Knowledge
of Angels
(Prologue)
| EnglishOpenAccess | Index | ||
|
Knowledge
of Angels |
commentary |
|
|
|
| Suppose you are
contemplating
an island. It is
not any island known to
you. You are looking
at it from a great height - you see fig orchards, vineyards, almond
orchards, and apricot orchards. There are little towns topping the
gentle rises on the ample plain, the houses with their pantiled rooftops
like so many tiny ploughed sloping fields clustered round the naves and
towers of churches. If you looked for rivers, you would see courses
of tumbled stones, with exhausted water lying in discrete pools - the
hallmark of a Mediterranean land watered by intermittent violent
torrents, and both parched and
fertile. You see the wooded cliffs of
the shore, the beaches of bright sand, the principal city, ringed by walls
and rising from its harbour. You see along the northern and western
shores the great mountains, the complex of ridges and green, well-watered
valleys, the woods and rocks, and the high pastures, and above the tree
line the towering summits, so tall that they keep their thick mantles of
snow all through the heats of summer. At this height your viewpoint is more like that of an angel than that of any islander. But after all, the position of a reader in a book is very like that occupied by angels in the world, when angels still had any credibility. Yours is, like theirs, a hovering, gravely attentive presence, observing everything, from whom nothing is concealed, for angels are very bright mirrors. Hearts and minds are as open as the landscape to their view, as to yours; like them you are in the fabled world invisible. The time of your contemplation is as mysterious as its place - it is a strange translation of the time known to the islanders, it is the time of angels, to whom everything is always present. You have only to open a book to find Hamlet eternally bracing himself to murder his uncle, when from Hamlet's point of view he has done the deed, and lost his life and been laid these many centuries beside Yorick, whom he knew. You are looking long ago - at a time before large ships, or tarmac roads, or any of the deep scars on the land made by more than muscle power; you are looking some time in the eternal present, in the long slow centuries of the deep past. You see now a party of young men, a line of donkeys, slowly and laboriously ascending a mountain path, while on the deep-drift clefts and buried ridges far above them another young man struggles, wrapped in the dark fleeces shepherds wear, descending towards the same destination. Their climb is present to your quiet observation, present to their struggling bodies as they painfully ascend. They will climb as often as you or anyone opens this book and reads; but the climb is to them irrevocable; each footfall as they make it vanishes into the past. |