italo calvino

But what we call eros - is it perhaps only a programme of our corporeal bodies, more complicated because the memory receives messages from every cell of the skin, from every molecule of our tissues, and multiplies them and combines them with the impulses transmitted by our eyesight and with those aroused by the imagination? The difference lies only in the number of circuits involved: from our receptors billions of wires extend, linked with the computer of feelings, conditionings, the ties between one person and another...Eros is a programme that unfolds in the electronic clusters pf the mind, but the mind is also skin: skin touched, seen, remembered. And what about the tortoises, enclosed in their insensitive casing? The poverty of their sensory stimuli perhaps drives them to a concentrated, intense mental life, leads them to a crystalline inner awareness... Perhaps the eros of tortoises obeys absolute spiritual laws, while we are prisoners of a machinery whose functioning remains unknown to us, prone to clogging up, stalling, exploding in uncontrolled automatisms...

from mr palomar. palomar in the garden - the loves of tortoises

trans william weaver