Reverie

Reverie. I close my eyes and I see Marburg an der Lahn.
My office — I beg your pardon — my ceiling is my refuge. When I struggle to grasp an idea, or get a better understanding of a phrase in particular context, or a chain of thoughts (professor's voice rings in my ears) — when I feel that my brain isn't flexible enough to slice into a cascade of subjects and objects, when Hegel's logic leaves my ability far behind I can clearly distinguish the dark area in front of me that needs to be explored among these clean slates on the desk, and I am chasing the fleeing caravan of reasoning and I am sieging the walls of the proud castle of my own ignorance, and when at last my modest intellectual powers are about to abandon me to the depths of pure dialectics the impulse of retreat runs through my fingers that makes me drop the ink and look up at the roofs of Marburg and the hills beyond...

A gust of wind breaks through the window and scatters my sheets, raises the dust and opens the books, steals and carries my attention over the river and through the forest into the gardens of philosophy where the learned wise men dwell beneath the antique pillars and beyond is the wide square with the narrow stair which leads to a medieval labyrinth with libraries and laboratories and this also proceeds into a ruin above which rises the ancient sun and the night stars are dissolved in the ultramarine sky, but the flaming disc is a heavy burden and the clouds carefully drop the sun into the sea where it drowns down and burns its way through the waters with great whirl and reaches the seabed and melts the earth leaving precious metals and stones behind. The darkness comes, the stars are reigning the space: all is quiet, all is listening as the sun rumbles deep beneath the mountain roots.

Sitting at my windowsill, I listen to the music of the night rain and wait for the morning sun to climb the hills and steam the moon away until — again — it descends from a cold Alpine lake next night.