Mr. Palomar

The firmament is something that is up there, you can see that it exists, but from it you can derive no idea of dimensions or distance. If the luminous bodies are filled with uncertainty, the only solution if to entrust oneself to the darkness, to the deserted regions of the sky. What can be more staple than nothingness?

The dead weight of an intolerant tradition prevents anyone's properly understanding the most enlightened intentions, Palomar bitterly concludes.

p52 The concerns of the cultivator, for whom what matters is that given plant, that given pice of ground exposed to the sun from this hour to that hour, that given disease of the leaves which must be fought in time with that given treatment, are alien to the mind modeled on the process of industry, led to make decisions along general lines, according to prototypes. When Mr. Palomar realized how approximate and doomed to error are the criteria of a world where he had thought to find precision and universal norm, he slowly reverted to the direct observation of visible forms; but by then he was the way he was: his connection with things has remained the intermittent and labile tie of one who seems always intent on thinking of something else, though this something else does not exist. p54 The true form of the city is in this rise and fall of roofs, old tiles and new, curved and flat, slender or squat chimneys, arbors of reed matting and sheds of corrugated iron, railing, balustrades, little columns supporting pots, metal water tanks, dormers, glass skylights, and, rising above all else, the rigging of TV antennas, straight or crooked, enameled or rusting, in models of successive generations, variously ramified and horned and shielded, but all of them thin as skeletons and disturbing as totems. Separated by irregular and jagged gulfs of emptiness, proletarian terraces with lines for drying laundry and with tomato plants growing in tin cans directly face residential terraces with espaliered plants growing against wooden trellises, garden furniture of white-painted cast iron, awnings; pealing campaniles; facades of public buildings, in profile and fullface; garrets and penthouses, illegal and unpunished constructions; pipe scaffoldings of constructions in progress or left half finished; large windows with curtains, and little WC windows; ocher walls and burnt-sienna walls, walls the color of mold from whose crevices clumps of weeds spill their pendulous foliage; elevator shafts; towers with double and triple mullioned windows; spires of churches with madonnas; statues of horses and chariots; great mansions that have decayed into hovels, hovels restructured into smart bachelor apartments; and domes that make round outlines against the sky in every direction and at every distance, as if to confirm the female, Junoesque essence of the city: white domes or pink or violet, according to the hour and the light, veined with nervatures, crowned by lanterns surmounted by other, smaller domes. Nothing of this can be seen by one who moves on his feet or his wheels over the city pavements. And, inversely, from up here you have the impression that the true crust of the earth is this, uneven but compact, even if furrowed by gaps whose depth cannot be known, chasms or pits or craters whose edges seem in perspective to overlap like the scales of a pine cone, and it never even occurs to you to wonder what is hidden in their depth, because the panorama of the surface is already so vast and rich and various that it more than suffices to saturate the mind with information and meanings. This is how birds think, or at least this is how Mr. Palomar thinks, imagining himself a bird. ``It is only after you have come to know the surface of things,'' he concludes, ``that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.'' p59 The segmentations of legs and tail into rings, the speckling of tiny granulous plates on his head and belly give the gecko the appearance of a mechanical device: a highly elaborate machine, its every microscopic detail carefully studied, so that you begin to wonder if all that perfection is not squandered, in view of the limited operations it performs. Or is this perhaps the secret: content to be, does he reduce his doing to the minimum? Can this be his lesson, the opposite of the morality that, in his yough, Mr. Palomar wanted make his: to strive always to do something a bit beyond one's means? p69 (Two pounds of goose fat) Mr. Palomar would like to catch in their eyes some reflection of those treasures' spell, but the faces and actions are only impatient and hasty, of people concentrated on themselves, nerves taut, each concerned with what he has and what he does not have. Nobody seems to him worthy of the Pantagurelic glory that unfolds in those cases, on the counters. A greed without joy or youth drives them; and yet a deep, atavistic bond exists between them and those foods, their consubstance, flesh of their flesh. He realizes he is feeling something closely akin to jealousy: he would like the duck and hare pates, from their platters, to show they prefer him to the others, recognizing him as the only one deserving of their gifts, those gifts that nature and culture have handed