If only, I feel now, if only I could be someone able to see all this as if he had no relation with it other than that seeing it, someone able to observe everything as if he were an adult traveler newly arrived today on the surface of life! If only one had not learned, from birth onwards, to give certain accepted meanings to everything, but instead was able to see the meaning inherent in each thing rather than that imposed on it from without. If only one could know the human reality of the woman selling fish and go beyond just labeling her a fishwife and the known fact that she exists and sells fish. If only one could see the policeman as God sees him. If only one could notice everything for the first time, not apocalyptically, as if they were revelations of the Mystery, but directly as the flowerings of Reality.
I hear the hour struck by some bell or clock tower – it must be eight o’clock though I don’t count. The banal fact of the existence of time, the confines that social life imposes on continuous-time – a frontier around the abstract, a limit on the unknown – brings me back to myself. I come to, look around at everything, which is full of life and ordinary humanity now, and I see that, apart from the patches of imperfect blue where it still lingers, the mist has cleared completely from the sky and seeped instead into my soul and into all things, into that part of them that touches my soul. I’ve lost the vision of what I saw. I’m blinded by sight. My feeling belongs now to the banal realm of knowledge. This is no longer Reality: it is simply Life.
… Yes, Life to which I belong and which belongs to me, not Reality which belongs only to God or to itself and contains neither mystery nor truth and given that it is real or pretends to be, exists somewhere in some fixed form, free from the need to be either transient or eternal, an absolute image, the ideal form of a soul made visible.
Slowly (though not as slowly as I imagine) I make my way back to my own door in order to go up to my room again. But I don’t go in. I hesitate, then continue on. Praça da Figueira, replete with goods of various colors, fills with customers and peoples my horizon with vendors of all kinds. I advance slowly, a dead man, and my vision, no longer my own, is nothing now: it is merely that of a human-animal who unwittingly inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality and all the other illusions that make up the civilization in which I live and feel.
What’s become of the living?
I hear the hour struck by some bell or clock tower – it must be eight o’clock though I don’t count. The banal fact of the existence of time, the confines that social life imposes on continuous-time – a frontier around the abstract, a limit on the unknown – brings me back to myself. I come to, look around at everything, which is full of life and ordinary humanity now, and I see that, apart from the patches of imperfect blue where it still lingers, the mist has cleared completely from the sky and seeped instead into my soul and into all things, into that part of them that touches my soul. I’ve lost the vision of what I saw. I’m blinded by sight. My feeling belongs now to the banal realm of knowledge. This is no longer Reality: it is simply Life.
… Yes, Life to which I belong and which belongs to me, not Reality which belongs only to God or to itself and contains neither mystery nor truth and given that it is real or pretends to be, exists somewhere in some fixed form, free from the need to be either transient or eternal, an absolute image, the ideal form of a soul made visible.
Slowly (though not as slowly as I imagine) I make my way back to my own door in order to go up to my room again. But I don’t go in. I hesitate, then continue on. Praça da Figueira, replete with goods of various colors, fills with customers and peoples my horizon with vendors of all kinds. I advance slowly, a dead man, and my vision, no longer my own, is nothing now: it is merely that of a human-animal who unwittingly inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality and all the other illusions that make up the civilization in which I live and feel.
What’s become of the living?
