Looking out of my window I can see the sturdy trunks of the old still bare chestnut trees and the flourishing forsythias behind them: Their flowers are blazing like yellow fire. There are slightly yellowed daffodils widespread onto the lawn and few and far between, red tulips with small patches of violets underneath.
.......When I look upwards I see the blue arching sky, not the slightest feathery cloud in view. The air is so full of the birds' chirping and warbling that my heart is laughing all the time. Spring is in the air - and every year it surprises me - the miracle of nature!
,,,,,,,,In this hopeful mood I will try to remember a special moment in time, I will try to recall one of the most happy moments of my life and describe it to you.
,,,,,,,,For that purpose I have to go far back in time: It was in the 80ies when I concentrated on reading diaries such as those by Robert Musil, Paul Klee and Ernst Junger. I myself kept notebooks in which I wrote my own thoughts, worries and experiences along with quotations or complete text passages from books that moved me. Those were days when I approached my sixties and was beginning to give myself account of my life. Bright and dark hours were steadily taking turns. I needed an intensive soliloquy - that was when I started writing letters to my teacher and mentor who had already passed away in 1962. Drafting the letters was a great help to me and I told myself that nobody had to know that I did such crazy things.

,,,Nevertheless it gave me a great pleasure when I eventually read an essay about Bertha von Suttner who had not just written the famous book "Lay Down Your Arms" and was the first woman awarded with the Nobel Prize, but had also been happily married. She felt so strongly connected to her beloved husband that after his death she was keeping a diary addressed to him. Later it was published titled "Letters To One Who Is Dead". I myself had named my own written thoughts "Letters to One Who Lives On - Inside Me".

