Ilse’s Reviews > A Leopard-Skin Hat > Status Update

But how can we hold such a tiny thing against her? Don't we all of us slay each other, day in, day out, hour after hour, with our exquisite smiles and shattering indifference, our lavish displays of wealth that the more impoverished members of society can only lower their eyes before?

Hiking around with someone who doesn't look at things as you do is always interesting. Fanny moves through the landscape not in order to read there like the Narrator, but to live. The open sky and the rolling meadows lend themselves to the movement of her thoughts, whereas for the Narrator everything falls still so that he can savor - just savor -down to the tiniest detail - as a happy expanse of untamed countryside.

Perhaps we all have lives the person closest to us knows nothing of? And perhaps this is what really attracts us to each other: the presence of this secret life which, from time to time, is revealed to us through a gleaming, narrow slit. The vision is fleeting and comes as a complete surprise; all our convictions are shaken because, however observant we might be, we hadn’t noticed a thing