a bed); and all those lives they have persuaded to the grave make them, instead, immune; make them, like love, almost abstract, almost—so safely do they step from death to death—immortal. Admittedly (my Lou) this argument is shaky; so is the wire we walk, dear lady; yet there’s no drop that ends in breaking if we fail to cross, no chance worth greater taking than this gulf we span in every line of poetry. Countess, Countess . . . dearest Madame . . . we’re replacing our two lives with verse; it is our soul, like Socrates, we’re shaping. Where’s the loss? Does it swim in the wine of your lover’s mouth like a stupored fish? Such a tongue I’d never trust. Or do you like your heart reverberating in another’s chest? Echoes, my Mandetta, merely . . . second sounds. Or is it loving eyes that lay a beauty on you like a curse which will make you yearn and dream . . . and tumble; for who can live so—placed as high and perilous as that? Perhaps it’s simply coming to a pitch and pouring forth in private quaking every physical possession; perhaps it’s simply those insane convulsions in lovemaking, Madame (from sensations found that fully only in sensation), when the prisoned inner body, as a state of total feeling, finally flowers out. (The violet, dear Lou, contains the purest burning, heat men say.) Ah, in that case, Countess, really what’s the loss?