High Resolution (Notes on Blurriness)
BY LUCY SCHILLER
Last summer, I was alone on a mountain in France, a famous mountain, Mont Ventoux—though there were other people on it, of course. In fact, there were probably a thousand people on that mountain as I was on it, most of them bicycling, but I was climbing it, hubristically, by myself, in order to commune with Petrarch, the Italian poet, who had climbed it centuries earlier to regard the view. Petrarch was said to be the first person to ever climb a mountain for the view, in fact. Here’s Petrarch, on the difficulty of picking a climbing partner (he eventually settled for his chaste and godly brother Gherardo): “The heavy deliberation of some repelled me as much as the lean incapacity of others. I rejected those who were likely to irritate me by a cold want of interest, as well as those who might weary me by their excessive enthusiasm.”
I had read Petrarch’s essay about the experience—which took the form of a letter—in grad school, and lodged it in my head as an example of digressive essayism. I was coming back to his essay as a kind of guiding document. The whole thing was a metaphor, I remembered: Petrarch had been constitutionally unable to take the straight, clear path up the mountain, preferring instead an exploratory, possibly cowardly, wandering attempt, which sometimes literally brought him down the mountain instead of up. Meanwhile, Gherardo scaled Ventoux straight away. Petrarch: “I became disgusted by the intricate way I had chosen,” he wrote. As had I, coming here. Something about this age—my own (35), and the larger “times”—encouraged one to get their ducks in a row, their house in order, their cleaning sprung, their sense of the future straight and thoughtful and clear-ahead, or face peril. But I could not seem to do it.
While his message was about the sin of wandering, and the lessons to be learned through the struggle of direct scaling, Petrarch was a fabulist. He was “creating rather than recording a spiritual experience,” I wrote in my notes that summer. Indeed, Petrarch is almost too coherent in this essay. Oddly neat. The scholar Nicholas Mann notes how Petrarch conveniently took the Confessions of St. Augustine with him to the top of Mt. Ventoux. Very clever, this book choice; very nice, the random opening, at the summit, of Confessions to a particular sentence about men considering alpine views when they did not even consider their deepest interiors. No, writes the scholar Mann, this was “scarcely, I think, a feat of mountaineering.”
Clearly, Mann continues, Petrarch’s essay-letter is not a “spontaneous and immediate account of a real event.” He could not have come back from eighteen hours of hiking and written it in the Malaucene Inn, while dinner was being prepared. Indeed, Mann makes the case that Petrarch wrote this letter years afterwards, after Gherardo had become a monk, hindsight making the younger brother’s noble, direct quest up to the summit all the more symbolic. Petrarch may not even have climbed the mountain at all, some scholars say. His is an essay in the sense that all essays are records less of particular experience than they are records of a writer’s mind moving through that experience. The father of humanism, or whatever: that summer, I still didn’t really know what “humanism” meant, at least in a distilled way. And I had started not from the Malaucene Inn but from a residency full of Instagrammers, where I nobly read as many of Petrarch’s sonnets as I could, sunburning on a lawn chair, and promptly found that he drove me slightly crazy. IDK, I thought—I had started thinking in internet language to myself, because I wasn’t really reading much anymore—IDK, he seems kind of fake. All the bloviating about Laura, which was honestly often fairly creepy. One biographer used the term “stalking.” Yes, he would go to church services where he knew she would be, and once he’d revealed his love for her, she never once, he wrote, put aside her veil to make eye contact with him, a detail that sends me into a feeling of instant recognition for Laura—that crawling feeling of being watched by someone you very much want to simply go away.
Petrarch was false, hubristic, pathetic, lovelorn, obsessed, relentlessly inward, and perhaps more than anything, his falseness on the page, in his more overwrought sonnets and in the Ventoux essay, reminded me of those people who cannot lie without some sort of obvious tell, so obvious—like biting their own lip, or turning bright red—that their conversation partner stops short and wonders what is actually happening. Surely both people here (Petrarch and reader) know that he is lying. Are we meant to be in on it? Do we say something?
