text 1
A Little Girl
Sitting on a grassy grave, beneath one of the windows of the church, was a little girl.
With her head bent back she was gazing up at the sky and singing, while one of her little hands was pointing to a tiny cloud that hovered like a golden feather above her head.
The sun, which had suddenly become very bright, shining on her glossy hair, gave it a metallic luster, and it was difficult to say what was the color, dark bronze or black.
So completely absorbed was she in watching the cloud to which her strange song or incantation seemed addressed, that she did not observe me when I rose and went towards her.
Over her head, high up in the blue, a lark that was soaring towards the same gauzy cloud was singing, as if in rivalry.
As I slowly approached the child, I could see by her forehead, which in the sunshine seemed like a globe of pearl, and especially by her complexion, that she uncommonly lovely.
Her eyes, which at one moment seemed blue-gray, at another violet, were shaded by long black lashes, curving backward in a most peculiar way, and these matched in hue her eyebrows, and the tresses that were tossed about her tender throat were quivering in the sunlight.
All this I did not take in at once; for at first I could see nothing but those quivering, glittering, changeful eyes turned up into my face.
Gradually the other features, especially the sensitive full-lipped mouth, grew upon me as I stood silently gazing.
Here seemed to me a more perfect beauty than had ever come to me in my loveliest dreams of beauty.
Yet it was not her beauty so much as the look she gave me that fascinated me, melted me.
text2
Three Passions I Have Lived for
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life:
the longing for love, the search for knowledge,
and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither,
in a wayward course over a deep ocean of anguish,
reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy
—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of my life
for a few hours for this joy.
I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness
—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness
looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss.
I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen,
in a mystic miniature,
the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.
This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life,
this is what—at last—I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of men.
I have wished to know why the stars shine ...
A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens.
But always pity brought me back to earth.
Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart.
Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people
—a hated burden to their sons,
and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life.
I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again
if the chance were offered me.