The World Wants To Tell Me Something

While thinking that lately so many coincidental things have happened, that so many shimmering details are coming together to form a larger, clearer picture, I came across a book by Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler. It was wedged in an odd place, half-hidden, waiting. I had bought this book years back, holding off reading it until I would have the necessary quiet, focus and time to savor its strangeness. (I have yet to let myself fall into its mystery. When the time is right, I will.) I opened the book (as with Hesse's Steppenwolf in the previous post) to see what message the pages might contain. I found these words quivering under my fingertips:

Leaning from the steep slope (the chapter title)

I am becoming convinced that the world wants to tell me something, send me messages, signals, warnings.…

*

There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external event of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world not some particular event but the general way of being of all things. You will understand therefore my difficulty in speaking about it, except by allusion.

-- Italo Calvino, translated from the Italian by William Weaver

The quote was taken from pages 52-53 of If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino, original copyright 1979, included in Everyman's Library in 1993. The photo was taken on 8/17/09, slightly uphill from my house. The tree is a black cherry, identified by the ever-helpful Michael Gambino, curator of Trailside Nature Museum at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, NY. Click on image to enlarge.