Tall Windows.
All day you didn't cry or cry out and you felt like sleeping.
The desire to sleep was light bulbs dimming when
a powerful appliance kicks off.
You recognized that.
As in school, it was explained to you
that pus was a brave army of white corpuscles hurling
themselves at the virulent invader and dying.
Riding through the Netherlands on a train,
you notice that even the junk was neatly
stacked in the junkyards.
There were magpies in the fields beside the watery canals,
neat little houses, tall windows.
In Leiden, on the street outside the university,
the house where Descartes lived was mirrored in the canal.
There was a pair of swans in a sense
that without haste or anxiety, all the people on the street
were going to arrive at their appointments punctually.
Swans and mirrors and Descartes.
It was easy to see how this European tranquility might
produce a poet like Mallarmé, a middle class art-like
symbolism.
And you did not despise the collective orderliness,
the way the clerks in the stores were
careful to put bills in the cash register
with the Queen's face facing upward.
In the house next to the house where Descartes lived,
a Jewish professor died in 1937.
His wife was a Dutch woman of strict Calvinist principles
and she was left with two sons.
In 1939, when the Nazis came, she went to court
and perjured herself by testifying
that her children were conceived during an illicit affair
with a Gentile.
And when she developed tuberculosis in 1943,
she traded passports with a Jewish friend
since she was going to die anyway
and took her place on the train to the camps.
Her sons kissed her goodbye on the platform, eyes open.
What kept you awake was the feeling
that everything in the world has its own size.
That if you could find its size among the swellings
and diminishings, it would be calm and shy.
[APPLAUSE]