Daylight God is proven in some way by the extreme difficulty of believing in him... —SIMONE WEIL July already, and the land is soon to burn, the sun at midday casting its least shadow. Across the road, the unmown pasture(草地,牧场) will whiten under its glare, and the world goes brittle(易碎的) with heat. The land loves the light, and suffers from the light, and lets it go when the day is done. The illuminated(被照明的) air has a density, and I feel as though I should part it with my hands when I step from the shade. You don't have to look hard to see that the light is always leaving— even rising towards you, taking its lowest angle down the countryside, it is passing. The days should be getting shorter but I can't sense it in the slow coursing of this one. It is difficult to believe even the things you've seen; there is nothing that I know for certain. A mockingbird(模仿鸟,知更鸟) lands on a post and has more to say about what will bear us skyward than I do. The day is without music— or any that is organized in a way I can hear. It is easy to forget the words you've read in books and all you've been told is true with the world this bright and close at hand. I am learning to look with a new kind of wanting. There are a few minutes as the day dims when the details in the distant line of trees become clarified, the tree forms taking on greater depth, their lobed(分裂的,有叶的) leaves individuated as the light releases them, the rich texturing of each tree suddenly present, rendered with a painstaking(艰苦的,勤勉的) draftsmanship(制图术) , then they blacken and solidify, emptied of every last particular, a jagged line backed by a sky which will stay brilliant for some time to come, as though the light that once lay in the weeds now waits in the air above, wondering, I suppose, why it is we do not follow. |