City by Alessandro Baricco Page B

order?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œGood. How do you get out of here?”
    â€œGo downstairs and follow the arrows.”
    â€œThe arrows.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œOK.”
    â€œSee you.”
    â€œSee you.”
    Gould and the professor remained in the classroom.
    â€œThat’s my new governess,” said Gould. “Her name is Shatzy Shell.”
    â€œCute,” observed the professor, who, to stick to the facts, was called Martens. Then he resumed the lecture, which, to stick to the facts, was his Lecture No. 14.
    And in effect this appears to be the heart of that singular experience, although obscure and for the most part impenetrable, Prof. Martens asserted in Lecture No. 14. Take the example of a passer-by who, methodically synchronizing his action to a prior plan, determined that morning, sets off with a precise goal, taking a well-defined and unambiguous route along a city street. And suppose that he suddenly happens to come upon the negligible presence, on the pavement, of a black spike heel, unforeseen and, at the same time, unforeseeable.
    And suppose he stands there as if bewitched.
    He alone—pay attention—and not the thousand other human beings who, in an analogous situation of mind and body, also saw the black spike heel but carefully and automatically relegated it to the useful marginal area of peculiar objects essentially not suitable for penetrating the system of attention, in accordance with the pragmatic setting of the aforementioned system. While our man, instead, having been suddenly subjected to a blinding epiphany, stops walking, spiritually and otherwise, because he has been irremediably taken out of himself by an image that resounds like an ineluctable call, a song that seemingly echoes into infinity.
    It’s strange, Prof. Martens asserted in Lecture No. 14.
    When, in the swarm of material that perception is charged with handing over from experience to us, one detail, and only that one, slips out of the magma, and, evading all checkpoints, actually
strikes
the surface of our automatic non-attention. Generally there is no reason for such instants to occur, and yet they do, suddenly kindling in us an unusual emotion. They are like a promise. Like the gleam of a promise.
    They promise worlds.
    One might say—Prof. Martens asserted in Lecture No. 14—that certain epiphanies consisting of objects that have escaped the equalizing insignificance of the real are tiny peepholes through which we are allowed to intuit—perhaps reach—the fullness of worlds. Worlds. In the meaninglessness of a spike heel lost on the street light percolates, the light of woman, of a world—Prof. Martens asserted in Lecture No. 14—so that one must ask oneself, in the end, if just that / perhaps that is the single portal to the authenticity of worlds there is in no woman all the woman that there is in a spike heel lost on the street / right there, within reach of your hand something that resembles / something that is the kernel of the vast collective experience and history sheltered under the name of woman / we could say its iridescent truth / more precisely, that which in the real world corresponds to what on our perceptual horizon occurs as the emotion and sensation catalogued under the linguistic expression
woman
there is in no woman all the woman that there is in a spike heel lost on the street: and if this is true, authenticity must be a subterranean metropolis, discernible in the gleam of tiny peepholes announcing it, glowing objects cut into the armored surface of the real, blazes that are annunciation and shortcut, beacon and portal, angels—Prof. Martens asserted in his Lecture No. 14. Adding: don’t even mention to me Proust’s madeleine.
Settled
there, in that obscenely homey, bourgeois, tearoom image / the burn of true peepholes is neutralized, they are reduced to phenomena, insignificant in themselves, of involuntary and—who knows why,