Having woken up, received birthday greetings from my mother, and had a simple breakfast, I took a bike and vanished into the fog.
It was thick. It is seldom so thick! It was everywhere. It is seldom everywhere!
Soon, white stripes of the fog were covering the sleeves of my black cotton jacket. Extraordinary! Soon, I was imprisoned by a huge bell jar surrounded by the fog of invisibility. I, a ghost for them. They, ghosts for me. Extraordinary? No. Ordinary? Not quite.
Silence all around. The sounds that make the silence even more silent.
Drops of water, as if out of boredom, falling from the running board of a lonely tractor. A colossal Soviet pigsty with a gaping tin roof. Large heaps of mud on both sides of the curvy road. A fine tang of dung insistently tempting my nostrils.
Theodoros Angelopoulos would probably like to shoot in the fog in the surroundings of Puurmani in a morning like this. His colours. White. Some grey. Some beige. Black fields covered by blades of hay cut short during the harvest. How concrete they look compared to the mystical fog in the background! The sticky dew on the dark green, almost emerald grass. Enormous leaves of shamrock. In October? Cannot pick those for Bosse.
A silhouette of a farmhouse with its ancillary buildings and a fir tree in the centre. Someone rhythmically hammering at something as if at a smithery. A dog also barking? Life as we see it.
The Kursi church tower, otherwise so prominent in the scenery, disappeared into the whiteness. The Pedja river, the presence of which is always so discernible despite its distance, seems to have become the whiteness. Everything is so languorously static. Here I am with my bike, on a stony road running through the infinity...
This is the ultimate beauty.
This is the ultimate beauty, and I am being rewarded.
For looking in the face of it, for listening to the music of it, for smelling it, for tasting it, for touching it. I often meditate on it, I try to take care of it, sometimes I worry about it, but nevertheless, I have learnt to trust it. That's why I need it, that's why I love it, that's why I also suffer from it.
And later, when it's gone, I yearn for it.
