convalescences were! Llucia, my old nurse, would come and keep me company every afternoon, and my grandmother would come and settle down to her knitting near the window of my room: my mother herself would also sometimes have her visiting acquaintances sent into my room, and I would listen with one ear to Llucia’s stories while with the other I would follow the more measured background of the murmurs and conversations of the “grown-ups,” continuous as a well-fed fire. And if the fever rose a little all this would mingle in a kind of foggy reality which merely lulled my heart and benumbed my head within which that white-winged Angel in silvery robes who, according to Llucia’s song, was none other than the angel of sleep began to gleam with a tired splendor.
Llucia and my grandmother were two of the neatest old women, with the whitest hair and the most delicate and wrinkled skin I have ever seen. The first was immense in stature and looked like a pope. The second was tiny and resembled a small spool of white thread. I adored old age! What a contrast between these two “fairy-tale” creatures, between that parchment-like flesh on which the effaced and complete manuscripts of their life were written and that other crude, brand new and apathetically unconscious flesh of my schoolmates, who no longer even remembered that they too had already been old a while ago when they were embryos; old people, on the other hand, had learned how to become old again by their own experience and, moreover, they also remembered having been children.
I became, I was and I continue to be the living incarnation of the Anti-Faust. As a child I adored that noble prestige of old people, and I would have given all my body to become like them, to grow old immediately! I was the Anti-Faust. Wretched was he who, having acquired the supreme science of old age, sold his soul to unwrinkle his brow and recapture the unconscious youth of his flesh! Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul—let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me,what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin! The smooth-skinned animal of my childhood was repugnant to me and I should have liked to crush it with my own feet provided with little bluish metallic heels. For in my mind desire and science were but one single and unique thing and I already knew that only the wear and decline of the flesh could bring me illuminations of resurrection. In each of Llucia’s or my grandmother’s wrinkles I read this force of intuitive knowledge brought to the surface by the painful sum of experienced pleasures and which was already the force of those germs of premature old age that crumples the embryo, an unfathomable force, a subterranean and Bacchic force of Minerva, a force that twists the hundreds of tendrils of the shoots of old age on the young vine-stalk and that soon effaces the strident laughter of the ageless and retarded face of the child of genius.
To be sure, I did not advance in that painful upward climb of arithmetic, I did not succeed in the sickly and exhausting calculation of multiplications. On the other hand I, Salvador Dali, at the age of nine, discovered not only the phenomenon of mimesis, 3 but also a general and complete theory to explain it!
At Cadaques that summer I had observed a species of plant that grows in great profusion along the seashore. These plants when seen at close range are composed of small, very irregular leaves supported on stems so fine that the slightest breath of air animates them in a kind of constant quivering. One day, however, some of these leaves struck me as moving independently of the rest, and what was not my stupor whenI perceived that they walked!
Llucia and my grandmother were two of the neatest old women, with the whitest hair and the most delicate and wrinkled skin I have ever seen. The first was immense in stature and looked like a pope. The second was tiny and resembled a small spool of white thread. I adored old age! What a contrast between these two “fairy-tale” creatures, between that parchment-like flesh on which the effaced and complete manuscripts of their life were written and that other crude, brand new and apathetically unconscious flesh of my schoolmates, who no longer even remembered that they too had already been old a while ago when they were embryos; old people, on the other hand, had learned how to become old again by their own experience and, moreover, they also remembered having been children.
I became, I was and I continue to be the living incarnation of the Anti-Faust. As a child I adored that noble prestige of old people, and I would have given all my body to become like them, to grow old immediately! I was the Anti-Faust. Wretched was he who, having acquired the supreme science of old age, sold his soul to unwrinkle his brow and recapture the unconscious youth of his flesh! Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul—let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me,what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin! The smooth-skinned animal of my childhood was repugnant to me and I should have liked to crush it with my own feet provided with little bluish metallic heels. For in my mind desire and science were but one single and unique thing and I already knew that only the wear and decline of the flesh could bring me illuminations of resurrection. In each of Llucia’s or my grandmother’s wrinkles I read this force of intuitive knowledge brought to the surface by the painful sum of experienced pleasures and which was already the force of those germs of premature old age that crumples the embryo, an unfathomable force, a subterranean and Bacchic force of Minerva, a force that twists the hundreds of tendrils of the shoots of old age on the young vine-stalk and that soon effaces the strident laughter of the ageless and retarded face of the child of genius.
To be sure, I did not advance in that painful upward climb of arithmetic, I did not succeed in the sickly and exhausting calculation of multiplications. On the other hand I, Salvador Dali, at the age of nine, discovered not only the phenomenon of mimesis, 3 but also a general and complete theory to explain it!
At Cadaques that summer I had observed a species of plant that grows in great profusion along the seashore. These plants when seen at close range are composed of small, very irregular leaves supported on stems so fine that the slightest breath of air animates them in a kind of constant quivering. One day, however, some of these leaves struck me as moving independently of the rest, and what was not my stupor whenI perceived that they walked!
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