Mr Palomar (Vintage Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

between the sown grasses and the wild ones, a relaxing of the barriers imposed by difference of birth, a tolerance resigned to deterioration. Some spontaneous grasses, in and of themselves, do not look at all maleficent or insidious. Why not admit them to the company of those that rightfully belong to the lawn, integrating them in the community of the cultivated plants? This is the road that leads to forgetting about the “English-style lawn” and falling back on the “rustic lawn”, left to its own devices. “Sooner or later we’ll have to make up our minds and accept it,” Mr Palomar thinks, but he feels it would be a betrayal of one’s code of honor. A chicory, a borage plant spring into his field of vision. He uproots them.
    To be sure, pulling up a weed here and there solves nothing. This is how it should be done – he thinks: take a square section of the lawn, one meter by one meter, and eliminate even the slightest presence of anything but clover, darnel, or dicondra. Then move on to another square. No, perhaps not: remain perhaps with a sample square. Count how many blades of grass there are, what species, how thick, how distributed. On the basis of this calculation you would arrive at a statistical knowledge of the lawn, which, once established . . .
    But counting the blades of grass is futile: you would never learn their number. A lawn does not have precise boundaries, there is a border where the grass stops growing but still a few scattered blades sprout farther on, then a thick green clod, then a sparser stretch: are they still part of the lawn, or not? Elsewhere the underbrush enters the lawn: you cannot tell what is lawn and what is bush. But even where there is no grass, you never know at what point you can stop counting: between one little plant and the next there is always a tiny sprouting leaf that barely emerges from the earth, its root a white wisp hardly perceptible; a moment ago it could have been overlooked but soon it will also have to be counted. Meanwhile two other shoots that just now seemed barely a shade yellowish have definitively withered and must be erased from the count. Then there are the fractions of blades of grass, cut in half, or shorn to the ground, or split along the nervation, the little leaves that have lost one lobe . . . The decimals, added up, do not make an integer, they remain a minute grassy devastation, in part still alive, in part already pulp, food for others plants, humus . . .
    The lawn is a collection of grasses – this is how the problem must be formulated – that includes a subcollection of cultivated grasses and a subcollection of spontaneous grasses known as weeds; an intersection of the two subcollections is formed by the grasses which have grown spontaneously but belong to the cultivated species and are therefore indistinguishable from them. The two subcollections, in their turn, include various species, each of which is a subcollection, or rather it is a collection that includes the subcollection of its own members, which are members also of the lawn and the subcollection of those alien to the lawn. The wind blows, seeds and pollens fly, the relations among the collections are disrupted . . .
    Palomar has already moved to another train of thought: is “the lawn” what we see or do we see one grass plus one grass plus one grass . . .? What we call “seeing the lawn” is only an effect of our coarse and slapdash senses; a collection exists only because it is formed of discrete elements. There is no point in counting them, the number does not matter; what matters is grasping in one glance the individual little plants, one by one, in their individualities and differences. And not only seeing them: thinking them. Instead of thinking “lawn”, to think of that stalk with two clover leaves, that lanceolate, slightly humped leaf, that delicate corymb . . .
    Palomar’s mind has wandered, he has stopped pulling up weeds; he no longer thinks