A Tumult
Her question transported him like Beatrice’s first salute, yet as he looked at her face for the first time he was filled with terror. He was startled by the speed with which her beauty elicited in him a sense of futility and dread. He remembered standing before the Botticelli in the National Museum and recalled his awe before the breathtaking power of the Renaissance masterpiece. He remembered the painting’s most poignant effect on him: it catapulted him upwards and then arrested him in flight. He was brought, by the mystical agency of art, to a sudden awareness of his inability to enter the realm of the work’s sacrosanct power. He passed quickly from contemplating the painting’s transcendence to sensing his own tawdry mortality. The sadness into which he plunged headlong almost as soon as the painting had elevated him resulted less from the fact that the pitch of this sublime moment could not be sustained than from his conviction that, as a moment, it could never be replicated, and this cognizance carried within itself nothing that could mitigate his sense of having fallen, of having been dashed against sharp rocks. The woman asking the question about the archives could not know that, to him, her face seemed to have been fashioned from timeless, numinous materials. Her ignorance of this, moreover, freed her from the burden of such weighty knowledge. For had she been even vaguely aware of the tumult the configuration of features she had inherited was effecting behind the spectacles of the shy librarian, she too would have
been terrified and might have recoiled in horror.