small core of cottony crumb. He did the same with the other quarter and pushed the husks off to one side, exposing the ridge at the edge of the plate in which olive oil had collected. He swabbed the chunks of bread until they turned a greenish-yellow.
Breakfast in the Spanish style, he thought. And who was it, the curly-haired golfer, who’d been known, decades ago, to eat bread and a shallow bowl of oil before each round? His father had told him about him, presumably as an example of Spartan values. But the name didn’t come back.
He turned to the second chunk, warily eyeing the desk across from him, overwhelmed, for months now, by legal pads with most of the sheets torn out; xeroxed journal articles, some pristine for not having been read, others bearing the underlines of successive readings, such that virtually the entire paper was lined, restoring its balance; loose papers and index cards carrying unassimilated notes; books, open (Collingwood, Bentley) and closed (Barnes, Burnyeat), stacked and scattered, concerning several projects; the disintegrating letters and journals on paper of varying constitution and age; and the little hand-drawn maps, water-stained and mottled in every shade of orange and yellow and brown.
These materials spilled onto the floor, reducing by half the walkable area of an apartment already compromised by scattered clothing. At the very center of this mass was a laptop, with a cursor blinking on the last line of a document, the one that would make sense, or a kind of it, anyway, of all the ones surrounding it.
Obscuring the keyboard were his notes from last night, the flashes he’d had of the monk, just before he’d found the wordless woman. There were still a few hours till he had to brief Penerin. His real work, the next part of it, was glaring at him: charting the axes of Darasa’s being, if not Larent’s, or Renna’s, or his own. Although if he could find his way to accounting for the men peopling his histories—and they were all men—they might well end up accounting for him, given his ancestry. He was, after all, only the latest branch of the tree. He swallowed the last of the bread and pushed on toward the center.
■ ■ ■
Squinting into that bright stretch of rock, his own reflection obscuring the fine scrawl covering the wall’s mirror-black surface, the mendicant Darasa, poet, chronicler, exegete, and priest, would have wished for powers of vision greater than men are granted as he searched it for sense.
Whatever he could make out he transcribed into a book of palm leaves. The uncommonly curly script, a thousand years old and part of a language caught between Pali and Sinhala, had been molded by these leaves. Where straighter lines would have separated the plant fibers, rounded ones, running across rather than between them, did not. The writing of Darasa’s day, less rounded but distinctly curvy, answered in its own way to the same constraints.
The graffiti covering that wall at Sigiriya was only partly intelligible to him, first, because his grasp of the continuum running from ancient Pali to seventeenth-century Sinhala, his own tongue, was strongest at its termini and progressively less certain toward its midpoint; and second, because the inscriptions were multiply superimposed, sometimes in seven or eight layers.
They’d accreted over the twelve centuries since the island had been ruled from here and not Anuradhapura, the ancient capital farther north, or, as now—1664—Kandy, to the south. At the time each inscription was made, it would have appeared more distinctly than the ones overwritten, the marks sharper, more pronounced. But little had been inscribed here since the monks re-founded the monastery two hundred years ago, though at the base of the rock this time, and not on the palace grounds themselves, which had served that purpose as recently as 1100. The monks’ maintenance, high atop the rock, was thought too costly by recent kings, so the
Breakfast in the Spanish style, he thought. And who was it, the curly-haired golfer, who’d been known, decades ago, to eat bread and a shallow bowl of oil before each round? His father had told him about him, presumably as an example of Spartan values. But the name didn’t come back.
He turned to the second chunk, warily eyeing the desk across from him, overwhelmed, for months now, by legal pads with most of the sheets torn out; xeroxed journal articles, some pristine for not having been read, others bearing the underlines of successive readings, such that virtually the entire paper was lined, restoring its balance; loose papers and index cards carrying unassimilated notes; books, open (Collingwood, Bentley) and closed (Barnes, Burnyeat), stacked and scattered, concerning several projects; the disintegrating letters and journals on paper of varying constitution and age; and the little hand-drawn maps, water-stained and mottled in every shade of orange and yellow and brown.
These materials spilled onto the floor, reducing by half the walkable area of an apartment already compromised by scattered clothing. At the very center of this mass was a laptop, with a cursor blinking on the last line of a document, the one that would make sense, or a kind of it, anyway, of all the ones surrounding it.
Obscuring the keyboard were his notes from last night, the flashes he’d had of the monk, just before he’d found the wordless woman. There were still a few hours till he had to brief Penerin. His real work, the next part of it, was glaring at him: charting the axes of Darasa’s being, if not Larent’s, or Renna’s, or his own. Although if he could find his way to accounting for the men peopling his histories—and they were all men—they might well end up accounting for him, given his ancestry. He was, after all, only the latest branch of the tree. He swallowed the last of the bread and pushed on toward the center.
■ ■ ■
Squinting into that bright stretch of rock, his own reflection obscuring the fine scrawl covering the wall’s mirror-black surface, the mendicant Darasa, poet, chronicler, exegete, and priest, would have wished for powers of vision greater than men are granted as he searched it for sense.
Whatever he could make out he transcribed into a book of palm leaves. The uncommonly curly script, a thousand years old and part of a language caught between Pali and Sinhala, had been molded by these leaves. Where straighter lines would have separated the plant fibers, rounded ones, running across rather than between them, did not. The writing of Darasa’s day, less rounded but distinctly curvy, answered in its own way to the same constraints.
The graffiti covering that wall at Sigiriya was only partly intelligible to him, first, because his grasp of the continuum running from ancient Pali to seventeenth-century Sinhala, his own tongue, was strongest at its termini and progressively less certain toward its midpoint; and second, because the inscriptions were multiply superimposed, sometimes in seven or eight layers.
They’d accreted over the twelve centuries since the island had been ruled from here and not Anuradhapura, the ancient capital farther north, or, as now—1664—Kandy, to the south. At the time each inscription was made, it would have appeared more distinctly than the ones overwritten, the marks sharper, more pronounced. But little had been inscribed here since the monks re-founded the monastery two hundred years ago, though at the base of the rock this time, and not on the palace grounds themselves, which had served that purpose as recently as 1100. The monks’ maintenance, high atop the rock, was thought too costly by recent kings, so the
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