Читать книгу Darwin Alone in the Universe - M.A.C. Farrant - Страница 16

IN THIS INSTANCE

AN ELEPHANT AS LARGE AS A MOUNTAIN is tethered to the centre of the world, a desert where white horses lie dead on their backs, their legs pointing stiffly upwards. The elephant moves slowly; he is the engine that turns the world.

Always in this world there are people laughing together, oblivious of the elephant’s patient work. In this instance it is two women, arm in arm, wearing cotton summer dresses and carrying parasols, speaking excitedly while they traverse the desert.

“But surely,” one says, “there must be one true reality!”

“Yes,” replies her friend. “Some place not decorated by vision but simply there, like an enormous blank canvas.”

“But then we’d paint upon that canvas and a vision would be created.”

“Or we’d speak of it and confine it with our words.”

“It’s a problem, certainly,” says the first woman. “But what I wouldn’t give for one good truth, one large understanding that I could hold onto!”

“How about this?” the second woman offers. And she closes her eyes, reciting, as if from memory. “An elephant turns the world. White horses die. We walk around them.”

And then skip together across sand and stone.