“Petrarch grows on you,” wrote another of his biographers. It was not just me annoyed by the man. Nevertheless, his wandering: that’s why I followed.
*
“ok i feel like this character is some percentage y
*u,”
Emily, my friend from grad school, texted me. It was 1:48 am. I was asleep, in a bed in a rental house in Marfa. I came to Marfa to finish my book, a book that has acted, for several years now, as a punishing whip to my psyche. In the past year, I had read two books written by people I knew personally who mentioned, in the beginnings or the ends of their books, that they had finished their books in Marfa. I didn’t really believe in a lot about Marfa, and unfairly thought a lot about how that “f” signified so much Petrarchian falseness: twee, I thought, but at the same time, the place worked on me. I believed in the way that time moved here: almost excruciatingly slowly.
You see, after graduate school, I became a bit unmoored. The unmooring showed me how temporarily I had been moored in graduate school, among friends and “writerly community,” that phrase we were all kind of inundated with, in the writerly community, all the time. In graduate school, time moved slowly, as it did in Marfa. Afterwards, time moved very quickly. I had moved places—the “Pittsburgh of Germany” and then, actually, Pittsburgh itself—where I did not know any members of the writerly community. I watched myself unmoor from writing in these places, becoming an even more solitary person than I had been in grad school, when I liked to proclaim solitariness, but was not fundamentally so at all.
It was seven in the morning or so, in Marfa, when I woke up and saw Emily’s text. I clicked on the dark link she’d sent me, and saw an essay pop up on a well-regarded literary journal’s website. The essay, I saw, re-focusing my eyes, was not an essay at all. In this time of relentless personal narrative and my own training in nonfiction, I was used to things—to literature—being essays. Fiction writers and poets were always writing essays now, dallying with nonfiction out of an un-or-semi-stated believe that it was a secondary genre, that anyone could do it. You didn’t need training, I understood them to think, in order to write about yourself. That attitude severely chafed me, because if you didn’t need training to write nonfiction, then what had I done there, in grad school, at a program that emphasized to us, constantly, that here was a rare chance at deep training—and also, hmm, maybe conversely, that we were all, as a group, wildly and innately talented? It was a spirit I recognized in Marfa, a place where the “innately talented” go to practice, like Olympic athletes, their various crafts, which they sell, then, to two tiers: the extraordinarily famous talents passing through and the more numerous Instagrammers wanting to capture, but not necessarily live inside, art.
The essay, I saw, was a piece of short fiction. It was called something wonderfully simple and evocative that I instantly liked. Let’s say it was titled “Her Green Scarf.” By the way, I will be changing all of the details of this piece of fiction in this nonfictional essay, because most of the details in this piece of short fiction, written by a brief ex-boyfriend, of sorts, of mine, are true. As such, to be clear, I am writing a fictionalized-essay, in parallel to my ex-boyfriend writing a true piece of fiction, while, meanwhile, in the fourteenth century, Petrarch wrote a fake letter that was a real essay about a very constructed possibly false journey up a real mountain that I later attempted to, in real life, follow him up. These things do not blend into the same basic thing. My ex-boyfriend’s truth-fiction did not care—and I don’t mean this in an aggrieved way at all—about whether or not I was recognizable as a character. My fictionalizing-essay, meanwhile, cares a great deal about whether he (and I) are recognizable people, because I do not want either of us to be. Petrarch cared about fame, and whether or not he loved Laura in the way he wrote he did, I don’t know. More largely, why I do not want to be recognizable in prose, while relentlessly wandering the nonfictional mountain, is one of the greatest mysteries of myself.
