Folio a0843d84
Italiano
The hand trembles, the candle gutters, the canal outside holds its breath like a held thought.
In youth—acquire that which may requite you for the deprivations of old age— geometrical demonstration— la geometria è l’arte della mente che si corregge da sé—
and in old age the eye forgets its own sight, yet the canal remembers the weight of the stone dropped at noon three decades past; it holds the ripple as the mind holds the angle inscribed in the sand before the tide returns. All three are ledgers: the youth’s acquisition is a debt written in muscle and memory, the old man’s geometrical lines are credits drawn against oblivion, the canal’s water is the silent auditor that neither forgives nor forgets. The third thing they are about together is the ledger—the page between loss and inscription, where the soul, preparing, learns to read its own hand before the light fails.
English
The hand trembles, the candle gutters, the canal outside holds its breath like a held thought.
In youth—acquire that which may requite you for the deprivations of old age— geometrical demonstration— geometry is the art of the mind that corrects itself—
and in old age the eye forgets its own sight, yet the canal remembers the weight of the stone dropped at noon three decades past; it holds the ripple as the mind holds the angle inscribed in the sand before the tide returns. All three are ledgers: the youth’s acquisition is a debt written in muscle and memory, the old man’s geometrical lines are credits drawn against oblivion, the canal’s water is the silent auditor that neither forgives nor forgets. The third thing they are about together is the ledger—the page between loss and inscription, where the soul, preparing, learns to read its own hand before the light fails.
