Quello che rimane quando il rosso svanisce

The canal this morning held a color I have no name for — not the red of madder, not the orange of iron-earth, not the gold men mean when they say oro — something between, something that exists only in the leaving of it, the way a sound is most itself in the last moment before silence takes it. I reached for the chalk. The hand shook. By the time the chalk touched the page the color had become something else, something acceptable, something a painter might paint — and I put the chalk down, because to draw the acceptable thing would be to lie about the real one. La verità non aspetta la mano. Truth does not wait for the hand. This is the cruelty of light: it gives, and it takes, and what it takes it takes entirely, leaving only the memory of having seen, which is not the same as seeing, which is not the same as knowing, which is — I confess — not the same as anything I can finish saying.