The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico Read Online Free PDF Page B

than the right, and life was there, calmedand measured out by the cricket who lived nearby, and that was the best night of all nights, liquid as the pulp of an apricot.
    In the time of this infinitesimal infinite, which is the space between my now and our then, I wave you goodbye and I whistle ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Guaglione.’ I’ve laid my pullover on the seat next to mine, the way I used to when we went to the cinema and I waited for you to come back with the peanuts.

‘The phrase that follows this is false:
the phrase that precedes this is true’
    Madras, 12 January 1985
    Dear Mr Tabucchi,
    Three years have gone by since we met at the Theosophical Society in Madras. I will admit that the place was hardly the most propitious in which to strike up an acquaintance. We barely had time for a brief conversation, you told me you were looking for someone and writing a little diary about India. You seemed to be very curious about onomastics; I remember you liking my name and asking my permission to use it, albeit disguised, in the book you were writing. I suspect that what interested you was not so much myself as two other things:my distant Portuguese origins and the fact that I knew the works of Fernando Pessoa. Perhaps our conversation was somewhat eccentric: in fact its departure point was two adverbs used frequently in the West ( practically and actually ), from which we attempted to arrive at the mental states which preside over such adverbs. All of which led us, with a certain logic, to talk about pragmatism and transcendence, shifting the conversation, perhaps inevitably, to the plane of our respective religious beliefs. I remember your professing yourself to be, it seemed to me with a little embarrassment, an agnostic, and when I asked you to imagine how you might one day be reincarnated, you answered that if ever this were to happen you would doubtless return as a lame chicken. At first I thought you were Irish, perhaps because the Irish, more than the English, have their own special way of approaching the question of religion. I must say in all honesty that you made me suspicious. Usually Europeans who come to India can be divided into two groups: those who believe they have discovered transcendence and thosewho profess the most radical secularism. My impression was that you were mocking both attitudes, and in the end I didn’t like that. We parted with a certain coldness. When you left I was sure your book, if you ever wrote it, would be one of those intolerable Western accounts which mix up folklore and misery in an incomprehensible India.
    I admit I was wrong. Reading your Indian Nocturne prompted a number of considerations which led me to write you this letter. First of all I would like to say that if the theosopher in Chapter Six is in part a portrayal of myself, then it is a clever and even amusing portrait, albeit characterised by a severity I don’t believe I deserve, but which I find plausible in the way you see me. But these are not, of course, the considerations that prompted me to write to you. Instead I would like to begin with a Hindu phrase which translated into your language goes more or less like this: The man who thinks he knows his (or his own?) life, in fact knows his (or his own?) death.
    I have no doubt that Indian Nocturne is about appearances, and hence about death. The whole book is aboutdeath, especially the parts where it talks about photography, about the image, about the impossibility of finding what has been lost: time, people, one’s own image, history (as understood by Western culture at least since Hegel, one of the most doltish philosophers, I think, that your culture has produced). But these parts of the book are also an initiation, of which some chapters form secret and mysterious steps. Every initiation is mysterious, there’s no need to invoke Hindu philosophy here because Western religions believe in this mystery too (the Gospel). Faith is