Aus der Heimat hinter den Blitzen rot

Da kommen die Wolken her,

Aber Vater und Mutter sind lange tot,

Es kennt mich dort keiner mehr.

Wie bald, ach wie bald kommt die stille Zeit,

Da ruhe ich auch, und über mir

Rauscht die schöne Waldeinsamkeit,

Und keiner kennt mich mehr hier.

The dream moves the world. The rooms no longer correspond to reality, the rooms became corridors, corridors on corridors, in silence. So many voices in my head but a single sovereign one brings back the order. Your voice.

Langage no longer makes sense, pronouncing your name but no one hears. My voice is forever silent for the fear of waking the dead. That’s why I know that everything can be forgiven, and it would be strange not to forgive.

Odeliah

“We ask everything of love. We ask it to be anarchic. We ask it to be the glue that holds the family together, that allows society to be orderly and allows all kinds of material processes to be transmitted from one generation to another. But I think that the connection between love and sex is very mysterious. Part of the modern ideology of love is to assume that love and sex always go together. They can, I suppose, but I think rather to the detriment of either one or the other. And probably the greatest problem for human beings is that they just don’t. And why do people want to be in love? That’s really interesting. Partly, they want to be in love the way you want to go on a roller coaster again — even knowing you’re going to have your heart broken. What fascinates me about love is what it has to do with all the cultural expectations and the values that have been put into it. I’ve always been amazed by the people who say, “I fell in love, I was madly, passionately in love, and I had this affair.” And then a lot of stuff is described and you ask, “How long did it last?” And the person will say, “A week, I just couldn’t stand him or her.”

Susan Sontag