Hera’s Reviews > The Wall > Status Update

Things happen, and, like millions of people before me, I look for a meaning in them, because my vanity will not allow me to admit that the whole meaning of an event lies in the event itself. If I casually stand on a beetle, it will not see this event, tragic for the beetle, as a mysterious concatenation of universal significance.

I save an animal from certain death or shoot a deer because I need meat. But the forest copes easily with my confusion. A new deer is born, another runs headlong to its doom. I'm not a troublemaker worth taking seriously. The nettles beside the byre will go on growing, even if I exterminate them a hundred times, and they will survive me.

Even if he had no other choice, he couldn't have laid down more than his life for me. It was all he owned, a short and happy dog's life; a thousand stimulating scents, the sun's warmth on his fur, cold spring water on his tongue, breathless hunts for deer, sleep in the warm stove door when the winter wind blew around the hut, a caressing human hand and a beloved, wonderful human voice.

I often look forward to a time when there won't be anything left to grow attached to. I'm tired of everything being taken away from me. Yet there's no escape, for as long as there's something for me to love in the forest, I shall love it; and if some day there is nothing, I shall stop living.