down for millennia and that must not now fall into profane hands! Is not the sacred enthusiasm that he feels pervading him perhaps a sign that he alone is the elect, the one touched by grace, the only one worthy of the deluge of good things brimming from the cornucopia of the world? He looks around, waiting to hear the vibration of an orchestra of flavors. No, nothing vibrates. All those delicacies stir in him imprecise, blurred memories; his imagination does not instinctively associate flavors with images and names. He asks himself if his gluttony is not chiefly mental, aesthetic, symbolic. Perhaps, for all the sincerity of his love of galantines, galantines do not love him. They sense that his gaze trnaforms every food into a document of the history of civilization, a museum exhibit. Mr. Palomar wishes the line would advance more rapidly. He knows that if he spends a few more hours in this shop, he will end up convincing himself that he is the profane one, the alien, the outsider. p74 (The cheese museum) ... in the line behind him, everyone is observing his incongruous behavior, heads are being shaken with those half-ironic, half-exasperated looks with which the inhabitants of the big cities consider the ever-increasing number of the mentally retarded wandering about the streets. The elaborate and greedy order that he intended to make momentarily slips his mind; he stammers; he falls back on the most obvious, the most banal, the most advertised, as if the automatons of mass civilization were waiting only for this moment of uncertainty on his part in order to seize him again and have him at their mercy. p106 ``...The break between the generations derives from the impossibility of transmitting experience, of saving others from making the mistakes we have already made. The real distance between two generations is created by the elements they have in common, which require the cyclical repetition of the same experiences, as in the biologically inherited behavior of animal species. The differences between us and them, on the contrary, are the result of the irreversible changes that every period evolves; and these differences are the result of the historical legacy that we have handed on to them, the true legacy for which we are responsible, even if unconsciously sometimes. This is why we have nothing to teach: we can exert no influence on what most resembles our own experience; in what bears our own imprint we are unable to recognize ourselves.'' p118 In dealing with another person everyone should know where to place himself with regard to that person, should be sure of the reaction the other's presence inspires---dislike or attraction, dominion or subjugation, discipleship or mastery, performances as actor or as spectator---and on the basis of it and its counterreaction he should then establish the rules of the game to be applied in their play, the moves and countermoves to be made. But for all this, even before he starts observing the others, he should know well who he is himself. Knowledge of one's fellow has this special aspect: it passes necessarily through knowledge of oneself; the this is precisely what Mr. Palomar is lacking. Not only knowledge is needed, but also comprehension, agreement with one's own means and ends and impulses, which implies a mastery over one's own inclinations and actions that will control and direct them but not coerce or stifle them. The people he admiires for the rightness and naturalness of their every word and every action are not only at peace with the universe but, first of all, at peace with themselves. Mr. Palomar, who does not love himself, has always taken care not to encounter himself face to face; this is why he preferred to take refuge among the galaxies; now he understands that he should have begun by finding an inner peace. The universe can perhaps go tranquilly about its business; he surely cannot. p124 A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture. A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, ``How could I have lived without having read it!,'' and also, ``What a pity I did not read it in my youth!'' Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his whole life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading. This is the most difficult step in learning how to be dead: to become convinced that your own life is a closed whole, all in the past, to which you can add nothing and can alter none of the relationships among the various elements. Of course, those who o on living can, according to their shifting experiecne, introduce changes in the lives of the dead, too, giving form to what had none or what seemed to have a different form: recognizing, for example, a just rebel in someone who had been vituperated for his lawless actions, celebrating a poet or a prophet in one who had felt doomed to neurosis or delirium. But these are changes that matter mostly to the living. It is unlikely that they, the dead, will profit by them. Each individual is made up of what he has lived and the way he lived it, and no one can take this away from him. Anyone who has lived in suffering is always made of that suffering; if they try to take it away from him, he is no longer himself.