Liberties

Each morning when you go out on the balcony to enjoy your first coffee of the day you face the same intolerable backdrop: Delos reposing nonchalantly in precisely the same place you left it yesterday. How much you wish that nature, just for once, would cast off for a while its earnest attire and, like a mischievous girl, astonish you with her coquetry by sending the sacred island to the bottom of the sea – so that your gaze would at last reach the horizon without tripping over some barren piece of land. But she would disapprove of such a dramatische development. At night she reads Hölderlin in German, memorizing all those Olympian verses and believing that she wanders arm-in-arm with Apollo himself through the ruins of his temple. How can you pick a quarrel with a god, a hunk of a lover who knows what secrets a woman hides in her heart, what she desires when she lies down naked in bed and – let me not forget! – who permanently holds a lyre in his hand? If I were you I would change islands, or houses, or at least balconies. Still, Hölderlin is the last person to blame. He went mad long before you, and at least he signed his works as Scardanelli and not as Héloïse and Abelard.