Spreading his arms to embrace it all
Looking at Alison Jardine’s painting this comes to my mind:
There was a place between his hometown and the next village. A small road along the busy railway tracks. No one used it but the farmers who had their fields there. Heat, air dancing like water upon the asphalt. Crickets.
He was riding a bicycle. The noise of trains, freight trains, passenger trains. A connection between Copenhagen and Paris, a connection between him and the clouds in the loneliness of the noise.
A thicket, willows, nettles. And between the nettles Wilhelm’s cannabis plants. Rebellion, criminal offence inside the sweet room of loneliness under this big sky.
Facing the sun, looking up, feeling the warmth on his closed eyelids, his feet rooted deeply into the ground he spread his arms to embrace it all. A sigh rising up from the depths of his stomach, through his chest, throat, mouth into the air, into the sound of the passing train: “aaaaahhhhhhh!”
