Selected Cronicas

EARTH’S SWEETNESS

I do not know if many people have made this discovery — but I know that I have. I also know that to discover land is a platitude which has long been divorced from what it expresses. But everyone should try at some time or other to rediscover the sensation that underlies the expression: to discover land.

I once had this experience in Italy while making a train journey. It need not be Italy. It could even happen in Jacarepaguá. But this was in Italy. The train was speeding along and, after a sleepless night in the company of a Swedish woman who spoke nothing but Swedish and a miserable cup of stale coffee smelling of railway stations, suddenly we were passing through countryside. The sweet Italian countryside. It was early spring, the month of March. Nor does it have to be spring. It only has to be — earth. And for that matter, we all have earth under our feet. Yet it was so strange to feel oneself living on top of a living thing. When feeling nervous, the French say they are sur le qui-vive. We are perpetually on top of what is living.

And to earth we shall return. Oh, why were we not allowed to discover for ourselves that we shall return to the earth? We were warned before being able to discover this for ourselves. It cost me considerable effort to discover that: to earth we shall return. The discovery caused me no sadness, it was exciting. Just thinking about it made me feel myself surrounded by the earth’s silence. By this silence which we foresee and seek out before time becomes a reality.

Somehow everything is made of earth. A precious substance. Its abundance does not make it any less strange to feel — for it is so very difficult to feel that everything is really made of earth. Such unity. And why not the soul as well? My soul is woven from the finest earth. And is the flower not made of earth?

And since everything is made of earth — what a wondrous, inexhaustible future we possess. An impersonal future which surpasses us. Just as the human race surpasses us.

Earth showed her bounty by separating us into persons — we have repaid her by being nothing other than earth. We are immortal. And I feel moved and committed.