“If the word magic has any meaning, I should say that the whole of his person, his voice, his look, his manners, everything about him gave the impression of a magic presence. You would have said that he had a way of giving to each word, as he spoke, the power of a charm.”*
But because truly, being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!
Poetry is a machine made of words.
*Paul Valery on Rilke
