(134) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

– Where one senses that, if Don Carrot contemplates above all the world's presence, Warmblood perceives more readily its relationships, its imperceptible transitions, its silent displacements. He is perhaps already more attentive to what changes beneath the appearance of what endures.
– And... look how thin he has grown, and how much he is beginning to resemble Don Carrot...

From Warmblood's Journal
Just before twilight, and before we had yet recognized the places from our previous journey, the forest stood before us with that same ancient majesty which seemed to belong to a time older than memory itself. I found myself rediscovering less a landscape than a disposition of the world, as though certain places remained present long before our minds were capable of recognizing them.
We advanced without the slightest anxiety. Indeed, it seemed to me that the forest required of us a kind of slowness that had nothing voluntary about it. Everything there invited us less to discover than to consent. The immense trees, the hanging lianas, the stones entirely reclaimed by moss—nothing called attention to itself. Each thing appeared quietly occupied with sustaining the others, as though none had received any task other than contributing to a balance whose secret belonged only to the whole.
As we went deeper, I gradually ceased to look at the trees individually. The trunks were no longer separate beings but the columns of one and the same ascent; the roots, far from competing for the earth, seemed to share a single subterranean effort; even the foliage received the light only in order to redistribute it. What elsewhere might have appeared as an almost excessive abundance of life revealed here an economy of astonishing rigor. Nothing seemed to have been added; nothing appeared capable of being removed.
I then understood that true order almost never resembles the order imagined by men. It does not consist in suppressing abundance, but in allowing abundance to remain intelligible. Perhaps that is why certain forests seem to me more reasonable than many cities.
The sounds themselves naturally found their place. The distant cry of a bird, a drop falling from an unseen branch, the rustling of an animal we would never glimpse... none of these interrupted the silence. On the contrary, each of these events seemed to belong to it. Silence neither preceded them nor followed them... it connected them.
For a long time Don Carrot and I walked with scarcely a word between us. This reserve arose neither from fatigue nor from distraction. It simply seemed to me that certain conversations, certain exchanges—or rather, to put it more accurately—continue more fully when no one speaks.
Several times I looked at my companion. Nothing in his bearing appeared different. And yet I could not free myself from a strange impression, as discreet as it was persistent. The very gestures that would once have reassured me now seemed to contain a slight distance, as though one part of him had already consented to remain in retreat. I was not thinking of disappearance; the word itself would never have occurred to me. I would rather have spoken of a new availability, of that way some beings sometimes have of inhabiting the present completely while already leaving room for what has not yet arrived.
I suddenly found myself thinking that the deepest transformations perhaps never begin with any visible change. They resemble instead those slow alterations of light beneath the great trees: nothing appears to move, and yet, when one finally raises one's eyes, the day is already no longer the same.
When at last the moon pierced the vault of foliage, its radiance seemed to illuminate neither the path nor the trees. It merely revealed that the night, too, belonged to the equilibrium of the place. We continued our walk almost in silence, saying nothing, our progress measured only by the sound of our footsteps and the syncopated beating of our hearts. That silence, though only relative, did not separate two travelers... it went before us. I did not yet know that certain journeys begin precisely at the moment when one believes one has recognized the road.
We had less the feeling of advancing through a forest than of entering, very slowly, into a thought whose consequences neither of us was yet capable of measuring.