without her blond wig, without makeup, nude. God, no, poor Signora Ely!
Then was that truth? No, not even that. Truth: a mirror that by itself sees nothing, and in which each person looks at himself, as he believes he is, as he imagines himself to be.
Well, then, she had a horror of that mirror where the image of her own soul, stripped of every necessary pretense, must also necessarily appear to her deprived of every glimmer of reason.
Many times when she couldn’t sleep, and while her husband and maestro was sleeping peacefully beside her, she would be suddenly attacked in the silence by a strange, unexpected terror that cut her breathing short and made her heart pound! What was very clear in the context of her daily existence would be rent in a second, allowing her to glimpse a very different reality, deprived of sense and purpose, when suspended in the night and in the emptiness of her soul. It was a horrible reality in its impassive and mysterious rawness in which all the ordinary fictitious connections of feelings and images separated and disintegrated.
Right at that terrible moment she would feel she was dying. She would feel all the horror of death and with a supreme effort would try to reestablish the ordinary awareness of things, to reconnect ideas, to feel alive again. But she no longer had faith in that ordinary awareness,in those reconnected ideas, in that usual feeling of life, since she now knew they were illusions to enable one to live, and that underneath there was something else that cannot be seen except at the expense of dying or going insane.
For many days everything seemed different; nothing stimulated her desire anymore. In fact, nothing in life seemed desirable anymore. Time stood before her empty, gloomy, and somber, and everything in it, as though dumbfounded, waited for decay and death.
Often, as she meditated, she would arbitrarily fix her gaze on an object and closely observe it in detail, as though that object were of particular interest to her. At first her observation was merely mechanical: her physical eyes stared and concentrated on that object alone, as if to ward off every distraction and to help her mental eye in the meditation. But gradually that object would begin to take over. It would begin to live by itself, as though suddenly becoming conscious of all the details she had discovered, and it would detach itself from all connection with her and with things around it.
For fear of being besieged again by that different, horrible reality that lived beyond ordinary sight, almost outside the pattern of human reason, perhaps without any suspicion of human self-deception or with a condescending sympathy for it, she would immediately avert her gaze, but without being able to focus on any other object. She felt the horror of the sight. It seemed to her that her eyes could pierce everything. She closed them and anxiously searched her heart for any kind of help in reassembling the shattered fiction. However, in that unfamiliar confusion her heart withered. Nothing like the machine Zio Ippolito spoke of! She was unable to draw any idea from that deep dark feeling: she didn’t know how to reflect, or rather, she had never allowed herself to do so.
As a child she had witnessed painful scenes between her father and her mother, who had been a saintly woman entirely devoted to religious practices. She remembered her mother’s look as she pressed her rosary to her heart when her husband ridiculed her for her faith in God and for her lengthy prayers. She remembered the spasmodic contortionof her mother’s face, almost as if by shutting her eyes she could shut out her husband’s blasphemies. Poor Mamma! And with what effort and tears she would then stretch out her arms to her little girl and draw her to her breast and stop her ears. Then just as soon as her father’s back was turned, her mother would have her kneel with hands joined and repeat a prayer to God that He might pardon that man whose
Then was that truth? No, not even that. Truth: a mirror that by itself sees nothing, and in which each person looks at himself, as he believes he is, as he imagines himself to be.
Well, then, she had a horror of that mirror where the image of her own soul, stripped of every necessary pretense, must also necessarily appear to her deprived of every glimmer of reason.
Many times when she couldn’t sleep, and while her husband and maestro was sleeping peacefully beside her, she would be suddenly attacked in the silence by a strange, unexpected terror that cut her breathing short and made her heart pound! What was very clear in the context of her daily existence would be rent in a second, allowing her to glimpse a very different reality, deprived of sense and purpose, when suspended in the night and in the emptiness of her soul. It was a horrible reality in its impassive and mysterious rawness in which all the ordinary fictitious connections of feelings and images separated and disintegrated.
Right at that terrible moment she would feel she was dying. She would feel all the horror of death and with a supreme effort would try to reestablish the ordinary awareness of things, to reconnect ideas, to feel alive again. But she no longer had faith in that ordinary awareness,in those reconnected ideas, in that usual feeling of life, since she now knew they were illusions to enable one to live, and that underneath there was something else that cannot be seen except at the expense of dying or going insane.
For many days everything seemed different; nothing stimulated her desire anymore. In fact, nothing in life seemed desirable anymore. Time stood before her empty, gloomy, and somber, and everything in it, as though dumbfounded, waited for decay and death.
Often, as she meditated, she would arbitrarily fix her gaze on an object and closely observe it in detail, as though that object were of particular interest to her. At first her observation was merely mechanical: her physical eyes stared and concentrated on that object alone, as if to ward off every distraction and to help her mental eye in the meditation. But gradually that object would begin to take over. It would begin to live by itself, as though suddenly becoming conscious of all the details she had discovered, and it would detach itself from all connection with her and with things around it.
For fear of being besieged again by that different, horrible reality that lived beyond ordinary sight, almost outside the pattern of human reason, perhaps without any suspicion of human self-deception or with a condescending sympathy for it, she would immediately avert her gaze, but without being able to focus on any other object. She felt the horror of the sight. It seemed to her that her eyes could pierce everything. She closed them and anxiously searched her heart for any kind of help in reassembling the shattered fiction. However, in that unfamiliar confusion her heart withered. Nothing like the machine Zio Ippolito spoke of! She was unable to draw any idea from that deep dark feeling: she didn’t know how to reflect, or rather, she had never allowed herself to do so.
As a child she had witnessed painful scenes between her father and her mother, who had been a saintly woman entirely devoted to religious practices. She remembered her mother’s look as she pressed her rosary to her heart when her husband ridiculed her for her faith in God and for her lengthy prayers. She remembered the spasmodic contortionof her mother’s face, almost as if by shutting her eyes she could shut out her husband’s blasphemies. Poor Mamma! And with what effort and tears she would then stretch out her arms to her little girl and draw her to her breast and stop her ears. Then just as soon as her father’s back was turned, her mother would have her kneel with hands joined and repeat a prayer to God that He might pardon that man whose
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