Cloudy Skies and Poor Humans

Jean Paul Richter, Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; or: The Wedded Life, Death, and Marriage of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkæs, tr. Alexander Ewing (London: George Bell & Sons, 1897), bk. iv., ch. xvi., pp. 454-457:

It was Saturday, and cloudy. Damp weather affects the walls of our brains as it does the walls of our rooms; the paperings of both imbibe the moisture, and get curled up into clouds, until the next dry day smooths both out again. Under a blue sky, I long for eagles’ pinions; under a cloudy one, I only want a goose’s wing to write with. In the former case we are eager to be off and out, into the wide world; in the latter, all we want is to sit comfortably down in our arm-chair. In short, clouds, when they drop, make us domestic, citizenish, and hungry, while blue skies make us thirsty, and citizens of the world. . . .

Away from home we are bold and daring: we resolve, and undertake; at home, we pause and hesitate, and delay.

. . . in man there nestles an accursed tendency towards still-sitting ease and comfort; like a big dog he lets himself be poked and pinched a thousand times before he takes the trouble to get up, rather than growl. Once fairly on his legs, however, he is not in a hurry to lie down again. The first heroic deed (like the first earned dollar, according to Rousseau) costs more than the next thousand. The prospect of the long, difficult, tedious and risky financial and surgical operation of a stage death stung our Siebenkæs on the domestic bolster. . . .

Poor, fevered human creatures that we are! driven back and repulsed asunder by our own lackings, and those of others, yet continually drawn together again by never-ceasing longings, in whom one hope of finding love falls away to dust after another, whose wishes come to nothing but memories. Our feeble hearts are at all events glowing and right full of love in that hour when we come back and meet again; and in that other hour when we part, disconsolate,—as every star seems milder, larger, and lovelier when it is rising, than when it is overhead. But to souls which always love, and are never angry, these two twilights (when the morning star of meeting, and the evening star of parting shine) are too sad to bear for to them they seem like nights.