In the ventilation grating lives a tit.
Couperin lives at this moment on the gramophone.
Tadpoles are already living in the pond.
Above the pond, at evening, is a mist, and in the mist live nightingales.
As long as they are there, as they come back in springtime,
there is still order and hope in the world, there are still the frail threads of migration paths
that connect us with Egypt, Sudan, the Congo, and Cape Province.
The world is still in place, like a map-mosaic, a children’s puzzle, a jigsaw,
that is so hard to put together and so easy to break up.
My greatest fear is, indeed, perhaps that the time will come when some of the pieces of the mosaic will disappear:
the nightingales will not come, the dung-beetle will not fly, and it will no longer be possible to put the world together again.
It will remain a confused, half-finished ecological puzzle:
a solitary tit will sing, but will not find a mate.
In the ocean the male blue whale will no longer find his partner.
The continents will break up into islets, skerries, stones surrounded by water.
Mankind will break up into parties, classes, principles, homos and sapiens,
naked apes which fear serpents, the dark, knowledge and other such things
and cower each by his own swaying coconut palm, trying to piece together his own map of the stars,
which scatters into the mist like everything else.
The tit came back again. The nightingale is singing.
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