Status Updates From Invitation to a Beheading

Cincinnatus had already stopped heeding the sound of the unnecessary count which was fading away in the distance; and, with a clarity he had never experienced before—at first almost painful, so suddenly did it come, but then suffusing him with joy, he reflected: why am I here? Why am I lying like this? And, having asked himself these simple questions, he answered them by getting up and looking around.

He realized that this fear was dragging him precisely into that false logic of things that had gradually developed around him, but from which he had still somehow been able to escape that morning. The very thought that this chubby, red-cheeked hunter was going to hack at him was already an inadmissible sickening weakness, drawing Cincinnatus into a system that was perilous to him.

...it was as if something real, unquestionable (in this world, where everything was subject to question), had passed through, as if a corner of life had curled up, and there was a glimpse of the lining. In his mother’s gaze, Cincinnatus suddenly saw that ultimate, secure, all-explaining and from-all-protecting spark that he knew how to discern in himself also. What was this spark so piercingly expressing now?

More than once, probably, you have felt your chest expand on a wonderful spring day, when the buds swell and feathered songsters enliven the groves, clad in their first sticky leafage. The first modest flowers peep coquettishly out of the grass, as if they would entice the passionate lover of nature, as they whisper timidly: ‘Oh, don’t, don’t pick us, our life is short.’