FOR MOST OLD PEOPLE, spring is not a good time—it also hit me hard. The powders and injections didn’t help much; the pain spread as lavishly as the flowers in the grass, and the nights were tough going. Nevertheless, the few short hours each day when I was able to go outside brought me intervals of forgetting and dedication to the miracle of spring, and occasional moments of delight and revelation, every one of which would have been worth holding on to, if only there were a way of holding on, if only these miracles and revelations could be described and passed on. They take you by surprise, and can last for seconds or minutes, these experiences in which a process in the life of nature addresses us, displays itself to us, and if one is old enough, it seems as if one’s whole life with joys and sorrows, with love and recognition, with friendships and love affairs, with books, music, travel and work has been nothing but a long diversion to the maturity of these moments, in which through the image of a landscape, a tree, a human face, a flower, God shows himself to us—the meaning and the value of all being and all happening is revealed to us. And the truth is, even if presumably in our younger years we have experienced more intensely and more dazzlingly the sight of a blossoming tree, a cloud formation, a thunderstorm, nevertheless for the experience that I’m referring to one does need great age, one needs the infinite sum of things seen, lived through, thought, felt and suffered, a certain frailty and proximity to death in order to perceive within a tiny revelation of nature the God, the spirit, the mystery, the coming together of opposites, the great oneness. Of course young people can experience this too, but less often, and without this unity of thought and feeling, of sensual and spiritual harmony, of stimulus and awareness.
During our dry spring, before the rains came with the sequence of stormy days, I often stopped at a place in my vineyard where at this time of year I build my campfire on a patch of still uncultivated soil. There, in the whitethorn hedge that closes off the garden, a beech tree has been growing for years—at first just a little shrub sprouting from a seed blown out of the forest; for several years I had somewhat reluctantly left it standing there just provisionally; I felt sorry for the whitethorn, but then the tough little evergreen beech flourished so prettily that eventually I accepted it, and now it’s already a sturdy little tree and I love it twice as much because the mighty old beech, my favourite tree in all the nearby forest, was recently chopped down, and the pieces of its sawn-up trunk lie there with massive solidity like the stumps of ruined columns. My little tree is probably the child of that great giant.
It has always delighted and impressed me how persistently my little beech clings to its leaves. When everything else has long since been bare, it still stands there wrapped in the cloak of its dead leaves, all through December, January and February, and the wind pulls at it, snow falls over it and drops down from it, and those dry leaves, at first dark brown, become ever brighter, thinner, silkier, but the tree won’t let them go, because they must protect the young buds. Then at some time every spring, each year later than expected, one day the tree has changed, has lost its old leaves, and replaced them with damply shining, tender new buds. This time I witnessed the change. It happened soon after the rain had left the countryside all green and fresh, one moment in the afternoon around mid-April, and so far this year I hadn’t yet heard the cuckoo and had found no narcissi in the meadows. A few days earlier, I had stood here in a strong north wind, shivering, with my coat collar turned up, and I had watched with admiration as my beech tree stood there impassively in the biting wind and hardly yielding a leaf—tough and brave, stiff and stubborn, it held on to its bleached old foliage.
And now, today, as I stood in the gentle, windless warmth of my fire, breaking bits of wood, I saw it happen—there arose the softest of breezes, nothing but a breath, and in hundreds and thousands those leaves, so long preserved, came down, light and soundless, willingly, tired of their endurance, of their defiance and of their courage. What had held on for five or six months of dauntless resistance now, in a few minutes, gave in to a nothing, a mere puff, because the time had come, because the bitter struggle was no longer necessary. Down they floated and fluttered, smiling, ripe, without a fight. The little breeze was far too weak to carry the light, thin leaves very far, and so like fine rain they drizzled down and covered the path and grass at the foot of the tree, a few of whose buds had already opened and grown green. What had this astonishing and moving show revealed to me? Was it death, the easy and spontaneous death of the winter foliage? Was it life, the pushing, jubilant youth of the buds whose suddenly awakened will had created space for themselves? Was it sad, was it cheerful? Was it a warning to me, the old man, to let myself flutter and fall—an admonition that perhaps I too was taking up the space of those younger and stronger than myself? Or was it a command to hold on, like the leaves of the beech, and stay on my feet as long and as obstinately as I could, to brace myself and resist, because then, when the moment was right, the farewell would be easier and happier? No, like every such revelation, it was a manifestation of the great and the eternal, the coming together of opposites fused in the flames of reality; it meant nothing, and warned of nothing, or rather it meant everything, it meant the mystery of existence, and it was beauty, it was joy, it was meaning, it was a gift and a discovery for the onlooker, as Bach is for the ear and Cézanne for the eye. These names and meanings were not the experience itself—they only came later; the experience itself was just an appearance, a miracle, a mystery, as beautiful as it was serious, as sweet as it was inexorable.
At the same spot, by the whitethorn hedge and near the beech tree, now that the world had turned a juicy green and on Easter Sunday the first call of the cuckoo had graced our forest, one mild and changeable, windswept stormy day such as usually prepares the leap from spring to summer, the great mystery addressed me once more through a no less allegorical visual experience. In the heavily overcast sky, which nevertheless kept throwing bright sunbeams down into the budding green of the valley, the clouds were staging a great piece of theatre; the wind seemed to be blowing in all directions at the same time, though south-north seemed to be the favourite. The whole atmosphere was electric with the sound and fury. And in the midst of this spectacle, suddenly forcing itself into my view, stood another tree—a young and handsome tree, a freshly foliaged poplar in my neighbour’s garden. It shot up like a rocket, waving, elastic, with pointed top, in the short intervals of windlessness closed up tight like a cypress, and as the wind strengthened gesticulating with a hundred slender, combed-out branches. The top of this lovely tree reared and rocked, its foliage gently flashing and whispering, rejoicing in its power and youthful greenness, softly swaying like the needle of a scale, at one moment giving way like a giant catapult, and then spontaneously springing back (not until much later did it occur to me that decades ago I had already been alert to this phenomenon, which I’d seen on a peach tree, and I had recorded it in the poem Der Blütenzweig—The Flowering Branch).
Joyfully, fearlessly and even mischievously, the poplar left its branches and leafy cloak to the mercy of the wet and swelling wind, and what it sang into the stormy day and what it wrote on the sky with its pointed top was beautiful, and perfect, and as light-hearted as it was serious, as much doing as being done by, as much fun as fate, and once again it contained all contrasts and contradictions. It was not the wind that was the winner and strong because it could shake and bend the tree; it was not the tree that was the winner and strong because each time it bent it could elastically and triumphantly spring back into position; it was the interplay between the two, the harmony of movement and rest, of heavenly and earthly powers; the endlessly elaborate dance of the treetop in the gale was only an image, only a revelation of the world’s mystery, beyond strength and weakness, good and evil, done and being done by. For a little while, for a little eternity, in all this I could read the pure and perfect manifestation of what is otherwise concealed and secret, as if I were reading Anaxagoras or Lao Tse. And once again it seemed to me as if, in order to see this image and read this writing, I had needed not only the gift of an hour in spring, but also the deeds and misdeeds, the follies and lessons, the pleasures and pains of very many years and decades, and I felt the dear poplar tree which had presented me with this show to be nothing but a boy, innocent and inexperienced. It would have to be worn down by many frosts and snowfalls, shaken by many gales, slashed and scarred by many thunderbolts, until perhaps it too would be able to watch and listen and eagerly enquire into the great mystery.
From the circular letter
Aprilbrief (April Letter) 1952