........At that point in time all of this constituted just a little part of my life. I was acting, singing and teaching in many different countries. But love and passion for literature, whether in English or French, always accompanied me. But my neglected mother tongue increasingly called for my attention.
........Once again in my life, like many times before, there was a lucky coincidence. A short vacation trip lead me to the sea, that is to say to Marseille. There, in a book sale at the Goethe Institute, for five Francs I bought "The European Journal" by Gustav Rene Hocke. In this book I heard about a wondrous god for the first time. With great delight and amazement I read the following:
........"Any individual history of creation in a diary gets a personal touch when you have an encounter with the God Kairos, the mythic image of the perfect moment. There will be dramatic effects when an author confides to his diary that his creative day, his creative hour has arrived, that he has seized his creative luck, that from now on he feels the inner calling to write, to paint or to compose. Kairos, the God of the Greek Mythology being called "Occasio" by the Romans, is the God of the favourable opportunity you have to lurk at, in order to jump at the scurrying one at the right time and hold on to him. And this is rather difficult as Kairos, as well as Occasio, just has one coil of hair, one strand of hah", which falls in his eyes, to which you could grasp. On the back of the head the God's hair is shaven off. The razor is a symbol of that time as well - deity. They are on the knife-edge, those 'creators', staggering on thin floor - like our luck, like the creative lucky inspiration. A dramatic diary is experience - because there it is recorded hastily and breathlessly, the experience is captured."
.......Of course the God with one lock of hair does not only appear in front of the diary's composer. To Paul Tillich the God revealed himself in the shape of Botticelli's Madonna and Child With Singing Angels" in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin. He simply called this experience "One Moment Of Beauty". He was so shocked by the sight that he had to turn away. Ecstasy and enlightenment flushed through him and influenced his entire life. This divine moment was preceded by five woeful years as a chaplain in the First World War where by candlelight - in the position warfare in Verdun -he looked at old illustrated magazines, reproductions of famous paintings which prevented him from losing his mind. Botticelli's "Madonna" was one of them and when he looked at the original as the War was over this revelation was granted to him.
.......To my teacher Kairos revealed himself in the prosaic shape of a street lantern. Standing on his balcony and looking onto the canals one night in Amsterdam he made out the dimly glowing red light of a street lantern in the distance. He continuously stared in this light and was overcome by a huge calmness, the distance was melting away, it seemed as if he would be dragged into this light, he felt an immense intensity and suddenly he thought. "Everything is so clean, the world doesn't stink anymore!". In the moment of the highest tension something flashed through him like a bolt of lightning: "God! God lives and is inside me." Then everything inside him became normal and dark again. This enlightenment occurred in 1946 when he had experienced two terrible wars and, after the end of World War II, had been told that his one and only beloved sister had been killed in the stench of the gas chambers in Auschwitz. I imagine that here the Greek God intended to place some kind of rest and peace inside a wounded heart.
.......For me these were moving and memorable stories which I wrote down in order to reread them once in a while. Never would I have imagined that Kairos would also visit me. But he did. One day, completely unexpected, he suddenly whizzed through my room, a beaming young God, immersed in bright light - like a bolt of lightning he darted past me or even through me. Could I grasp his lock of hair this fast? I do not think so, it rather felt as if I was seized by the neck. Steady, gently does it... we know that Kairos does not come by without good cause. You have to make preparations, very often you have to carpenter the steps for the spiral case from which he, the daring Occasio, descends throughout your whole life. Yes, it was a convenient opportunity - in English occasion is not only a synonym for "opportunity" but also for "reason", "cause" and "incidence". At that point of time - the reason I was occupied with translating a manuscript by my teacher from German into English. For days I had been struggling with two certain sentences - the cause - to match the poetry, the melody of the words. When I finally succeeded more or less, I rather loftily reported on "the hardship and art of translating" in one of my letters to "him", the following occurred: for a split second I saw the God Kairos, but with traces of my teacher's features which in fact is to say, the great love of my life -I saw his slightly teasing but charming smile, saw that the single lock of hair changed into a black curly head, the beautiful almost femininely curved lips... The delicate platitudes - my heart froze, it took my breath away, a great happiness overwhelmed me... - now they became vivid and authentic. But how to describe the luck? Stay with me! You are so beautiful!? But it did not last, on the contrary - in this blissful fraction of a second I saw, felt and experienced the most important, unforgettable, defining moments of my life with the one person who has left his indelible mark on me and made me the person I am today.
........Somewhere I had read that just before your death you go through your life again; but I for myself stood right in its midst and passed through the stages of my education.: the first encounter in London, the first conversation, the first singing lesson, then the years of education, the long walks through English parks, the philosophical dialogues accompanied by a whisky or a gin in an English pub. And the painful moments belonging to it as well, his severe illness, the conversations next to his sickbed... in short, my thirteen years at this man's side... - like in quick motion all these moments rolled by in my mind's eye. Oh, describing such strong emotions is so difficult, it was not just a feeling of happiness - much pain, beauty and passion, sorrow and fear were mixed with it. I can describe the end of the incident more clearly. Kairos had disappeared - there I stood as if immersed in gold and a thought formed inside me. The love and lesson connecting me with this man even after his death have made me the luckiest person - rich in invaluable life experience. I'm in possession of an inner treasure and I regard myself as its guardian.
........I tried to hold on to this feeling of inner wealth a little. I opened a bottle of wine: "I raise the glass to myself, cheers!". A faint distant echo remained, which changed into a feeling of great gratitude. Even today, in the process of rewriting this, in placing the words on the paper, a slight memory flashes through my mind and I send my thanks to Kairos, the god of the instant, and I lay all spring flowers blooming in front of my window at his feet. –
........Now I will write down the two sentences of the manuscript which took me so long to translate. Here they are in the original.
......."..this has to do with the fact that music is an almighty force behind our lives, for it is the centre of our lives. It begins with the scream of the baby, it accompanies each emotion, each of our life's hour of celebration, it flames up in the eternal minutes of our embraces, it calls from our insides when we are in need, in harm, when we are in pain and anguish, at the point of death, it is stirring us through nature when the sea sings its songs, when the stony waves of the mountains and hills strike up their melodies, when the furrows of the earth communicate their maternal lullaby to our receptive ears."

Malerargues, spring 1997 Marita Gunther