JК
The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana :: Эко Умберто
Страница: 254 из 286So, I have abad heart. Consecrated to death, like Gragnola.
Heart disease becomes my absinthe. I track its progress, watching my lips grow ever darker, my cheeks ever gaunter, as the first blooms of teen acne lend my face a morbid flush. I will die young, like Saint Aloysius Gonzaga and Domenico Savio. But my spirit has asserted itself, and I have slowly reformulated my Exercise for a Good Death: little by little I have given up hair shirts for poetry.
I live in a dazzling crepuscular light:
The day will come: I know that this my ardent blood will of a sudden slow , and that my pen , not dry , will clatter down on wood… it’s then that I will die.
I am dying, no longer because life is evil, but because in its madness it is banal, monotonously repeating its rituals of death. A secular penitent, a logorrheic mystic, I convince myself that the most beautiful island is the one that has not been found, that sometimes appears, but only in the distance, between Tenerife and La Palma:
Their vessels sail along that blessed shore: the dense green sacred forest scents the air; over the nameless flowers , huge palms soar; cardamom weeps , the rubber trees perspire…
The unfound isle , announced by fragrances , like courtesans … But like vain semblances , when pilots sail too near it vanishes , turning that shade of blue that distance is.
Faith in the ungraspable allows me to close my penitential parenthesis. Life as a provident young man had promised me, as a reward, she who was lovely as the sun and pale as the light of the moon. But a single impure thought could snatch her away from me forever. The Unfound Isle, however, since it is unattainable, remains forever mine.
I am educating myself for my encounter with Lila.
18. Lovely Thou Art as the Sun
____________________
Lila too was born from a book. I was entering my third year of high school, on the verge of turning sixteen, when I began reading, in my grandfather’s shop, Cyrano de Bergerac , by Rostand. Why I did not find it in Solara, in the attic or in the chapel, I do not know. Perhaps I had read and reread it so many times that it finally fell apart. I could recite it now from memory.
Everyone knows the story, indeed if someone even after my incident had asked me about Cyrano , I think I could have said what it was about, that it was a melodrama of exaggerated Romanticism that touring companies still put on every so often. I could have said what everyone knows.
Heart disease becomes my absinthe. I track its progress, watching my lips grow ever darker, my cheeks ever gaunter, as the first blooms of teen acne lend my face a morbid flush. I will die young, like Saint Aloysius Gonzaga and Domenico Savio. But my spirit has asserted itself, and I have slowly reformulated my Exercise for a Good Death: little by little I have given up hair shirts for poetry.
I live in a dazzling crepuscular light:
The day will come: I know that this my ardent blood will of a sudden slow , and that my pen , not dry , will clatter down on wood… it’s then that I will die.
I am dying, no longer because life is evil, but because in its madness it is banal, monotonously repeating its rituals of death. A secular penitent, a logorrheic mystic, I convince myself that the most beautiful island is the one that has not been found, that sometimes appears, but only in the distance, between Tenerife and La Palma:
Their vessels sail along that blessed shore: the dense green sacred forest scents the air; over the nameless flowers , huge palms soar; cardamom weeps , the rubber trees perspire…
The unfound isle , announced by fragrances , like courtesans … But like vain semblances , when pilots sail too near it vanishes , turning that shade of blue that distance is.
Faith in the ungraspable allows me to close my penitential parenthesis. Life as a provident young man had promised me, as a reward, she who was lovely as the sun and pale as the light of the moon. But a single impure thought could snatch her away from me forever. The Unfound Isle, however, since it is unattainable, remains forever mine.
I am educating myself for my encounter with Lila.
18. Lovely Thou Art as the Sun
____________________
Lila too was born from a book. I was entering my third year of high school, on the verge of turning sixteen, when I began reading, in my grandfather’s shop, Cyrano de Bergerac , by Rostand. Why I did not find it in Solara, in the attic or in the chapel, I do not know. Perhaps I had read and reread it so many times that it finally fell apart. I could recite it now from memory.
Everyone knows the story, indeed if someone even after my incident had asked me about Cyrano , I think I could have said what it was about, that it was a melodrama of exaggerated Romanticism that touring companies still put on every so often. I could have said what everyone knows.