Daybook, Turn, Prospect by Anne Truitt

Author:Anne Truitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

I said good-bye to Paris in two places.

Delacroix remains a presence in his studio. I sat humbly on a chair upon which he may perhaps have sat, and quietly thanked him for the companionship of his life. It is this companionship—Delacroix’s and that of the other artists whose work I am seeing—that I shall take with me when I leave Europe. The stubborn intransigence of my own nerve, coupled with fierce independence, has made me reluctant to consort with other artists, no matter how wholeheartedly I may be impressed by their achievements. This self-reliance may well be a fault—it certainly has made me lonely—but if so it is one I have earned with every atom of my experience. It penetrates deep within and throughout my character, as proliferated and as intrinsic to my life and movement as the delicately boned skeleton of a fish.

At St.-Julien-le-Pauvre, I lit a candle, and my inarticulate prayer joined those of the folk who for 1500 years and more have raised their silent voices in that place, on that ground. The church sits there plainly, declaring without declamation the fact that Bishop Julien’s life exemplified: only by giving away can one receive. The human must relinquish the personal to know the divine.

4 FEBRUARY

LA GUIZZA ASOLO, ITALY

For all my efforts to be correct, I was in the wrong couchette from Paris to Padua: number thirty-eight when my ticket was for number thirty-two. I did not notice until I was on my way out of the train yesterday morning. This was a lucky mistake because my companion in number thirty-eight was an Italian woman on her way home to Trieste from a visit in Paris, and she made the trip happy for me. A plump woman—black hair, black dress, black shoes, as comforting as an experienced nurse. She takes the trip often and she knew the conductor; she spoke French, so I had to speak only French and found that I could quite fluently. We were alone, each on a lower berth. She helped me with the customs declaration and showed me how to make up my berth with a white cotton sack into which she insisted I push my handbag down against my feet so no thief could get at it while I slept. Without ado, she simply lay down in her dress inside her sack, pulled the blanket over her, went to sleep, and snored in the most soothing way. So I slept too, cozily. I awoke once to see out the window a thick slice of Swiss snow that looked like carved marble, but mostly I slept like a protected child. Her good humor was unfathomable. She laughed and chatted as if we were old friends in some way at once personal and impersonal, inhabitants, say, of the same village. We shook hands good-bye with mutual appreciation.

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