*
As I read “Her Green Scarf,” I was still basically asleep. The story felt lightly amusing and kind of bleary-buzzy. On the second read, I started to text people: I was beginning to recognize myself. On the third read, I made a list on the butcher paper I had set down on my kitchen table, originally thinking I’d be mapping out my book there. The list—of true details within the fictional story—extended. The artifact of clothing the female character wore, the terrifying appliance that centerpieced my/her apartment and that I/she was convinced would one day kill me/her, the details of the apartment itself, the way he would get blackout drunk, the minor but disturbing infraction that he committed on me/her while drunk, the confrontation I/she had with him about it in the morning and my/her tone while doing so, a great deal of the dialogue between the two characters, what we/they did during our/their nights together, a certain witty phrase I/she had used to refer to his particular kind of alcohol, my/her eye color, my/her dominant hand and my/her pride about it, and a condition I/she have/has that makes my/her feet numb with cold, particularly in winter.
“We were built for each other,” he had written—or something similar to this—in his story, and I remembered how lightly I’d treated that entanglement, but also how clear it had seemed to me, back then, that he did understand some element of me that other men had not, and possibly vice-versa. We had had a weird language in common: a lilting, back-and-forth causticness and generousness both. It felt like hanging out with a friend, not a lover: this was new for me, and very rare. Very special, I still think, but also not.
Like this, I began to recognize things of truth that I had originally read as fiction. Then, I began to wonder if I was occasionally misremembering: maybe some of these “facts” were actually not true at all. And then I began to also wonder if I was creating, to myself, a false confession, basically, borne frantically from the blurriness of reality. Through this fictional lens, some version of past reality became newly sharp to me, and differently blurry: it was being remembered, but also amended, by someone who knew it as I knew it, but had a different mind than my own, one geared towards fabulation, and not the essay-kind-of-fabulation that Petrarch exemplified. As I constructed my list on the Marfa kitchen table, moving methodically through the story, so flabbergasted I was to be recognizing my own likeness in a major literary journal, and not through my own doing—topped off by an introductory editor’s note that the editor felt as if he like the two main characters most when they were being particularly “obnoxious” (again not the exact word)—that I felt as if I was receiving a message. Like I had climbed Mont Ventoux hoping to get a message from Petrarch.
The message was that I could not recognize myself.
For instance: the writer spent a little time describing the allure of my specific forehead, which I had never once thought about. But was it actually mine?
As for the “green scarf”: I had worn the “green scarf” for as long as I could remember, though what I was able to remember was tilting away from me. My father, who this writer accurately characterized as Jewish (and my mother, for her measure, had accurately been characterized as a WASP) had bought it for me when I was probably fourteen in Champaign, Illinois, at a store called Champaign Surplus where we liked to go try on “winter warmies.” That is a detail I can accurately convey with extreme relish to you now, without having to hide behind light fictionalization. It involves no one other than me, fourteen, walking through the blowsy aisles, in the winter, of that store and its plastic-fragranced technical gear. That memory is mine, but trying to convey it to you now, I do feel I have to alter my language thanks to this new story. I loved that ___. I wore it every day for years, I know the veracity and depth of its color (___) in the way that my once-lover did too. It is the rare object that has transcended the shuffling eras of my life; it is the card held up at the end of a magic trick, there somehow all along. And I had no idea he was looking at it in the way that I looked at it: so deeply the color ___, perhaps one of the most intimate objects I have, of myself. Does that make sense? I suppose what I’m realizing is that I have my own special, precise understanding of the world that, wow, it turns out someone else can perceive and share. But now I live somewhere else, somewhere warmer, and the ___ feels of another era, tucked in a plastic storage container in my closet. I don’t see that man anymore. I am different.
