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along on its own.
Still, if I touch this coral, I feel that the surface has retained the sun s warmth on the exposed part,
whereas the part that rested on the deck is colder; and if I were to split it in half, I could perhaps feel
how the heat decreases from the top to the bottom. Now, in a warm body the atoms move more
furiously, and therefore this rock, if it feels movement, cannot help but feel in its interior a differentiation of
movements. If it were to remain eternally exposed to the sun in the same position, per-haps it would
begin to distinguish something like an above and a below, if merely as two different types of motion.
Un-aware that the cause of this difference is an external agent, it would conceive itself in that way, as if
that motion were its nature. But if there was an avalanche and the stone rolled downhill and ended in
another position, it would feel that other parts of itself were moving, parts formerly slow, whereas those
formerly fast would be moving at a slower pace. And as the terrain slid (and it could be a very slow
process), the stone would feel that the heat, or, rather, the motion consequent to it, was passing gradually
from one part of it to another.
Thinking like this, Roberto slowly exposed different sides of his body to the sun s rays, rolling across the
deck until he came to a patch of shadow, darkening slightly in it, as would have happened to the stone.
Who knows? he asked himself. Perhaps in these motions the stone begins to have, if not the concept of
place, at least the notion of part: certainly, of change. Not of passion, how-ever, because the stone does
not know its opposite, which is action. Or perhaps it does. For the fact of being stone, so composed, is
something it feels constantly, whereas its being hot here or cold there is felt alternately. So in some way it
is capable of distinguishing itself, as substance, from its own ac-cidents. Or not. Because it feels itself as
relation, it would feel itself as relation among different accidents. It would feel itself as substance in
evolution. What does that mean? Do I feel myself in a different way? Who knows if stones think like
Aristotle or like the Canon? All this in any case would take it millennia, but that is not the problem: it is
whether the stone can store up successive perceptions of itself. Because if it feels itself now hot above
and cold below, and now vice versa, but in the second condition it does not remember the first, then it
will believe always that its interior movement is the same.
But why, if it perceives itself, should it not have memory? Memory is a power of the soul, and however
small the soul of the stone, it will have a proportionate memory.
To have memory means to have a notion of before and after, otherwise I would also believe always that
the suffering or the joy I remember are present at the moment I remember them. Instead I know they are
past perceptions, because they are fainter than the present ones. The problem therefore is having a sense
of time. Which perhaps not even I could have if time were something that is learned. But did I not say to
myself days or months ago, before my sickness, that time is the condition of movement and not the
result? If the parts of the stone are in motion, this motion will have a rhythm that even if inaudible will be
like the sound of a clock. The stone is the clock of itself. Feeling oneself in motion means feeling one s
own time beating. The earth, great stone in the sky, feels the time of its motion, the time of the respiration
of its tides, and what it feels I see drawn on the starry vault: the earth feels the same time that I see.
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So the stone knows time, indeed it knows it before per-ceiving its own changes of temperature as
movement in space. As far as I know, it does not even need to sense that the change of temperature
depends on its position in space: it could un-derstand this as a phenomenon of change in time, like the
passage from sleep to waking, from vigor to weariness, just as I realize now that, lying still, my left foot is
growing numb.
No, the stone must also feel space, if it senses motion where formerly there was stillness and stillness
where formerly there was motion. It knows, then, how to thinkhere andthere.
But let us now imagine that someone picks up this stone and sets it among other stones to build a wall.
If, before, it sensed the play of its own internal positions, it was because it felt its own atoms bent in the
effort to compose themselves like the cells in a beehive, crammed one against the other and one among
others, as the stones in the dome of a church should feel, where one presses the other and all press
towards the central keystone, and the stones near the keystone press the others downwards and
outwards.
But accustomed to that play of thrusts and counterthrusts, the whole dome must feel itself as such, in the
invisible move-ment its bricks make, thrusting one another reciprocally; sim-ilarly, it should feel the effort
that someone makes to demolish it, and should understand that it ceases to be dome at the moment the
wall below and its buttresses collapse. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]