Das erste Jahr jetzt auf:

http://www.hanser-literaturverlage.de/verlage/hanser-box

Are babies beautiful? Ours obviously is, we would like to say, our vanity readily excludes any other possible answer. But curiously, our vanity does not feel hard-pressed when we also say: all babies are beautiful, they are all very beautiful creatures. We look at our baby. We can find nothing in him that contradicts his beauty. (In ourselves, on the other hand we immediately find many things that are not beautiful). It’s as if for the baby there is only beauty (as if it were chosen for beauty). Everything ugly is unthinkable, impossible, out of the question. Beauty in the baby seems to be firmly anchored, inseparable from him. It does not waver, shows no weaknesses and does not exaggerate. Impossible to grow weary of it or to sate oneself on it. It engenders no longing, does not come or go ( – this is not how we and our kind are. Every day on the street we see beauty coming and going. Sometimes in a single second. Like a timid animal, beauty shows her face and ducks away. She never stays; even in the most beautiful people she is on flight. The most awful thing happens when she forms an alliance with arrogance and conceit. She is indeed in danger of vanishing and never coming back.) Babies never cease to be beautiful. That is the only thing they cannot do.