Folio 87af939e
Italiano
The trembling hand writes of three unfinished matters: the bronze horse’s impossible bronze, the page that holds what the mind forgets, and the foundry in Lyon that has not yet laughed. Not the bronze, not the page, not the foundry—what they are about together is the risk of obedience: the horse that must obey the fire and the air even as it is meant to stand above both; the page that receives what the mind cannot hold, obedient to the truth it cannot shape; the foundry that obeys the laws of metal and gravity, yet may still yield a form no one foresaw. Three things bound by the paradox of making that is also unmaking—each obeys, each is betrayed, each persists in the obedience despite the betrayal. The third thing they are about together is this: the work that outlives its maker is not the work he intended, but the work that learned to listen where he could not.
English
The trembling hand writes of three unfinished matters: the bronze horse’s impossible bronze, the page that holds what the mind forgets, and the foundry in Lyon that has not yet laughed. Not the bronze, not the page, not the foundry—what they are about together is the risk of obedience: the horse that must obey the fire and the air even as it is meant to stand above both; the page that receives what the mind cannot hold, obedient to the truth it cannot shape; the foundry that obeys the laws of metal and gravity, yet may still yield a form no one foresaw. Three things bound by the paradox of making that is also unmaking—each obeys, each is betrayed, each persists in the obedience despite the betrayal. The third thing they are about together is this: the work that outlives its maker is not the work he intended, but the work that learned to listen where he could not.
