The Pacific and Other Stories Read Online Free Page B

you only quickly, as they would a post or a gate, saving their more intense concentration for one another. This, for someone of my age, constitutes the kind of dismissal for which, not inexplicably, one can actually be grateful. And for someone of my age it is a pleasure when older people look at you knowingly—for what you have seen, what you have done, for the wars you have lived through, the pains you feel, the energy you lack, and your bittersweet knowledge that you are not young anymore.
    So by the time I paid admission to the Accademia I was in a state of perfect balance, my youth fresh in feeling and memory, my age clearly in mind, my reconciliation of the years that had passed with the years that were to come much like the reconciliation in Venice of land and sea.
    The first thing you do in the Accademia is go upstairs, and this I did, rising into the same kind of rarefied world into which Rosanna provides entrance with her voice, and into which she had sent me to see what had happened when the paintings had been made young again, how it had been done, and how their colors, liberated from the sadness and fatigue of centuries, shone through.
    I AM NOT A WELL EDUCATED MAN except that I have educated myself, and, because I have educated myself, what I say will not stand up, for lack of recognized authority. This in turn leaves me free to say what I will, in the hope that, like those small forces that do not threaten empires and are thus not fully pursued, the things in which I believe can survive in some high and forgotten place until the power of empire subsides.
    And although I know that few will listen to or credit this, I think we are in a lost age, in which holiness and charity have been traded for the victory and penetration of knowledge, though all the knowledge in the world has not brought us any further than where we can go without it even in the outermost halls of grace. I believe that more is to be known and apprehendedfrom the beauty of a face than in delving, no matter how deep, simply into how things work, no matter how marvelous that may be. The greatest substance of the world is immaterial, the province of the heart, and its study cannot be forced or reasoned. Merely to touch upon the edge of things in parsing their mechanics is to forswear their fullness, for the entry to this fullness lies not in science but in art. I cannot prove this, for it cannot be proven, but I claim, assert, and have seen it.
    There in the Accademia, among so many magnificent paintings that their import was almost lost, was the girl who reminded me of my daughters when they were young. She was one of the two saints in Bellini’s
Madonna with Child Between Two Saints
, the one to the Madonna’s left. Sometimes in a simple sequence of notes a shaft is opened into precincts of pure and perfect light. Rosanna has this wonderful gift, but music is by nature sequential, and moves in time. In the painting, where I saw, among other things, the souls of my daughters in the face of a saint, the revelatory sequences coexisted: in the way the light fell; how their eyes were directed, focused, and drawn; in the position of their hands; the rendering of expression; the tint of flesh; depth of darkness; softness of air; and composition of the ineffable. More was to be found in that one painting, in the construction of faces and the action of light, than in all the ponderings of the world.
    Only when I had been there for God knows how long, and people had come and gone in untold numbers, silently pulling up and gliding away like fish in an aquarium, did I fall back almost in exhaustion, and come to my senses. That was when I realized that I had been hearing music, and that it was not imagined. Music is my business. I can remember it and hear it almost as vividly in recollection—and, just before sleep and in dreams,
more
vividly—than when it is real. So I thought at first that I was simply remembering a great singer singing a great