And then everything was different. From one moment to the next, there seemed to be nothing left as it was. Or not? The moon was full and bright in the sky, and yet it was different for me. The night air was lukewarm and warm, and yet it was different for me. Even I myself felt different. And yet the moon was as always and the night air as always, and I too, really. Nothing had changed. My senses had not diminished, nor was the great sunset announced. It was quiet and breathing and alive. And yet it was like a stiffness that lay over everything, as if the world around me held my breath and the time to stand still, far from life, far from me, and I stood as under a glass dome, so I did not get it.
Everything left me, though it remained. Everything was inaccessible, although it had not closed. And when it began to rain, it was first a blessing, something that made me feel, a little that made me move. Despite everything, my body moved as always, although it also felt far away. I was separated from the world and from myself, as if an invisible door had been opened, which I could not find again. Forever I would have to stay in my glass dome. Even when I went, it came with me, arrested me like an annoying boil. Fled from a world that no longer allowed me. Stunned and enveloped in gloom and coldness and seclusion. All alone, no matter where, or in the midst of a crowd, a circle would form around me, and my glass dome, under which I was caught. Independence of space and time meant to me lostness in time and space or better outside of time and space. And the rain made me flee into the room, to the fireplace, but the room did not take me either, and the fire in the fireplace did not warm.
Nothing penetrated through my glass dome, no sensation, no consciousness. Cut off in the midst of fullness. Exclusively in the middle of what is self-evident, which in the show also withdrew. So it was that night. Like a malicious grin, the contempt for me, coupled with infinite indifference, seemed to me as if in this world, not even in the little one I had so far called mine, I would never find any more in this life than if I had fallen out of the human and from the living, condemned to remain under my glass-bell, always visibly, and yet not able to participate.
Was it hubris to say that everything that happens in my life depends only on me, that I can influence everything and direct in the direction that I imagine? Had I really thought it could be so? Now fate had denied me to my place, had made me aware of my smallness and my impotence. I could see it, I thought. Could not it be done with the fact that I had learned my lesson so that I was ready for the next step, ready not to pretend to be omnipotent. A little hint, that was all, and yet it was enough that nothing was more like just now, that everything had fallen out of line, from one moment to the next.
I was content, I had asserted – and now I was condemned to suffice myself, and it was enough for me to bear my own pain. Independent, free and self-determined, I thought – until that moment, and then the glass bell dived, and I was placed under the glass bell, pushed toward humility. But it was still not enough. And the pain grew, became ever more intolerable, but he touched nothing more, everything remained unmoved. So I gradually collapsed inside of myself, becoming small and mute.
Suddenly everything was different. When you came back, and with a hint of your hand, the glass dome disappear, so that everything was different, as before, only much better, and I knew it would not be so, never would be without you. And my silence was one of gratitude in your arms.
