August 16
The way to the king of the birds leads through seven valleys. Many turn back, many fall. And the few who arrive find at the end no foreign marvel — only their own face in the mirror.
The Conference of the Birds (freely rendered)
Listening mode
The way to the king of the birds leads through seven valleys. Many turn back, many fall. And the few who arrive find at the end no foreign marvel — only their own face in the mirror.
Some things you wish for so long that the wish takes on a shape of its own. A text in a language you have spent years learning can be like that. As long as you couldn't read it, there was something indeterminate in it, something almost full of promise.
Then you actually read it, sentence by sentence, and it is good. But it is a text. The disappointment is quiet and hard to explain. And yet nothing was withheld from you.
Perhaps the wonder never belonged to the text at all, but to the person who did not yet understand it. That person would have been amazed. You, on the other hand, now bring dictionaries with you, and mistakes, and many evenings when you would rather have done something else. Through all of this the text has become accessible to you. At the same time you have lost the distance from which it looked so large.
What you have gained in return is hard to show. It lies in the way you read, not in what you read. And you cannot look at it with a stranger's eyes, because you no longer have any others.
