What yesterday’s long hike through the Käfertal brought me (October 25, 2025)...
“I should pick up the pen again.
I should revive and relive my public library — my blog — which I’ve neglected for so many years, because life simply overran me...”
It seemed as if she were emerging from a long, silent devastation. She toyed with the question of whether it might make sense to return to the world — to recreate it for herself and, through her words, also for others. To forge inspiration for herself and for those who are willing to receive it, for words shape us and outlast all times as well as all relationships.
She flirted, in thought, with the idea of reviving her “public library.” I read her not-yet-written thoughts and saw myself before a cup of hot tea, in hand-painted, old and fine porcelain, set upon a 200-year-old, elegantly crafted wooden round table — sunk deep into a wide, soft, dark-green cashmere armchair.
I felt myself among the shelves, with that old joy of searching, of discovering, of coincidence — within a space where thinking could expand freely, in perfect silence. The scent of books drifted like perfume through the circle of my perception and entered all my senses. I inhaled deeply, as I do in summer during the hay harvest, when I let the dust of the air pass right through me.
The library — her library, my library, our library — not merely a place, but an inner condition. A part of oneself long buried, now ready to be entered again…
Yes, she really should pick up the pen again. Sometimes passion is therapy. For twelve years, she had written almost nothing — too much had happened, and the speed of life had rolled over her, both in time and in spirit.
The last four years — years of attrition — felt more like a displacement of life itself. Nearly four years given to the illusion of closeness, of shared stability, of love. She had aligned herself with another’s life, helping him find his footing again, while the greater part of her own inner space quietly disappeared.
She convinced herself she was happy in that connection, fulfilled — yet her thinking, her language, her sense of self shifted almost imperceptibly, as the other’s life realigned — at her expense.
She recognized the destructive effects of manipulation, of silence as a form of control, of devaluation, of subtle isolation within the relationship — and finally of sarcasm and extreme lack of empathy — only late... almost too late. When she eventually left that toxic environment for good, she did not yet realize how long and winding the path to healing would be, how much time and attention it would take to rediscover her own inner space.
It is understandable that her connection to her mental and creative space was lost. Writing, reading, and similar pursuits become nearly impossible for a time; no natural form of therapy works amid pain, loss, humiliation inflicted from outside, and the coarseness of others. Inner strength falters for a while.
One needs time — time unmeasured. Time to realize that precisely where everything breaks apart, forgotten passions can become the greatest source of support. Even when writing again seems impossible — when one is still in free fall — it is exactly in that moment, when life threatens to collapse, that the texts begin to speak again.
Perhaps the first step is not “to read again,” but simply to be in the library. To sit. To breathe. To smell. To listen. To feel oneself. No goal, no plan. Only presence.
The manuscript will come on its own — don’t search. The right thing will find you.
Sometimes the return to books, to texts, is a return to one’s own language — not the language one speaks, but the one that lives within, when everything external falls silent.
To rewrite the burned pages anew...
To be continued .....
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