Six hours a day we had lessons in the kitchen. History, Literature, Art, Geography, Music, Natural Sciences.
Instead of Music for a year it was Mathematics, a subject we appreciated without understanding. At best, we contemplated shapes. I can't teach you the laws, she admitted, but I recognize in them a higher beauty, rarefied, and very much like Music, which I also do not understand on a fundamental level, but which I believe we will understand on a spiritual level together, and perhaps we will work our way back to Mathematics along that path one day, once we again accustom ourselves to soundlessness.
There had also been a Language, but she replaced it with Art, because Languages were hard to teach. They had to be grasped through a kind of sympathy, which was better intuited through Art and History and to an extent Geography, for which she spent many hours selecting images of antique globes so as to provoke by automatic suggestion the mood she wished to convey.
It's strange, in retrospect, that she avoided Languages and Mathematics, since her approach to other subjects was bathed in a honey-colored atmosphere of cerebral pathos, as if the whole point of education was the transmission of a certain melancholy attitude toward libraries, clocks, hallways, and paintings seen in failing light.
She approached the Sciences by way of a hidden door. She preferred to show us bird's nests, without their occupants. Feathers, dropped from wings. Charts of the eyes of various birds, from the tiny, glistening orb of a chickadee to the haunted, panoptic glare of an owl.
I remember these charts clearly, the isolated eyes surrounded by hints of feathery growth.
For several weeks in Music, before advancing to the keyboard works of Scarlatti, she made us listen to hundreds of recorded birdsongs, augmented only by the sounds of tree limbs and air whipping across the surfaces of microphones. Outside this house, she said, you'll find dozens of tiny recording devices on branch stems and under leaves. There are so many local varieties of songbird and most will not exist even one century from now.
I asked which she meant in particular, wanting to devote as much attention as I could to the doomed varieties, but she replied that it was a question of chance — Carried on the wings of chance, she said. She stopped to listen to the play of her words on her emotions, as she often did. On such occasions she would end the lesson early and retreat to her room. After which I did nothing, because she had so thoroughly shut us off, except to look at pictures of stars, planets, and other edifying bodies.
I wondered who Galileo had been, if he had lived far away from everyone else, and if at night he would grow so distracted by the distance between himself and all other persons that he charted the stars in a kind of daze, seizing up planets and casting them across his notebook like marbles. If he moved in a form of sleepwalk, in which eternity seemed to elapse.
Addison Zeller is a translator and editor in Wooster, Ohio. His fiction appears or is forthcoming in 3:AM, Ligeia, Epiphany, Olney, Sleepingfish, and elsewhere. Twitter: @amhcrane87
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