Joy of the mayfly that leaps up inside even when mating. O blessedness accorded the small creature still living in the vessel where it was born. And after the first home, the next seems like mere travesty and bluster. For it fastens on him too, a thing that often overpowers us,-the recognition that what one strives so hard for was perhaps at one time closer, truer, an alliance endlessly tender. And yet inside the warm and watchful mammal the weight and pain of sorrow also dwells. And where we see a future, it sees All, itself within that All, forever healed. Its inner self, though, is limitless, ungrasped, with no regard for its positioning, pure, like its clear gaze. Were consciousness like ours present in the animal whose firm tread moves toward us following its own guidance-, we'd be torn along its wayward path. Our fate consists of this: to be against, nothing else but that, and always against. Or an animal, voiceless and calm, looks up and then straight through us. Forever focused on Creation, we see it as only a mirroring of untrammeled regions that we have darkened. Since neither can get beyond the other, each of them turns back into World.

As if by someone's oversight, space opens behind the partner. And lovers, if their partner didn't block the view, could then draw near and be astonished. Or someone dying is it, and, near death, does not see death but stares beyond it, his gaze perhaps large as the mammals'. As children we lose ourselves to this in silence, until abruptly shaken. It's always the real world, never a Nowhere void of negation, a pure Unsurveillance that can be inhaled, forever known and thus not craved. Yet we don't, not even for a single day, have pure space before us, a place where flowers forever bloom. That, only we see the unhindered animal keeps its decline and sunset ever behind it, with God before and, if it walks, goes forward in timelessness, like springs that well and flow. What does exist outside we come to know from their faces alone in fact, we make even young children turn and take a backward look at fixed concepts, not at the openness deep in those mammal features. Only our seeing is retrospective, set like traps around them, an obstacle that blocks the path to freedom. With all of their eyes, animals behold openness.

Rilke duino elegies deutsch