Folio b68d104b
Italiano
The hand trembles. Eppure scrive.
Et contra, si punctum D contingit sectionem Conicam transeuntem per puncta B, C, A, & ubi rectæ BM — here the line touches the curve at three points and the eye is asked to hold them all at once, though the hand can only trace one at a time.
Illustrations of the action of Natural Selection — here the page is filled with tiny variations, each one a dot that must be seen as part of a curve that no single hand could draw in a lifetime; the curve is not drawn, only inferred through the accumulation of points.
Tomorrow, perhaps, the canal again — the water holds the reflection of the sky, but the reflection is never the sky; it is the sky seen through the medium of the canal’s slow movement, a third thing that is neither sky nor water but the act of seeing both at once.
The third thing they are about together is the act of seeing across difference: the curve that holds three points yet bends between them; the selection that gathers singular variations into a form still invisible to the eye; the reflection that is not the object but the medium through which object and image become simultaneous. The tremor in the hand writes what the mind cannot hold entire, and the page becomes the place where these acts of seeing are caught before they slip away.
English
The hand trembles. And yet it writes.
Conversely, if point D touches the conic section passing through points B, C, A, and where the lines BM — here the line touches the curve at three points and the eye is asked to hold them all at once, though the hand can only trace one at a time.
Illustrations of the action of Natural Selection — here the page is filled with tiny variations, each one a dot that must be seen as part of a curve that no single hand could draw in a lifetime; the curve is not drawn, only inferred through the accumulation of points.
Tomorrow, perhaps, the canal again — the water holds the reflection of the sky, but the reflection is never the sky; it is the sky seen through the medium of the canal’s slow movement, a third thing that is neither sky nor water but the act of seeing both at once.
The third thing they are about together is the act of seeing across difference: the curve that holds three points yet bends between them; the selection that gathers singular variations into a form still invisible to the eye; the reflection that is not the object but the medium through which object and image become simultaneous. The tremor in the hand writes what the mind cannot hold entire, and the page becomes the place where these acts of seeing are caught before they slip away.
