The Mathematicians of The Forest

a Montevideo, donde "la Tierra se confunde con el Cielo"

 

Morris West (1916 - 1999) : "The Second Victory"

 

When Sepp Kunzli had left, Hanlon changed into ski clothes and walked out alone to look at the town. His first day in Bad Quellenberg was nearly over and he needed time and privacy to ponder the experience.

The snow was still falling heavily, filling the air like blown feathers, softening the harsh contours, icing the bleak trees, coating the town from road to rooftop, deadening the footballs of the homing burghers. The mountains were hidden by a mist that swirled in from the southern defiles and drooped in ragged streamers over the pines. Yellow lights pricked out round the amphitheatre of buildings, and already the dusk was darkening into night.

From the entrance to the Sonnblick, the road wound downwards through buildings of diminishing importance, towards the centre of the old town, where the waterfall ran under the roadway, a silent ice-bound torrent, writhing fantastically from the steep crags to the valley floor.

When Hanlon moved out from the lighted doorway, the cold hit him like a knife and he twitched the hood of his parka up over his head and walked briskly down the slope. Behind him he heard the frosty tinkle of bells and he stepped aside to watch the passing of a peasant sleigh piled high with firewood and driven by an old man with Bismarck whiskers and a high green hat. The horse stepped awkwardly on its high-toed shoes and its breath made little cloud puffs among the fluttering snowflakes. Hanlon followed the silver music of the harness down the road.

The first buildings he passed were high and dark, their windows were shuttered and their balconies covered with board frames to protect them from the snow. Their doors were locked and the snow was piled high on the deserted steps.

These were the big hotels, pride of the town, source of its boom-time revenue. Now they were white elephants, eating their heads off, the interest piling up on their mortgages, the snow ruining the roof covers, the water freezing the pipes, the dank cold of winter seeping through their corridors.

'This', thought Hanlon moodily, 'is the way towns die, and empires too. Not by the sporadic cataclysms - war, earthquake, fire and flood - but by the slow recession of life from the members towards the small pumping heart, whose ventricles are the market, the shops, the beerhouse, the church. After a while the heart stops too, because when the members are dead the body is inert and useless, and life is a fruitless repetition of pulse beats - lost energy, motion that leads nowhere!'

Then he remembered that this was the purpose of his own coming: to jolt new life into the fading heart, to set the blood moving outwards again to the cold extremities, to give them warmth and articulation and a new direction. Instead he had wasted a whole day on a cynical display of power, as if one frightened a dying man back to life, instead of coaxing him slowly to desire it first, then fight for it.

Morris West "The Second Victory" (excerpt)

Published by Harper Collins, 1977

. . .

 

. . .

 

         -  Heed daughter . . . stars talk . . .

                  Can you hear it ?

Shakespeare : "Sonnet CVII"

 

Not mine own fears nor the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come

Can yet the lease of my true love control,

Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.

The mortal moon hath her eclipsed endured,

And the sad augurs mock their own presage;

Incertainties now crown themselves assured,

And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

Now with the drops of this most balmy time

My love looks fresh, and Death to me suscribes,

Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,

While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes;

    And thou in this shalt find thy monument

    When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.

.

 

I am as constant as the northern star

Of whose true-fixed and resting quality

There is no fellow in the firmament

The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks

They are all fire and every one doth shine

But there's but one in all doth hold his place

So in the world

                                               Shakespeare