II. Falling over. Dead on the spot, as we’re reminded with a certain rudeness. I think of it all the time, as I descend the stairway in the morning to get a glass of water, for instance. I cannot say that it frightens me. At least not exactly. If fear is involved, it’s more in the way that the Germans pronounce reverence, where fear is linked inextricably to respect. It’s more a sort of reverence I feel for the event of falling over. As if after all this time, after promises whether broken or kept, after my zealous or hushed advances, after the thoughts visiting me as though it were important to visit me and me alone, after loves and losses of loves and all that, after all that, there shall be such such a blunt and coarse, such a stupid, such a laughable end of me! The smile that comes to my face when I think of it is like the only way of bowing, of revering, left to the amazed show of expression when it encounters the hilarious prince, for whom the tragic becomes stumbling jest, as though there were tripwires everywhere, as though life itself, as one prescient man whispered into my ear once, walked on a tripwire.
Love the Dust 