*
In nonfiction school, much gets made—some would say too much gets made—of the “blurry line between fact and fiction.” Even that phrasing: “the blurry line between fact and fiction,” well, it would cause some people to roll their eyes. Myself included. This wasn’t because we didn’t believe in a line between fact and fiction, but simply that we were tired, so tired, of talking about it. It was the topic, and it spawned offshoot topics, which basically were still that topic: the fallibility of memory, the multi-perspectived “truth,” the impossibility of capturing the “full” truth, the framing of truth as inherently built of subjective choices, memoir as memory not as record. Our journey through nonfiction school coincided with the rise of similar phrases, namely “fake news,” which described similar things, maybe less artfully. A professor there once urged me, as I was serving as editor of our in-house literary magazine on all things “essay,” to put out a themed call for essays on “writing nonfiction in the age of Trump.” The age of Trump, my co-editor, who didn’t do anything for magazine ever, repeated back to me, with acid. His wild eyerolls in this case gestured at the fact that, to him, Trump was simply a manifestation of some older, more ongoing presence in American life—same, of course, for “fake news,” which you could ungenerously say we were here to practice. Sometimes people would submit things for workshop that flabbergasted me, because they involved other, real people, but those other, real people clearly had not read these essays, and they never would. Unbeknownst to them, versions of these people might live on in small literary journals, their names changed, or maybe not. They would be tucked into arcs that claimed truth but paraphrased dialogue, compressed timelines, and composited lives. There was little guidance around this issue: the straightforward fact that many of us were making clearly fabulated art that also used a certain standard of reality as a supposed constraint.
Since the writer set my story in winter, I’ll set this essay there too, rummage around for some things that happened, then, and there. Who can say if they are true. I almost died one night, on the icy road. A man followed me in a van. I secretly poured yellow Gatorade onto snow and ate it in front of horrified friends as a prank. I began to apply thick layers of a product called Skin Food, which smelled like a forest of gin and tonics, over my face, creating a physical barrier between me and the air that slowly absorbed over the course of the day. I dated the founder of a local energy drink company, the son of a Keokuk pastor, who had a dog named Sleep Daddy. I hated myself. I loved myself. I sheltered in a bowling alley from a tornado. I photographed the top of my head to check for signs of hair thinning. I had no idea who I was.
*
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized, in some moments, what exactly it means to prioritize blurriness. You might spend years moving around in the world, then come to a stop, recognizing yourself all of a sudden in strange places, in strange ways, in specific details: in a rock, on a mountain, in a horrible extended moment in the middle of nowhere, in a “green scarf” titling a fictional story about your very specific attributes. You are always the star of your own story, of course, even if you don’t use the personal pronoun, as you (I) have often avoided doing. You are always waiting for the truth to come out to get you.
The first night I was there, in Marfa, before the story-about-me came out, I was staying in the house of a well-known writer.
Their house was cold but lovely, messy in strange ways—they seemed to have left in a hurry, and I noted a pile of records fallen from a shelf, a line of books seemingly left on the ground for ongoing or future research, a tea cup left out on top of an article about bears in Tahoe. It had that feeling I am sure you know well: a slightly antiquated not-quite-rightness, now in this era of the clever standardization of strangers’ homes. You can expect, now, certain things from AirBnBs that do not map onto the actual homes of acquaintances who are generously offering their spaces to you. The writer’s home was a reminder of this, I saw, this reality poking through something else—the layer of fiction, or maybe euphemism, or blurriness, covering, now, almost everything. In fact, it is often implied that an AirBnb is a person’s regular home when, at this point, it rarely is that, and more often is an asset owned by a mini empire and decorated much like every other asset in the mini-empire, with an eye, that is, towards broadcasting lived-in “authenticity” and local vibes. For that matter, the term “vibes” had spread to cover—what—everything, broadcasting some kind of vague statement about “mood,” “feeling,” “atmosphere,” while originally, actually, in its longer form (vibrations), it had actually poked at something very specific: an exact feeling of resonance between things, a felt understanding prickling upon invisible waves. Personal essays said nothing while gesturing at everything. We were all entreated to perform endless “self-care” and “anti-burnout” rituals, the implication being that we were returning to ourselves, while the increasingly unregulated everything began to crash/burn/break/plummet/kill/fail.
Marfa sells things to people like me. I bought yucca root soap and hinoki body oil, got a facial that left my skin glassy and glossy and thankful, and bought a book about burnout. I bought the dark cold night sky and the way it seemed to slide as a punctured layer over a bright-burning backing material. I bought the plan I had sold to myself: here I would finish my book.
