Twilight in Italy | Page 9

fingers were plucking
spontaneously at the strands of wool drawn down from it. And hanging
near her feet, spinning round upon a black thread, spinning busily, like
a thing in a gay wind, was her shuttle, her bobbin wound fat with the
coarse, blackish worsted she was making.

All the time, like motion without thought, her fingers teased out the
fleece, drawing it down to a fairly uniform thickness: brown, old,
natural fingers that worked as in a sleep, the thumb having a long grey
nail; and from moment to moment there was a quick, downward rub,
between thumb and forefinger, of the thread that hung in front of her
apron, the heavy bobbin spun more briskly, and she felt again at the
fleece as she drew it down, and she gave a twist to the thread that
issued, and the bobbin spun swiftly.
Her eyes were clear as the sky, blue, empyrean, transcendent. They
were dear, but they had no looking in them. Her face was like a
sun-worn stone.
'You are spinning,' I said to her.
Her eyes glanced over me, making no effort of attention.
'Yes,' she said.
She saw merely a man's figure, a stranger standing near. I was a bit of
the outside, negligible. She remained as she was, clear and sustained
like an old stone upon the hillside. She stood short and sturdy, looking
for the most part straight in front, unseeing, but glancing from time to
time, with a little, unconscious attention, at the thread. She was slightly
more animated than the sunshine and the stone and the motionless
caper-bush above her. Still her fingers went along the strand of fleece
near her breast.
'That is an old way of spinning,' I said.
'What?'
She looked up at me with eyes clear and transcendent as the heavens.
But she was slightly roused. There was the slight motion of the eagle in
her turning to look at me, a faint gleam of rapt light in her eyes. It was
my unaccustomed Italian.
'That is an old way of spinning,' I repeated.

'Yes--an old way,' she repeated, as if to say the words so that they
should be natural to her. And I became to her merely a transient
circumstance, a man, part of the surroundings. We divided the gift of
speech, that was all.
She glanced at me again, with her wonderful, unchanging eyes, that
were like the visible heavens, unthinking, or like two flowers that are
open in pure clear unconsciousness. To her I was a piece of the
environment. That was all. Her world was clear and absolute, without
consciousness of self. She was not self-conscious, because she was not
aware that there was anything in the universe except her universe. In
her universe I was a stranger, a foreign signore. That I had a world of
my own, other than her own, was not conceived by her. She did not
care.
So we conceive the stars. We are told that they are other worlds. But
the stars are the clustered and single gleaming lights in the night-sky of
our world. When I come home at night, there are the stars. When I
cease to exist as the microcosm, when I begin to think of the cosmos,
then the stars are other worlds. Then the macrocosm absorbs me. But
the macrocosm is not me. It is something which I, the microcosm, am
not.
So that there is something which is unknown to me and which
nevertheless exists. I am finite, and my understanding has limits. The
universe is bigger than I shall ever see, in mind or spirit. There is that
which is not me.
If I say 'The planet Mars is inhabited,' I do not know what I mean by
'inhabited', with reference to the planet Mars. I can only mean that that
world is not my world. I can only know there is that which is not me. I
am the microcosm, but the macrocosm is that also which I am not.
The old woman on the terrace in the sun did not know this. She was
herself the core and centre to the world, the sun, and the single
firmament. She knew that I was an inhabitant of lands which she had
never seen. But what of that! There were parts of her own body which
she had never seen, which physiologically she could never see. They

were none the less her own because she had never seen them. The lands
she had not seen were corporate parts of her own living body, the
knowledge she had not attained was only the hidden knowledge of her
own self. She was the substance of the knowledge, whether she had the
knowledge in her mind or not. There was nothing which was not
herself,