Friday 16 September 2011

A landscape of interminable undulations

“…all this had caused him most unpleasant dreams; waking at very early dawn… he had found himself comparing this ghastly journey with his own life, which had first moved over smiling level ground, then clambered up rocky mountains, slid over threatening passes, to emerge eventually into a landscape of interminable undulations, all the same colour, all bare as despair.  These early morning fantasies were the very worst that could happen to a man of middle age; and although the Prince knew that they would vanish with the day’s activities he suffered them acutely all the same, as he was used enough to them by now to realise that deep inside him they left a sediment of sorrow which, accumulating day by day, would in the end be the real cause of his death.”

From "The Leopard" by Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampedusa

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