(Night. An old-fashioned study. A dying fire casts shadows about the room, illuminating now some of the leather-bound volumes on the shelves, now others, never all at once. A copy of Euclid’s Elements lies open on the desk. Through the window can be seen a garden, the hedges and pond and gravel paths of which are an almost uniform gray in the moonlight. Beyond the garden, a forest, dark, forbidding, inscrutable.)

the fire

Campbell had gotten into the wine cellar of the palazzo we were using as a headquarters. We were on our third bottle when the corporal came in and told us that Martinez had been sent down for getting drunk and crashing a Jeep into the hospital. A hot, dry breeze was blowing in through the window, carrying the scent of olive trees and gasoline. From where we were sitting, we could see the tall, slender palm trees in the piazza, the dome of the cathedral, and, beyond it, the sea.

(The book on the desk begins to shine like the face of Moses coming down from Mount Sinai. A sharpened knife cuts a triangle out of the light emanating from the book. The triangle expands, rises a few feet into the air, and hovers over the desk.)

the triangle

A triangle in general, therefore, as opposed to this or that particular triangle, that is to say, the abstract idea of a triangle, though unimaginable—Berkeley being, admittedly, quite right on that point—is, nevertheless, perfectly intelligible. And the proof, so often taken for granted, that the three interior angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles depends, ultimately, on the common notion that things that are equal to the same thing are also equal to each other, an intuitive, self-evident truth, the certainty of which rests on the clarity and distinctness of its perception, a truth that is, in a word, as “plain as day.”

(The face of a faun, with horns and pointed ears, appears in the window. His expression is mischievous and playful, and his restless movements suggest an animal vitality. He gambols about the garden, playing on his pan-pipes now a gay, now a melancholy air.)

the faun

Walking along the hot dry dusty path towards the still airless indifferent house he saw his brother, expressionless and inexorable and unfathomable, who like Esau had sold his birthright for a mess of pottage—a white strap on a sunburnt shoulder, a haughty bearing and a curled lip—who like wild hairy reckless Esau, confident and overconfident, called up from the fathomless not-real of notime, plucked from the secret repository of eternity as one plucks the fragrance of thyme from the repository of memory, was bearing down on a doubtful and diffident Jacob, sensitive and oversensitive, with a sickly conscience and a pallid cheek.

(Outside, an object, dim, obscure, unperceived and imperceptible, reflecting, like the flames of hell, not light but “darkness visible,” makes its presence felt.)

the thing-in-itself

Cnagecnaknaknegumgno! Skeiscishshshenz! Phthhhh! Sssssst!