“Sometimes we can speak to distant mountains, and even, in the blue between two mountains, become the horizon, the precipice over there, or the rocky cliffs.
Once a day, perhaps, we are the gesture that answers, far below, in the grass, and the sun lamp in the heart of the thicket, the nest of light in the purple beech, and the sheltering darkness within the yew. At any moment we may become the wind of the roots that lifts the crowns of the trees from below, the sound of nights and days, the infinite green, the surface of the sea with its tranquil radiance, which the proverb calls ‘galene’. Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall be nothing. The day after tomorrow we shall be dead and buried, and not even a footnote in the history books. Yet, far above, the tombs of white clouds will never cease to be our places of remembrance.”
Peter Handke, Walk about the Villages (French edition: Par les villages, Gallimard).
Where Igniatius, standing before the river, allows himself to be spellbound by the beauty of the glints of light reflected in the moving water.
Igniatius’s Notebook
Far removed from any theoretical concern, everything I see is changing. I could remain here indefinitely, contemplating, since nothing in what I am looking at ever repeats itself in quite the same way. Hardly has this thought taken shape in my mind when I sense that it no longer concerns the water alone. This incessant transformation, whose patterns I have been following for so long upon the surface of the stream, continues into the very eye of the one who watches them.
Little by little, the luminous constellations change my eyes themselves. As they appear and disappear, they imperceptibly alter the man leaning over the water. The man who stopped here is no longer quite the same as the one who entered the gorge.
I could see myself in the water. This would be unremarkable if the water were still. Who would not see themselves in the calm of a mirror? But the water here was not still. Without any great turbulence, it swirled in the current and seemed to play with the flashes of light. This impression might have struck me as absurd had it not been so immediately perceptible. I saw a man, certainly, but from a distance. He stood at the water’s edge, leaning slightly towards it, one hand resting against a damp rock, his clothes darkened by the moisture and the light behind him. He was surrounded by countless branches crossing above his head. I knew perfectly well that this man was myself. Yet there was no place outside myself from which I could actually have seen him in this way. Something in the landscape was making my own presence visible to me, as though the very place I occupied within it were now enough to make me appear to myself, no longer as the one before whom things were arranged, but as one of the forms they contained. The forest, had it possessed a gaze of its own, would have witnessed the spectacle too.
This thought arose from a natural, almost physical sensation. My body belonged to what I was looking at, and I could no longer separate it from what I saw. The air held beneath the canopy of branches entered me with every breath before returning to the gorge, slightly altered by its passage through me, while beneath my skin other currents continued to flow, warm and invisible, with their branching pathways and their slowing movements. All this inner geography, of which I was ordinarily unaware, suddenly became almost perceptible before the networks of roots and the branching courses of the stream.
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