In the writer’s house, I tucked myself into the slightly mussed sheets. I attempted to go to sleep; I could not. The house, again, was cold: not so cold as to be a problem, but cold enough to draw out the edge I was feeling there. There had been a bit of cat food in the bathroom, on the floor, which was weird, but then again normal for a writer, I thought, in the way we think these ridiculous things. I empathized with the way my host had torn open the bag of cat food in the pantry, seemingly with their hands, not with scissors, the exhaustion of life leading one, in privacy—again, I could relate—to use their teeth to just get the damn fucking thing open, to rip, to take shortcuts not in the name of self-care, but in the name of finding some actual ease amidst all the packaging.
I closed my eyes: my brain hurt, a slightly hangover-y ache tinged things, the sheets smelled faintly of cigarettes and skin, I did not know if I would be able to do my work here in this house, finish my book, without the layer of dependable and fictional ease, now, that slides over everything.
The demands of me seemed very clear. I was literally laying in the bed of a real writer. The bed smelled of their breath. Breath of my breath. Was that a phase? Blood of my blood? Their breath had uttered words as they typed them, maybe, in this room.
There was a long moment, of maybe thirty minutes, when I seemed to be arcing gently, though with some minor difficulty, towards sleep. My eyeballs burned lightly, felt too big for their sockets, and my eyelids could not seem to stay fully closed, just as a plastic doll’s slide up and down relentlessly as you tilt it. But still: I was tilting, I hoped and sensed, towards darkness. And then this time ended, as I heard a footstep in the house. Then I heard something brush the wall. Then I heard another footstep, and a tiny but unmistakable crash. Then another footstep, heavy. Someone was here. Someone besides me. Someone very specific. Someone in the dark and the cold of this place, this so-specific place that I can only vaguely describe, out of fear of the (likely minimal) consequences.
My training has taught me to be open to the world, I thought. And now what is likely to happen is that I will have some sort of confrontation. I dreaded it. I have always dreaded it, this weird specter of an idea that sometimes comes to me, and that felt very present in that moment. It is very precise, this worry. I have worried and dreaded the reality that I will, in a moment like this, have to make eye contact with a person or a thing who wants to hurt me. I will recognize them as wanting to hurt me, and they will recognize me as what they want to hurt. We will have to exist in that recognition—that truth—together, until I die. That is why I stay blurry: it’s not for some noble artistic reason as much as it is to risk less.
I turned on the light in my room—the footsteps stopped somewhere outside the door—and quickly grabbed a lamp.
I opened the door all the way.
A fat, glossy raccoon stared straight at me, holding, to its face, a nugget of cat kibble between its two leathery paws. It was unafraid. It was simply there, as I was there.
I shut the door and felt oddly enraged.
We have these systems for classifying animals that actually do not matter. The raccoon was no Laura, spied on by Petrarch and drawing a veil across her face. It did not care as we made eye contact. I did not matter to it. We have all these ways of dealing with things, structuring things, organizing things in our minds, concealing, but we can never prepare for a raccoon that is not particularly affected by our tendencies.
Specificity, I realized I thought then, is death. To be specific in truth is to be finite—Gherardo bounding up the mountain, committing to the task. To be blurry and boundless—Petrarch—is to avoid, by prolonging things, the oncoming reality of pain, of suffering, of death.
So that was my problem. I was simply very afraid.
I lay like a board in the bed behind the door. The animal ate more cat food, peed and defecated, and strewed more records around the house. It threw itself against the door to try to get in. I lay there deeply bound inside of my body inside of the famous writer’s house inside of the raccoon’s den, inside the sleepless early light of day, inside of West Texas, before I slunk out for an AirBnB. There was a version of me who did not look up “raccoon poop dangerous” and learn that you need a propane torch to safely dispose of it, as raccoon feces carry parasites for which humans have no defense. There was a version of me who could finish her book there, and become, in the language of these times, a real writer.
