“…Can I ask you a question? Those moths in November, where are they now, do you think? You remember. We’d see them each evening around three in the afternoon; first a few, then a bucketful, and all at once millions, everywhere. The cold arrived, the cold that really means it, and they were gone. They simply vanished, the way we all do in the end, but what does that mean? What does it mean, to say “Where are they?” Where are we? We change, all right; but where else, strange fellow moths, is there to go but the world? I saw the first trillions of snowflakes today as the light was beginning to change, to darken, blowing and swirling across the bare back fields and back roads. Like you and I, they did as they were told. To things already here, we were called forth and asked to join them, asked to live. Not forever, not even very long. But we are called forth, we are brought here, and we are not brought here to die. I’ve been looking at Edvard Munch’s The Sick Child, for the first time since I was nineteen. The girl is sitting up in bed, a green blanket pulled up to her waist, the mother seated facelessly beside her to the left; her left hand and the child’s are clasped, knitted together, like the spot where a broken bone was healed. Then there is the child’s thinning hair, the poor skull showing through the sparse wisps of it: it makes you think of an infant’s, the little continents of bone still closing. Hair the color of the red wine in the half-full glass that’s glowing on a table in the foreground, in the half-light. Her head is turned sharply to the left, her line of sight passing right over the woman’s bowed head in the direction of some unseen source of light—I always thought it was a window, but who’s to say it’s not a mirror. I see that now. Face beaming or reflecting from the depths of resignation, with a small exhausted smile of utmost sweetness, an unmistakable expression of gladness toward the outer world, the sight of things exactly as they are, and expressing the sum of all knowledge regarding that world: it is still there…”
- Franz Wright, from “The Window”, in Kindertotenwald