Ice and Fire

With all its eyes the creature-world beholds the open. But our eyes, as though reversed, encircle it on every side, like traps set round its unobstructed path to freedom.

What is outside, we know from the brute’s face alone; for while a child’s quite small we take it and turn it round and force it to look backwards at conformation, not that openness so deep within the brute’s face. Free from death.

We alone see that; the free animal has its decease perpetually behind it and God in front, and when it moves, it moves within eternity, like running springs.

We’ve never, no, not for a single day, pure space before us, such as that which flowers endlessly open into: always world, and never nowhere without no: that pure, unsuperintended element one breathes, endlessly knows, and never craves. A child sometimes gets quietly lost there, to be always jogged back again. Or someone dies and is it.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies: ‘Eighth Elegy’