Liberties

Why are the landscapes beautiful, and the approaches to the forest at twilight drawn to the melody of the pipes warming in your breast, and the bluish puddle on the other side of the railroad tracks make the tune in your heart tremble and the body yearn to step over its banks as if once, on a childhood evening, it walked there…? Because every landscape in the world has its souls that were joined to it by the finest desires and the sweetness of the heart’s exaltation in the days when love rose as if blooming spring and summer together, and also in the days of a late-summer tear glistening in the mystery of parting… and the ripened fruit reddening in the gardens… No landscape is beautiful for itself, in its forest and its river and its well. It takes its beauty, in all its facets and luscious scents, abundantly from the souls who walk within it the walks of longing, and from the jubilation in the blood and the living lyreness of the body… With this weave the beautiful souls embroidered this empyrean and stamped it with its verdant hues and poured wines of myrrh into the feathery softness of its clouds. If not for wounds of love even unto the gift of blood and the ascension in flames for the sake of family, or the honor of throne and temple, or the sanctity of a liberation, would there be such twilights morning and evening, with the smell and the taste of must mingled in them? If not for the grace of bodies and the ideas sprouting in the heart and the head about what is beyond them in the world, would there be luxuriant trees such as these, or their fruit, or their birds’ nests? If not for