chaotic and blind, are all fettered unconsciousness, struggling in their self-imposed chains as I feel myself in that moment to be.
We board the train and pass along the Serchio valley, among gentle green perspectives of hills and distant mountains, past melancholy Barga, swaying serenely over grassy plains and stopping sometimes at deserted stations that seem to stand in the middle of nowhere. There are weeds flowering on their platforms, and clumps of grass between the rails, and after a while we slowly pull away again. I feel that something new is disclosing itself, something to do with time. We are free: no one is expecting us. We look out of the windows. We listen to the tranquil hum of the engine. We watch the valley in the mild morning light.
*
Lucca stands in an unbroken circle of gigantic walls. They are forty or fifty feet high, dark, and so thick that over time they have become a land formation, a strange circular isthmus with lawns and trees and paths on the top. They were built in the sixteenth century to keep out the Tuscans, those gentle Chianti-quaffing folk, and now, in their retirement, with their neat paths and barbered lawns, they provide tourists with a circular bicycle ride and a view of the plains and mountains from their colossal shoulders. Outside them the city has spread its clutter, its traffic and car parks and residential suburbs, its strings of shops: within, in the old town, an atmosphere of unusual refinement prevails. Every infelicitous speck of modernity has been sieved out. When those walls were built, it was in ignoranceof what they would be called on over time to repel: Tuscans or car parks, it’s all the same to them. Of course, these beautiful islands of the past in their turbid oceans of modernity are to be found all over Europe, in England too. At the heart of every hideous human settlement we find an image of our predeceased ancestor, aestheticism. It is our lot to defend that image, lifeless as it may seem. But the forbidding walls of Lucca do a more thorough job of it than most.
The bicycle is the accepted means of transportation here: the motionless air rings with their shrilling bells. Resolute bluestockings fly by with a warning glissando ; professorial men in tweed jackets glide past, erect, with a ping! Groups of students and tourists pass along the old paved streets in weaving flocks, their many bells trilling and squawking as they go. For a while we walk, but we are birds without wings. We return to the city gates, where earlier we passed numerous bicycle shops without realising their significance. There we are given bicycles at a daily rate, in descending sizes like the furniture of the bear family that so preoccupied Goldilocks, whose tastes and proportions ruled their little owner to the degree that she could feel no sympathy with the world. I have never cared for the moral of that story, nor for Goldilocks either: but the bears in their shameless conservatism I like least of all. I do not want to be Mrs Bear, with her middle-sized possessions, her brown motherliness, her sturdy bear’s body that contrasts so with the blonde whimsicality of her intruder. I do not want to be the Bear family, pedalling sedately on their bicycles of descending sizes.
But it is too late: up we go, up to the ramparts, where a breeze rustles the great skirts of the trees and the laid-out paths and lawns, so strangely elevated, recede down their long, curving perspectives. It is four kilometres all the way round: on one side there is the plain with its dove-grey light, its pale geometry of roads and buildings and here and there the classical forms of Lucchese villas, sunk in their soft beds of trees; on the other there is the slowly revolving ancient town. We see its bell towers and palaces, its piazzas and churches, the Guinigi Tower with its mysterious forested top, all seeming to turn like a jewelled mechanical city pirouetting on a music box. We go faster and faster, flying along the
We board the train and pass along the Serchio valley, among gentle green perspectives of hills and distant mountains, past melancholy Barga, swaying serenely over grassy plains and stopping sometimes at deserted stations that seem to stand in the middle of nowhere. There are weeds flowering on their platforms, and clumps of grass between the rails, and after a while we slowly pull away again. I feel that something new is disclosing itself, something to do with time. We are free: no one is expecting us. We look out of the windows. We listen to the tranquil hum of the engine. We watch the valley in the mild morning light.
*
Lucca stands in an unbroken circle of gigantic walls. They are forty or fifty feet high, dark, and so thick that over time they have become a land formation, a strange circular isthmus with lawns and trees and paths on the top. They were built in the sixteenth century to keep out the Tuscans, those gentle Chianti-quaffing folk, and now, in their retirement, with their neat paths and barbered lawns, they provide tourists with a circular bicycle ride and a view of the plains and mountains from their colossal shoulders. Outside them the city has spread its clutter, its traffic and car parks and residential suburbs, its strings of shops: within, in the old town, an atmosphere of unusual refinement prevails. Every infelicitous speck of modernity has been sieved out. When those walls were built, it was in ignoranceof what they would be called on over time to repel: Tuscans or car parks, it’s all the same to them. Of course, these beautiful islands of the past in their turbid oceans of modernity are to be found all over Europe, in England too. At the heart of every hideous human settlement we find an image of our predeceased ancestor, aestheticism. It is our lot to defend that image, lifeless as it may seem. But the forbidding walls of Lucca do a more thorough job of it than most.
The bicycle is the accepted means of transportation here: the motionless air rings with their shrilling bells. Resolute bluestockings fly by with a warning glissando ; professorial men in tweed jackets glide past, erect, with a ping! Groups of students and tourists pass along the old paved streets in weaving flocks, their many bells trilling and squawking as they go. For a while we walk, but we are birds without wings. We return to the city gates, where earlier we passed numerous bicycle shops without realising their significance. There we are given bicycles at a daily rate, in descending sizes like the furniture of the bear family that so preoccupied Goldilocks, whose tastes and proportions ruled their little owner to the degree that she could feel no sympathy with the world. I have never cared for the moral of that story, nor for Goldilocks either: but the bears in their shameless conservatism I like least of all. I do not want to be Mrs Bear, with her middle-sized possessions, her brown motherliness, her sturdy bear’s body that contrasts so with the blonde whimsicality of her intruder. I do not want to be the Bear family, pedalling sedately on their bicycles of descending sizes.
But it is too late: up we go, up to the ramparts, where a breeze rustles the great skirts of the trees and the laid-out paths and lawns, so strangely elevated, recede down their long, curving perspectives. It is four kilometres all the way round: on one side there is the plain with its dove-grey light, its pale geometry of roads and buildings and here and there the classical forms of Lucchese villas, sunk in their soft beds of trees; on the other there is the slowly revolving ancient town. We see its bell towers and palaces, its piazzas and churches, the Guinigi Tower with its mysterious forested top, all seeming to turn like a jewelled mechanical city pirouetting on a music box. We go faster and faster, flying along the
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