Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu Read Online Free PDF Page B

and glittering. When you have stared at her until she chills you, the human proportions of your world are reasserted suddenly. Suddenly the man crosses the orchard to the seawall. Helen walks with a lighted candle across the grass to tend the goat. Abstract from the balcony Bach begins to play—absorbed in his science of unknown relations, and only hurting us all because he implies experience he cannot state. And because paint and words are useless to fill the gap you lean forward and blow out the lamp, and sit listening, smelling the dense pure odor of the wick, and watching the silver rings play on the ceiling. And so to bed, two enviable subjects of the Wheel.
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    Yesterday we awoke to find an Aegean brigantine anchored in the bay. She wore the name of Saint Barbara and two lovely big Aegean eyes painted on herprow with the legend(“God the Just”). The reflected eyes started up at her from the lucent waters of the lagoon. Her crew ate melons and spoke barbarically—sounding like Cretans. But the whole Aegean was written in her lines, the great rounded poop, and her stylish rigging. She had strayed out of the world of dazzling white windmills and grey, uncultured rock; out of the bareness and dazzle of the blinding Aegean into our seventeenth-century Venetian richness. She had strayed from the world of Platonic forms into the world of Decoration.
    Even her crew had a baked, dazed, sardonic look, and sought no contact with my chattering, friendly islanders. The brig put out at midday and headed northward to the Forty Saints in a crumple of red canvas. Like a weary dancer to the Forty Saints and the Albanian peaks, to mirror herself in some deserted and glassy bay like a mad butterfly. We could not bear to see her go.
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    My material is rapidly getting out of control once more. Theodore has been to stay for a few days. Characteristic of his shy heart he sends us presents. For N. a box of Turkish delight with pistachio nuts in it; for me a flute made of brass, with the word(“Loneliness”) engraved upon it. It is impossible to get a note out of it so I have asked the peasants to find me the shepherd boy to teach me.
    Theodore has recorded the latest miracle of St. Spiridion with sardonic humor. An old man from a country village appeared at the x-ray laboratory with what was diagnosed as an incurable cancer of the stomach; medicine having washed its hands of him, the old man and his family made a Mass petition to the Saint. Within three weeks he reappeared before the doctors. The cancer had been reabsorbed. Theodore is professionally downcast, but secretly elated to find that the Saint has lost none of his art. It gives him the opportunity for a long disquisition upon natural resistance. It appears that the peasants can stand almost any physical injury which can be seen; but that a common cold may carry off a patient from sheer depression and terror. He gives an instance of a peasant who had a fight with his brother and whose head was literally cloven with an axe. Tying the two pieces of his skull together with a handkerchief the wounded man walked three miles into town to visit a doctor. He is still alive, though feebleminded.
    Zarian has contributed a wonderful piece of natural observation for our notebooks. He observed last Tuesday that the four clock faces of the Saint’s church all registered different times of day. Intrigued, he asked permission to examine the phenomenon, scenting an ecclesiastical mystery. But it turns out that the clock hands are made of the flimsiest material and that the pressure of the wind upon the clock.… Therefore when the north wind blows the northern clock-faceis slowed up considerably, while when the south wind takes up its tale the southern clock face shows a loss of time.
    Not that time itself is anything more than a word here. Peasant measurement of time and distance is done by cigarettes. Ask a peasant how far a village is and he will reply, nine times out of ten, that