Caging Skies

by Christine Leunens

THE GREAT DANGER OF LYING is not that lies are untruths, and thus unreal, but that they become real in other people’s minds.

It seems I was like most babies: I smiled with all my gums, took great interest in my little feet and wore prune jam more than I ate it.

It’s the best remedy for an ache—just find another ache somewhere else.”

My happiness had a streak of guilt, nonetheless, as it wasn’t the first time Ute’s death had brought me gifts and attention.

How surprised I was to think that the Führer I saw at Heldenplatz, cheered by masses, the giant on billboards all over Vienna, who even spoke on the wireless, needed someone little like me. Before then, I’d never felt indispensable; rather I’d felt like a child, something akin to an inferior form of an adult, a defect only time and patience could heal.

Emotions lead you to what logic is incapable of finding on its own.

Logic will take you nowhere you want to go in life. It will take you many places, far and wide, yes it will, but nowhere you really want to go, I assure you, when you look back on your life. Emotion is God’s intelligence in us, in you. Learn to listen to God.”

Nothing’s as necessary to existence as diversity. You need different races, languages, ideas, not only for their own sake, but so you can know who you are! In your ideal world, who are you? Who? You don’t know! You look so much like everything around you, you disappear like a green lizard on a green tree.”

language was more personal than a toothbrush,

“I feel evil fearing for my own family. Love for my own kin is turning me into a bad person.”

black is nothing but the absence of all colors. I, therefore, am living in the absence of color. I cannot see myself, therefore I can assume I am absent. I no longer exist.”

By the time we win, we won’t need more land, we’ll need less.

The ones I saw, they lost their individuality, their humanity! It looked like some mad sculptor had come along and chiseled off their face.”

… there was something always miraculous about the life I had been given.

The flags were like children sticking their tongues out at us—annoying, but only to be expected.

To this day, Germany is the bearer of the war guilt; but the truth is, we were the hind leg of the beast, not the white rabbit caught in its mouth.

“Nothing we do creatively is for ourselves. It’s only done for someone else, if only for that someone in our head.

Somehow, whatever one learns as a child in school leaves behind a solid core; and it’s impossible to replace this core within oneself; one can only grow on from there. One’s beliefs through life resemble the rings of a tree, each year solidifying what we successively thought, doubted and believed. Nature takes no note of the contradictory ideas, all of which are packed in, one after another, to make the trunk we are: the compact, unified remainder of our diametric past.

“It’s the greatest proof of love I can give you. I’m willing to sacrifice my life to give you freedom. That’s the very definition of love, giving one another space and freedom. Love isn’t possessive, a way of caging someone in for your own sake. Love doesn’t bind one to another. Love is as free and liberating as the air, the wind—yes, as God’s light.

It’s only when you have the choice to stay with someone, the free, open choice among a hundred, a thousand other possibilities, that it has any meaning!”

Children didn’t have the look of children—they were little disenchanted adults, playing as routinely as if going to work.

Lies are like easy friends, there to help you out of troubled waters. Short term. But long term, they’re traitors only there to make a wreckage out of your life …”