The Melancholy of
Resistance
"Because there would be something worth seeing then,
something worth discovering—he knocked three times as was his custom—since he
would then be granted a vision of that incorruptible order, under whose aegis a
boundless and beautiful power comprehended in one harmonious whole the dry land
and the sea, the walkers and the sailors, heaven and earth, water and air and
all those who lived in mutual dependence, whose life was just opening out or
already flying by; he would see that birth and death were only two tremendous
moments in an eternal waking, and his face would glow with amazement as he understood this; he
would feel—gently he grasped the copper handle of the door—the warmth of the
mountains, woods, rivers and valleys, would finally understand that the
unbreakable ties that bound him to the world were not imprisoning chains and
condemnation but a kind of clinging to an indestructible sense that he had a
home; and he would discover the enormous joys of mutuality which embraced and
animated everything: rain, wind, sun and snow, the flight of a bird, the taste
of fruit, the scent of grass; and he would suspect that his anxieties and
bitterness were merely cumbersome ballast required by the live roots of his
past and the rising airship of his certain future, and , then—he started
opening the door—he would finally know that our every moment is passed in a
procession across dawns and day’s-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive
waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars. Suitcase in
hand, he stepped into the room and stood there blinking in the light."
