Looking at Things
I’m sitting in the orange-tinged reading room, with its high ceilings and wooden floorboards
and what I can see from here is this:
a couple sitting on two easy chairs, he immobile and she drawing him and the sweeping staircase behind, only stopping sometimes to smudge some of her charcoal lines
and I think that this might say a lot about their relationship (the her drawing him, but also the blurring of lines)
a clock that looks like it could have been stolen from the brass skeleton of a train station roof, its hands showing eleven past three, and I wonder what the room will look like when the hands are in the exact same position again in twelve hours, and it strikes me that, quite possibly, no one has looked at this clock at eleven past three in the night, but many people have done so at eleven past three in the afternoon,
and I think that there might be a metaphor somewhere in this, but I’m not quite sure what it is yet
the stormy sky behind the window on my left, and a bird swooping through the grey, cutting it in two, and the roof of the building next to the library with a railing crowning its brickwalls, white tarpaulin blowing with the gusts of wind, and behind the roof the lonely spire of a church, and on top of the spire a cross, cutting the sky yet in half again,
and, superimposed over all of this, the rectangular glowing reflections of the lamps of the reading room
one of the windows of the building opposite that is neither dark nor really light, but I can see the back of a woman and I think she is working on something, and I wonder whether this is her home or her office or both, it’s Saturday, but the lines have blurred
my fingers moving across the keys and six silver rings of different shapes and sizes, keepsakes from journeys that have taken me further from and closer towards my selves, reminding me of the multitudes in me
and I think of the many, many things that I have seen and felt since I got here,
not the library, but the city,
and the many, many things that I am yet to see and feel, and I wish I could note them all down just as accurately as I’m doing right now, to give my mind a break from trying to desperately hold on to all of it
and I look at the two rings on my right hand, specifically, the newest additions to my silver keepsakes;
the one on my index finger, one flower intertwined with leaves, a symbolism I liked when I saw it on a blustery afternoon at a Covent Garden stall -
one flower, blooming
and then the one on my ring finger that surprised me on my doorstep last week after a journey across the ocean, picked as a gift to gently, perfectly remind me; a ring with flowers yet again, but this one with three flowers next to each other, mine a perfect copy of four others made to order, sitting on the fingers of beloved hearts -
it is good to bloom independently, but it is also good to share one’s soil with others
and I only noticed just now that the two rings together make a perfect metaphorical whole,
and I make a mental note to more often accurately write down what I see
because oftentimes, I suspect, it will lead me to see things that can’t necessarily be seen at all
and this, in turn, reminds me of the little prince
who said:
«on ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur,
l’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux»
and I look at the two rings on my right hand that make a perfect metaphorical whole, and at the grey sky outside and the lights from within imprinted on it,
and I think the little prince was very right
and feel almost like a little princess myself, what with all the flowers
in my life.
Flora Hausammann