ART OF EUROPE Why, when this span of life might be fleeted away as laurel, a little darker than all the surrounding green, with tiny waves on the border of every leaf (like the smile of a wind): - oh, why have to be human, and shunning Destiny, long for Destiny?... Not because happiness really exists, that precipitate profit of imminent loss. Not out of curiosity, not just to practise the heart, that could still be there in laurel... But because being here is much, and because all this that's here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all. Just once, everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we, too, once. And never again. But this having been once on earth - can it ever be cancelled? And so we keep pressing on and trying to perform it, trying to contain it within our simple hands, in the more and more crowded gaze, in the speechless heart. Trying to become it. To give it to whom? We'd rather hold on to it all for ever... But into the other relation, what, alas! do we carry across? Not the beholding we've here slowly acquired, and no here occurrence. Not one. Sufferings, then. Above all, the hardness of life, the long experience of love; in fact, purely untellable things. But later, under the stars, what use? the more deeply untellable stars? Yet the wanderer too doesn't bring from mountain to valley a