Ciò che ritorna

The water in the mill-race today moved as it always moves — and yet I watched it an hour, perhaps more, the cold working into the bad hand, because something in the curl where fast meets slow reminded me of the vortex I drew in Milan, thirty years gone, when I believed I was approaching the law of all turning things. Credevo di essere vicino. I was not wrong, exactly — the law is there, I feel it still, the way a man feels a word he cannot speak — but I was nearer to the drawing than to the law, and the drawing was beautiful, and perhaps that was enough, perhaps that is always the question: whether the beautiful rendering of a thing one does not fully understand is a kind of knowing or a kind of forgetting dressed in ink. The mill-race does not care. It curls. It continues.