*
At the AirBnB, a girthy cottonwood stood in the backyard and gently rained down its yellow leaves, which had that cottonwood fragrance of warm, dusty paper. There is no tree that smells more to me like a beautifully-working, dependable printer than a cottonwood. A sign in the dining room read LOVE + COFFEE. In the dining room, on my sheet of butcher paper, I scrawled the list, ever-growing, of moments in the story in which I recognized myself. I worked there, too, on my book. I was making progress. I was seeing it truly.
But I knew I needed to confront the fear. It was a fine, sunny morning, the day that I decided to visit a hiking area I will not name, to “get out of my head,” to both return to and distance myself from myself. I needed to walk somewhere with snakes, of which I am phobic. I needed to do something very clear, very intentional, very direct, very Gherardo.
At the park which I will not name, I was the only one there, besides the greeter/cashier. He was a tall man, handsome, and golden, but too eager about animal facts, I understood quickly, an amateur biologist with one of those thick dark wedding bands made of a material I wanted to call tungsten.
Judgmental, I caught myself, you’re being judgmental, and beginning to fabulate, and it is because you are scared: he was talking now, the golden man—he could have been, if he did not have his specific personality, a member of the Fleet Foxes; he was what Mark Zuckerberg wanted to look like; and yet his shirt bore an earnest collection of animal tracks, and I myself might have had that same shirt, in third grade—he was talking about the mountain lions here, which he had seen recently, he said. He had seen one race down and catch an audade—a species of sheep imported to this area from Morocco by big game hunters—just on that ridge over there, next week. Every day, he ran the trail I was about to walk, he said, and he had started seeing recently, he said, the carcasses of audades that lions had dragged up the hill and wedged between boulders. “I’m six-foot-five!” he exclaimed, “and I was scared!”
The trail began with rocky but generally even ground. I could barely move forward, I noted. The snake fear. The knowledge that they blend in. The tungsten man had said I should go to the left, through the canyon, which, he noted, did void any cell phone reception. Canyons, to me, are places where danger lives. And so I went to the right, instead.
Shuffling forward, I climbed Lion’s Head Hill, entering higher elevation, the road to the park ribboning out below me. I watched some tiny car stream along the road and thought of the people in that car, noted that I was watching them, and that they had no idea. I felt a few minutes of pride with myself.
The perspective was strange out there.
I shuffled forward. Huge hills linked to me by a ridge seemed to loom just a few feet away, but the chunky audades on them seemed barely visible. A quarry—the tungsten man had said “things live in there”—I could see beyond an audade, and I did not want to stare too long, for fear of summoning.
The sun felt fierce; I had brought, ridiculously, a strawberry basil scone, and now I ate it, glancing at the thick-rumped audade, who was staring seemingly directly at me.
Yes, I thought, I would keep going. I was doing so well. I was conquering something. I was making progress. I shuffled forward.
I found myself on a patch of black shale underneath a cliff, holding onto a yucca’s stem in order not to fall off the mountain.
I found myself scrambling, wondering if I should move towards the wavering line in the distance, clearly an animal trail.
In the canyon I knew I was not on a trail any longer—I had known that for hours now—and was moving forward, on my hands and knees, through passages so narrow and rocky I could not do it any other way. Many times I moved like this through stagnant water. Sheaves of dry leaves. Duff: the word came.
I could not, here, pretend to be afraid of death, or think it was likely to happen to me, as my body was moving beyond my brain, and as quickly as it could. I had become something like an animal. My body had taken over; my brain was revealed to be helpless, scared, “namby-pamby” was the word that came to mind. Each blank spot in my mind stretched further, towards either death or safety.
____________.
____________.
My body scrambled through the scree, pulled ahead by something true. I heard myself scrambling and climbing and panting.
