The White Dog

Abstract

I'm writing to you from this inn perched up here?inn, however, is saying too much?it's a little caf? near a hamlet, on the rim of a high valley, a place I thought might be suited to profound meditation, since it's at the limit or even beyond the limit of human habitation, as though it were already withdrawn from this world and so closer to your own. It's been night now (a particularly icy night) for some time, although in other parts it can't be more than nine o'clock. Here, as soon as night falls (and what else can night be but darkness?), we're immediately in the middle of it. With the disappearance of the light, time is immobilized more quickly than the streams, as though the clocks too were hung with crystalline stalactites like the eaves with their diamond icicles. And through this cold we enter a kind of eternity. To tell the truth this is the third night I've come up here. From my village it's only three or four kilometres on the snowy road. You know that diamond precision of the cold?how fond it is of cracks, ridges, splinters, and points. That first night all the stars were shining in a naked sky. The Milky Way displayed its tiniest gems, the Bears their sharp claws; the whole celestial menagerie darted down its pitiless glances. The animals in that vast cage up there were quiet but you couldn't trust them, because their cruelty is terrible. Their door is wide open, and they're only waiting for you to fall. At this altitude there are no trees but a few stunted larches. Did I forget to say that there was no moon? There's no border or ditch along the road and it merged with the uniform whiteness, the only shadows those of rocks. I tried to follow the center of the road where it was packed by the sleighs, guiding myself by the crackling sound of my feet on the hard snow; I knew I'd strayed when my feet sank into a softer whiteness. Such difficulties aren't conducive to reverie, but by dint of zigzagging enough you can sometimes achieve a trance. You know how sometimes there isn't a breath of wind up in those valleys. The immobility is absolute, almost inconceivable. Everything is fixed, fascinated, as though by a serpent's stare. That's when the danger starts, when life itself is in peril. Because the traps are all around, as peacefully, as quietly and cunningly as they're laid. It's treacherous the way these things lure you into their fixedness. This falsely amiable tranquillity invites you to lie down and dream awhile in the