Mr. Palomar and I on the Quad

Mr. Palomar once—in Italo Calvino’s book about him— tried to watch a wave crash on the beach. He stood where land fell beneath water and watched the waves roll in, trying to see, really *see* just one wave in all its dimensions, in all its unfolding, in all its being. But no matter how he tried, he couldn’t fully see any wave. Every wave eluded him. Every wave overwhelmed him with ephemeral excess, too much to grasp, gone too quickly. With Mr. Palomar by my side I sit on the quad looking at a tree brushed by dusk, dancing in the wind, and I turn to him and say, “I wonder if we can see, really *see* this tree.” So side by side, in our pocket of silence surrounded by distant conversations and laughter and even more distant traffic and airplanes, we stare at the tree, trying to see it, trying to see each face of each leaf twisting in the breeze, to see every crease and fold and valley and peak in every inch of bark, to see the photons streaming from the direction of the sun and across the whirling leaves and refracting through chlorophyll and reflecting from rough bark, to see where the roots plunge into the earth and spread through the rich soil ever-finer tendrils that finally taper into thin hairs, to see the faint fading of summer's color, to see the slow growing of new leaves and twigs and branches and bark and roots and wood, to see the harmonious vibrations of air produced by its manifold movements, to see its every relation to the grassy plane which it pierces and to the crisscrossing brick paths that surround it and to the other trees and the buildings of marble and brick that form its odd forest and to the human and nonhuman bodies that flit around it, to see time flowing around and through it carrying scents of growth and decay.... "It's no good," he finally sighs, "each side we see conceals another." "Perhaps we could each take a different side?" "But then we will each see different trees." "We could compare our experiences." "But then we would be creating a new tree, not seeing this one." "There's another problem," I say. "Oh?" "It's like your wave, too much and too fast, at least the leaves are. But it's also too slow. We can't see its growth because we move too fast, think too fast, live too fast. And if part of seeing it is seeing its growth and death, well, it's no use. That tree is older than me and will outlive us both, you know." "Well, you, sure, but I'm only a character in a book. I suspect I shall outlive that tree yet." I'm not sure he's right, but I say nothing. I don't want to be rude. Who am I to say? Maybe he is right. I hope he is right. In the end, we settle for seeing what we can, for watching the planet turn the tree from our nearest star, for watching the light slowly rise before shadows stretching from the ground until the tree is muted by twilight's cloak. Then beneath magenta sky we leave and board a bus that takes us somewhere beyond ourselves.