“Weeping”

“Weeping” is a poem fragment attributed to Natan Alterman and placed among the novel’s opening acknowledgments. In a few compressed lines, it binds another person’s grief to the speaker’s wakefulness, solitude, and sense of danger: the night is still, but the person addressed is not alone in the emotional consequences of that stillness. The passage’s central reversal is that weeping, ordinarily associated with sorrow, becomes something that fixes the speaker in the position of a victim watched by a beast.

Placement and Attribution

The fragment follows the acknowledgment of William Jovanovich and the Colorado College community for providing a peaceful year in which the major part of the novel could be written. It is identified as an excerpt from “Weeping” by Natan Alterman. Its position among this opening material gives the poem a threshold function: before the novel’s narrative begins, it offers a compact emotional image of silence, sleepless attention, and threatened isolation. The surrounding matter then gives the author’s name, Dr. Alexander A. Gideon, and his department. The placement does not explain how the poem relates to a particular character or incident, so its force rests first in the words and images presented here.

Address and Isolation

The poem begins by turning toward an unnamed other: “But you, you knew the night is still and silent,”. The repeated “you” makes the address feel pointed, while “But” signals a contrast whose earlier terms are not supplied in the excerpt. The addressee knows the night’s stillness; the speaker, by contrast, remains awake within it. “And I alone remain alert and brood.” The line makes solitude more than physical separation: alertness keeps the speaker in contact with thought, and brooding gives that wakefulness a troubled, inward direction.

The pronouns establish a sharply unequal relationship without specifying its history. The speaker speaks directly to “you,” yet the next lines describe the consequences of the addressee’s weeping as borne by the speaker. That asymmetry makes the address intimate but not consoling. The passage does not tell readers who is crying, why the speaker feels affected, or whether the two are together. Instead, it concentrates on the experience of being left alone with an awareness that belongs, in some way, to another person’s grief.

Weeping as Threat

The most abrupt change comes in the declaration “I am the only victim of your weeping:”. The word “only” intensifies the speaker’s isolation, while “victim” recasts sorrow in the language of injury. The colon makes the following image feel like an explanation or unveiling: “The beast has fixed his eye on me to be his only food.” The beast is not identified, and the excerpt does not establish whether it is literal or figurative. What the image makes unmistakable is the speaker’s exposure. A fixed gaze turns attention into threat, and the prospect of being food gives that threat a consuming, bodily form.

The repetition of exclusivity links the two lines: the speaker is the “only victim,” and the beast’s intended food is also “only” the speaker. The effect is to close off escape within the image. Weeping does not merely surround the speaker as an expression of feeling; it leads into a vision in which the speaker is singled out. The poem’s movement from the still night to the beast’s stare therefore sharpens rather than resolves the opening tension: quiet offers no assurance of safety.

Bodily and Mental Disorientation

The surrounding lines extend the passage’s movement from watchfulness toward distress. The speaker says, “At times I shudder suddenly and tremble,” then describes wandering in panic. These bodily verbs give the fear a physical register, while the shift from alert brooding to involuntary shuddering suggests that attention has become difficult to control. The excerpt proceeds into darkness and sobbing, ending with the disappearance of “memory or sense or understanding.” That final loss of mental bearings carries the image of isolation beyond being alone in the night: the speaker’s capacity to make sense of experience is also threatened.

Together, the fragment’s images form a progression rather than a settled explanation. Stillness becomes wakeful brooding; another person’s weeping is experienced as victimization; the beast’s gaze turns that vulnerability into imagined predation; and darkness culminates in disorientation. The poem does not name the cause of this suffering or identify the beast, and it offers no resolution in the excerpt. Its opening function is instead to establish a mood in which silence is charged, grief has consequences beyond the person who weeps, and the speaker’s solitude feels exposed to something that may consume it.