Читать книгу Of Silence and Song - Dan Beachy-Quick - Страница 34

24.

Wondering why my mind keeps turning back to ancient history when all I want to do is dwell here in my life. I guess I don’t know what my life is, don’t know what the horizon is. In every direction that border-line retreats with every step I take. But step isn’t a true word. I’m not moving at all. Just quiet in a chair, thinking silently to myself. Is that life.

I might say life is what persists through time. It has a duration, and to become an adult is to feel that duration as something both growing longer and diminishing, growing heavier and turning daily into almost nothing. It’s like a word in a sentence grown aware of itself, hearing faintly the echo of those words already said and dimly perceiving that more words are to come, single part of the meaning no single word can hold, just as a day is made possible only by all the days already lived, and this day will drift away into those to come which would not exist without this one, and these moments that seem to be the ones in which we live abandon themselves before we realize we too have been left almost behind.

But I might say other things. Or life might speak better for itself.

It’s hard to keep up; memory keeps looking backward. Love, or is it fear, or is it hope keeps peering ahead. Or maybe I have it wrong, and love looks both ways at once, into the past and into the future; or maybe I’m wrong again, and love like the bashful youth looks down at her feet in the grass; or is it love looks you in the eye. I don’t know.

Poor words.

Numa was the second king of Rome, born on the same day the city he would rule had been founded. They came into the world together.

It is said he knew Pythagoras and so followed the inner laws of silence.

After his mortal wife passed away he wandered the fields and in the quiet grasses a goddess consorted with him. Some deny this is true. They don’t believe a deity would make love to a human being. But almost every day he wandered into the meadows.

Maybe the calm was erotic. Maybe the grasses bending over in the wind.

He put at peace the warlike ways of the Romans. He instituted many religious observances.