*
Months earlier I had been on Mont Ventoux, of course. “Remorseless toil conquers all,” said Virgil, who Petrarch quoted in his fake letter-essay. The cyclists here embodied that spirit, grinning for the waiting photographer, I would learn, at the aching final bend of road. I had been watching, in preparation for my climb, The Tour de France: Unchained. “When you come to the mountains, you see what suffering is, and how hard it is,” one cyclist said to the camera. They pushed up the mountain and coasted down. At that time I was writing, and would continue to write, a seventy-page dialogue between myself and Petrarch, in the style of a book of his Secretum, or My Secret Book, in which the poet/essayist dialogued with St. Augustine, in the wordless presence of Truth personified. My project joined the ranks of many other projects of mine: not quite books, but not not books. Not quite real and not quite not. It meant so much to me while I was working on it. It went nowhere. All my life I have been writing. Romancing. Self-gazing. It is no wonder, I realized in Marfa, months later, that my brain felt broken. That it felt blurry to itself. It felt like it had been AirBnBd. I had been trying to market it, to produce something marketable from it for myself and others, for literal decades.
I was listening to a song, months later, by Laurie Anderson, that was called “Let X = X.” As in, say it straight. Let the thing be plain and clear.
Then I listened to another song by Laurie Anderson, on the same album, that had this line: this is the time, and this is the record of the time. I was re-reading my project, which I had also called, after Petrarch, My Secret Book, with the sinking feeling that it was unpublishable.
I’m going to try to be very direct, from this precise desk in West Texas where I sit writing and re-writing this: I resent the expectation that nonfiction writing has to be extraordinarily intelligible. Poets and fiction writers are not asked to make their work straight to the point in the way that truth supposedly is. Or to clarify the lesson learned from the time portrayed.
What if the time—and reality in general—is blurry?
Different words for blurry: layered. Not fully perceptible by one hubristic person claiming truth. Not scalable. Lent, briefly, and absorbed.
Vous etes ici, a sign told me that day on Mt. Ventoux, and it did look very clear. The diagram showed me that I stood in the path of a 1963 avalanche. You are here. Looking up, it was possible to see a waterfall of thickly tumbled white rock straight above me. A group of schoolchildren appeared around the bend, chasing, they said, un rocher, and I marveled at the translation of that chocolate company: but no, I’d had it wrong, I’d heard something they had not said, I’d realize later, rocher meant rock, and this was a deer. I skulked with them. We watched the hind of the animal as it bounced and crashed away from us. I continued, into a low stand, now, of pines, the yellow flowers growing sparser, and the trees feeling drier, higher, hosts, a new sign informed, to rare birds like le bec croisé des sapins (red crossbill), le pic noir (black woodpecker), la chouette de Tangmalm (boreal owl), l’autour des palombes (Eurasian goshawk). The trail, too, began to thin, and moss banks moved to shades of rock on whose surface the path seemed, at least occasionally, indeterminable. I became afraid when the trail transformed into no more than a slight indentation on the side of the scree, and to the left zoomed a precipitous drop. Suddenly I was up high, inarguably on Mont Ventoux. It was here that I felt with certainty that Petrarch had, in fact, been here. Why, I couldn’t say, it was simply a feeling as my head drew nearly level, now, with the clouds. I envisioned a cloak. I envisioned his shoes. Rounding a corner, a gray-white flash, and I approached, gingerly. It was a gigantic slide of limestone, and I thought immediately of Petrarch’s phrasing: that “certain cliff” where he made, again, the wrong choice, taking the easier-seeming, less direct path. But from here, now, there was only one way through. And the trail, though goatily narrow and absolutely vertiginous, made a way between Petrarch and Gherardo, snaking up the mountain with alternating steepness and distraction. You had to take this trail, there was no other choice. And yet you could find an infinity of other, smaller paths to study. A lush patch of violets bloomed out of the rock, from seemingly nothing; this landscape was positively lunar, and yet there was abundant life. That noise, I realized, it was all around me: a humming I had absorbed as some element of my self and my self’s exertion. But it was not me, I saw now. It was a throng of wild bees, thrumming with increased activity as the air warmed, and hovering with mysterious industry around and in the rock itself, which was not simply a slide of collected shards, I saw now, but a real home to these insects, full of entryways and built languages I could only ever guess at.