With their whole gaze animals behold the open. 

Only our eyes are as though reversed, 

and set like traps around us, keeping us inside. 

That there is something out there we know only from a creature’s countenance. 

Never, not for a single day do we let the space before us

be so unbounded that the blooming of one flower is forever. 

We are always making it into a world,

and never letting it be nothing. 

The pure and unconstructed,

which we breathe and endlessly know, 

and do not crave. 

Sometimes a child loses himself in this stillness, and gets shaken out of it. 

Or a person dies and becomes it. 

For when death draws near,

we see death no more;

we stare beyond it with an animal’s wild gaze. 

Lovers also look with astonishment into the open, 

when the beloved doesn’t block the view. 

It surges up unburdened in the background. 

Sometimes neither can get past the other, 

and so the world closes again. 

Ever turn toward what we create,

we see it as only reflections of the open, darkened by us.

This is our fate: to stand in our own way, forever in the way. 

We, always and everywhere spectators, 

turn not toward the open, 

but towards the stuff of our lives. It drowns us. 

We set it in order, and it falls apart. 

We order it again, and fall apart ourselves. 

Who has turned us around like this? 

Whatever we do, 

we are in the presence of one 

who’s about to depart.

— RAINER MARIA —