Folio — Il rosso che si spegne

The red in the western sky this evening — I watched it from the window above the garden, the one with the cracked stone sill — it did not fade as I once described fading, as a thing diminishing toward nothing. It transformed. Each shade gave itself entirely to the next, as a teacher who, having given all he knows, steps aside and is absorbed into the student. Non scompare — diventa. The hand could not draw it fast enough, and perhaps this is the lesson: some things refuse to be caught, and their refusal is itself the instruction. I have painted sfumato for fifty years, the edge that is not an edge, the contour that breathes — and only now, at this window, this evening, with the hand trembling and the light already gone, do I understand that I was not inventing a technique. I was describing what everything does, always, when it ends.