There is pride, too, though - pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That’s how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.
. . .
Racial purity, political purity - Bastian speaks to a horror of any sort of corruption, and yet, Werner wonders in the dead of night, isn’t life a kind of corruption? A child is born, and the wold sets in upon it. Taking things from it, stuffing things into it. Each bite of food, each particle of light entering the eye - the body can never be pure…The entropy of a closed system never decreases.
. . .
As wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world - what pretensions human have! Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them?
. . .
To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.
. . .
That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.
. . .
It is the obliviousness of our children that saves us.
. . .
The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow, imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass. Why doesn’t the wind move the light?
