Cascade

Children know that the doll isn’t real, but they treat it as if it were, to the point of crying with grief when it breaks. The art of children is in non-realization. How blessed is that deluded age, when life is negated* by the absence of sex, and reality is negated by the act of playing, unreal things standing in for real ones!

If I could only go back to being a child and remain one for ever, oblivious to the values that men attach to things and the relations they establish between them! When I was little, I often stood my toy soldiers on their heads. And what convincing argument of logic can prove to me that real soldiers shouldn’t march head downward?

Gold is worth no more than glass to a child. And is gold’s value truly any greater? The child obscurely senses the absurdity of the wraths, passions and fears he sees sculpted in adult gestures. And aren’t all our fears, hatreds and loves truly vain and absurd?

O divinely absurd intuition of children! True vision of things, which we always dress with conventions, however nakedly we see them, and always blur with our ideas, however directly we look at them! Might not God be an enormous child? Doesn’t the whole universe seem like a game, like the prank of a mischievous child? So unreal, so.....

I laughingly threw out this idea for consideration, and only now, seeing it from a distance, do I realize how ghastly it is. (Who’s to say it isn’t true?) And it falls to the ground at my feet, shattering into shards of mystery and pulverized horror…

I wake up to make sure I exist…

An immense, indefinite tedium gurgles with a deceptively fresh sound in the cascades past the beehives, at the stupid far end of the yard.