Without Ever Reaching the Summit by Paolo Cognetti

Author:Paolo Cognetti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

In the afternoon I did my laundry down at the stream and laid it out in the sun. I asked Sete to wash my hair, and I washed the rest of me with a basin of warm water, then put on some fresh clothes. My companions also freshened up. They stretched out some rope between one tent and another and hung the laundry to dry. Only when I walked away, and I turned to look at the field, did I notice the comic sacrilege: our underwear flapped on the laundry cords; prayer flags stirred on the roofs, walls, and wooden poles. But Buddhists appreciate irony, and no one would be offended at Shey. Inspired by the scene, I thought how in the realm of the wind, those faded and ragged fabrics had the specific purpose of venerating it. The wind would not be seen if there was nothing to wave: the flags make the invisible visible. The vultures that hovered with open and immobile wings were priests of the air.

I was wandering among the prayer wheels when the girl from the day before came with Kanjiroba in tow. She wanted to show me something in secret, and stretched out her hand and opened it: it was a shell fossil, a reminder of the time when the Himalayas were at the bottom of the sea. India, which was then an immense wandering island, had run aground against China, the mountains had risen in the impact, and the shells wound up at four thousand meters. I shook my head no. I didn’t like the fossil market or the child merchants. The girl was a bit upset. I had chocolate somewhere and offered it to comfort her. She turned to the tent, I think to check if the person who sent her was watching, then grabbed the chocolate and ran away.

I sat down against one of the mills and watched the monastery. Higher up, on the grassy slopes of Mount Somdo, a herd of bharals grazed in the sun. No leopard in sight, but the afternoon sky was clear and at that altitude the light had something absolute to it, like light in its purest state. The same with the rarefied air I breathed, the icy water I caressed with my hand, the rock warmed by the sun against which I was sitting. That purity corresponded to the purity within me; this was the thought I was trying to shape: the wind, the stream, the light, the stone were of the same substance as my blood, my fibers, my organs, and resonated with them like the monk’s drum had shaken my membranes. Bum, bum, bum: I am made of this, of this, of this. The mountain led me to the essence.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.