In
the silence stardrops are heard dripping, falling from heaven somewhere in the
great distance. Their echoes skip and bounce across the great sky vault.
This
is the only sound in heaven and on earth.
-
The sound emanates from a faucet not quite turned off.
Alone in the world and lonely, the faucet drips, drips.
These reminiscences are organized in
70 parts. The narrator switches between his vantage point as an old man and as a
child.
Every now and then the old man draws
us out of the years of childhood to the present. Virtues are evaluated and set
up against what has already passed. And then he dives back into time past, and
new fragments of life are conjured up.
It annoys him that he now,
symbolically speaking, finds himself at the end of the world and only can look
back on the life that youth now journey through while he is fettered in the
prison of old age. However, the life he looks back on is also exceptional.