lines from the Bay

 and I noticed for the first time that this man sitting across from me had beautiful eyes now

Both of us know what to think of each other 

he probably had the decisive qualification for a book, intution; but since his life was elsewhere, he despised this 

And why do I still believe . . . that no better support can be found than in a vacillating, yearning person?

it was only through my writing that I had ever been able to feel something like a connection with the world 

he jerked the pencil out of my hand   And I stopped at the nearby gas station, where the attendant lent me his ballpoint pen for a note 

If you knew how beautiful you look as silhouettes you would never want to be anything else again.  If I were a painter, I would never paint anything but silhouettes 

if a television interviewer had been there, how they would have spilled their most intimate stories

I have not asked, not once in this entire year 

In magnificent Paris nothing required my observation anymore; here, however, in the suburb-bay, almost everything did.  

And that almost painful appetite in my breast was called longing

in my style of jumbled thinking 

I have love of the world.  It is within me.  Except that I cannot keep love of the world at the heart of the story.  For that I had to go to the margins.  The silhouettes: I feel the weakness in them, the lack of presence. 

Perhaps the outsider is in fact best equipped to see you as all together.  

And since I have been here in the suburbs, I have come to see myself as such an associate judge.  As a reader.  To read a book of a new-blown world. 

Where do I belong?  At home at the edge of the field.

When alone I appear to myself again and again as a villain. 

at the thought of being alone, I should like to spend my whole life this way 

And where are the readers?  Mysterious brood!  Passersby, hieroglyphic mankind.

Those who have not undergone metamorphosis have done themselves in.  

as if I were being butted from below, at the knees, as if by a goat, from sheer joy 

And all of them, I saw, had hangnails on their fingers from fumbling around in their pockets in foreign lands

I have never felt more tranquil inside than when I have been listening to such a Thersites, metamorphosed into an epic narrator 

To be one with the singer, without having to sing: my ideal.  

Eternally amazed, we sat together, each on a ladder rung.  The adventure of life showed itself in the form of a single rolling wave in the otherwise tranquil sea.  

With that began his new, his Last Song.