🇬🇧 Wittgenstein’s Garden (1)

Wittgenstein's Garden (1)

78.    The deer is a frozen play of colours in the frosty morning. Ears turn and eyes stare; vigilance ticking between us.

79.    The only motion is the greywhite vapour from the nightblack nostrils as the lungs pump under the coat of fur; one second, two seconds, three.

80.    Greenish, yellowish, brownish, greybrown, reddish brown, algae green, yellowish green, blackstudded, greyish, browngrey, whitestreaked, greyyellow, orangeblack, bluegreen, and yellowed red colours float frostcoated in the clear air. 

81.    This is the deer. I step out to meet it.

82.    I cannot hold colours in my hand, but I can touch them as part of something. Colours are not things, but they are visible and can be distinguished in millions of nuances for which I have no words. Colours have qualities for which there is no proof, colours give off experience that cannot be explained.

83.    And then: fear, flight and hunger. The crunch of hooves that leap across stubs and brushwood and only the white tail tips among the trees - and the image is gone.

84.    We understand in images, we feel in colours, we grope for descriptions.


New in Index Ten Thousand:
Deer • 78, Nostril • 79, Colours • 80, Step • 81, Colours, experience of • 82, Hunger • 83, Feel • 84.