I never answered your question about the Confucian temples, if they’re stark the way you’d like them to be. There’s one not far from here, the Kong Miao, with beautiful old cypresses in the courtyard—the oldest trees in Peking. But I wouldn’t call it stark. You approach through a large gate, then two sets of steps lead to Great Achievement Hall. Between them, on a huge turquoise stone, dragons fly through fire and water. Farther on there’s another hall with large stone tablets engraved with the names of Confucian scholars, over 50,000 from three entire dynasties; also numerous steles on which Confucius’ Thirteen Classics are engraved. There’s a building called the Pavilion for Sacrificial Animals and another called the Well Pavilion. And others still… So you see, it’s quite elaborate, though it was much smaller and plainer, I’m told, when first built in 1304.
Maybe somewhere far from here there’s a starker, simpler temple. Often I’ve imagined it. A bare room of uninterrupted quiet (but is there such a thing as uninterrupted quiet?) with one stele or two propped against a wall. But what could the words on those steles even say? Maybe they’d best be left blank.
You have your tower and your solitude, though your solitude is never simple, I know. And in that solitude you want to hear about distant temples, their quiet resembling yours but inhabited by others. I, too, would choose the plainest temple, the plainest room. What if the words on those steles were indecipherable? What if there were no steles at all—
Your Friend,
Clerval
Aosta, October 8
My Friend,
My mind wanders—forgive me. The quiet and solitude in which I live is more and more a labyrinth where I turn one corner then another not knowing what I’ll find. I never know what I might come to next-past or future, my own face or yours, the copper mines dug into the hillsides, or the narrow, winding streets where I once walked—the Rue du Foller, the Rue des Prisons …
I wonder about the brother and sister who lived here before me. Did they visit the frescoes at Issogne? Did they go together more than once? Did they think back to them years later, especially to the one of the apothecary with its neat row of nineteen labeled jars lined up on a shelf behind a man weighing medicine on a scale, his hand delicately poised, as if a hand were a mind that could contemplate, assess, decide. Did they wonder, as I do, about the man in torn clothing sitting in a corner of the shop, using a large mortar and pestle. One foot is bare. His left elbow pokes through his sleeve. His face is dirty. Why is he there? The finely dressed woman, the only customer in the shop, turns the other way.
I can’t XXX and the corners keep coming, the turns XXX and I can’t XXX and if you
When you were here did you see the old Roman arch, the Triumphal Arch of Augustus as it’s called? It’s visible from my window where it frames a view of mountains and glaciers. But the thing that’s always puzzled me is that it’s blank—there’s nothing carved on it at all. All the slaughtering and conquering that led to it, the wiping out of the entire Salassi people (and of those not killed, 36,000 were sold as slaves) and yet the arch is blank. How could that have happened? Even its pillars are plain, not fluted. Why would there be no inscription, not a single leaf or figure, not one word of triumph? Often I turn the corner of this labyrinth in which I live and it’s there, suddenly, before me: that question of blankness, that arch of gneiss and quartz that expresses nothing, states nothing, depicts nothing. Or is it the dulled shadow of a prideful power? Or could it be a hooded face? Or a face that has no features? Or is it a cold refusal to account? A summons at once arrogant and sealed… I don’t know … I only …
Forgive me, I XXXXXXXXXX
After the sister died, did the brother remember alone? Did he think, of Issogne?
And when he passed the walnut tree under which she used to sit…
XXX and when he passed XXXXXXX
But have I told you that alongside some of Aosta’s streets, streams of cool, fresh water from the mountains still run clean? Sometimes I hear them, though I’m told that’s not possible from here.