Almost like legends were the clickers or marbles we played with [...] They were Arabian stones, ringed with red or green, sometimes with stars, even with miniaturized lands; these were carried in our pockets. But it was at six in the evening, out on the field, I hear the bells ringing in the clock tower. I was gathering pebbles from the Rhine; as I looked right at them in the dusk and the clock struck, the little men were moving there fleet as shadows...
[...]
Eight years, and the most remarkable thing was the sewing box in a shop window on the way to school; it stood between skeins and mats, embroidered by feminine hands... on the box was an illustration with many dots or flecks of color on the smooth paper, as though the paint had run. It showed a hut and much snow; the moon was high and yellow in the blue winter sky; in the windows of the hut burned a red light. Below the little image stood "Moon Landscape," and at first I believed it was a landscape on the moon...
[...]
In short, there was almost no everyday in those times beyond school; everything was amplified, or became completely still in first love, by the fountains of the rococo gardens, in the intoxication of the first speculative looks. We felt ourselves drawn, to the point of pain, into the beauty of trees, clouds, the night sky, with a sorrow of muteness before it all that drove us almost to hallucinations.
[...]
The "same" had become magical; a long gaze would transport us into that constellation.
...
~ Ernst Bloch, excerpts from Spirit Still Taking Shape, an essay in Traces...
