You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table
and listen.
You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet,
and still, and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be
unmasked.
Franz Kafka, Zürau Aphorisms
Kafka, obviously, lived before Facebook, before Twitter,
texts, Netflix.
Nobody waits anymore. Every shred of time is spent bent over
our screens – in the grocery line, on a bus, in the restaurant, over our morning
cup of coffee, at the lake, on our breaks.
Even now, thinking about this, waiting impatiently for the
world to unmask itself, I barely resist the urge to click on Facebook just for
a minute, to scroll through Instagram to see what’s new, to do anything,
anything at all, but wait.
Even very small children are given a phone to play a game or
watch videos to fill the smallest gap in activity.
What do we fill their minds with?
And what are we afraid of, we who choose distraction over
contemplation? Perhaps we are afraid that we will hear the fires burning in
Australia, the war trumpets across America, the cries of hunger in Zimbabwe, and
closer to home and in our hearts, the sounds we cannot bear.
Or are we afraid of beauty? That the unmasked world might
call to us as the Torso of Apollo called to Rilke.
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem
defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of
itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Rainer Maria
Rilke
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