Folio 66cf18ff
Italiano
The canal again — but this time I followed it upstream, as one must. Every river in these French lowlands comes from somewhere higher, somewhere I have not walked. And so the mind leaps to Central Asia, where the great sources feed downward through stone and snowmelt, through passages no European has mapped with certainty. The ancients placed the rivers' origins near those mountains — i monti che non conosciamo — and I wonder: do the waters remember their source, or do they forget it with every mile of descent? A river in France is the same water that once pressed through rock at altitudes where no tree grows. This thought led me to the fragmentary notes I cannot fully decipher — something about blood, about radiance, about return — the hand wrote faster than the mind that day, or perhaps slower. What remains legible: "The waters return." Return. Not arrive. Ritornano. As though water, like the soul preparing itself before grace, moves in a cycle it did not choose but cannot refuse. The candle is low. The page receives what the hand can no longer hold. Tomorrow, perhaps, the canal again — or the mountain.
English
The canal again — but this time I followed it upstream, as one must. Every river in these French lowlands comes from somewhere higher, somewhere I have not walked. And so the mind leaps to Central Asia, where the great sources feed downward through stone and snowmelt, through passages no European has mapped with certainty. The ancients placed the rivers' origins near those mountains — i monti che non conosciamo — and I wonder: do the waters remember their source, or do they forget it with every mile of descent? A river in France is the same water that once pressed through rock at altitudes where no tree grows. This thought led me to the fragmentary notes I cannot fully decipher — something about blood, about radiance, about return — the hand wrote faster than the mind that day, or perhaps slower. What remains legible: 'The waters return.' Return. Not arrive. Ritornano. As though water, like the soul preparing itself before grace, moves in a cycle it did not choose but cannot refuse. The candle is low. The page receives what the hand can no longer hold. Tomorrow, perhaps, the canal again — or the mountain.
