Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Why are the landscapes beautiful, and the approaches to the forest at twilight drawn to the melody of the pipes warming in your breast, and the bluish puddle on the other side of the railroad tracks make the tune in your heart tremble and the body yearn to step over its banks as if once, on a childhood evening, it walked there…? Because every landscape in the world has its souls that were joined to it by the finest desires and the sweetness of the heart’s exaltation in the days when love rose as if blooming spring and summer together, and also in the days of a late-summer tear glistening in the mystery of parting… and the ripened fruit reddening in the gardens… No landscape is beautiful for itself, in its forest and its river and its well. It takes its beauty, in all its facets and luscious scents, abundantly from the souls who walk within it the walks of longing, and from the jubilation in the blood and the living lyreness of the body… With this weave the beautiful souls embroidered this empyrean and stamped it with its verdant hues and poured wines of myrrh into the feathery softness of its clouds. If not for wounds of love even unto the gift of blood and the ascension in flames for the sake of family, or the honor of throne and temple, or the sanctity of a liberation, would there be such twilights morning and evening, with the smell and the taste of must mingled in them? If not for the grace of bodies and the ideas sprouting in the heart and the head about what is beyond them in the world, would there be luxuriant trees such as these, or their fruit, or their birds’ nests? If not for the gaze of craving eyes with which all of heaven once swelled when lovers met, when the heart was lifted to the sky, would there be such cubits of water on the other side of the railroad tracks? And if not for our incarnations before birth, now vanished from our minds, if not for the recollection of the existence of marvelous bodies in a second reality which the concepts of our language today cannot capture, in which we rested in our cribs as all the moon’s soul spilled onto their little posts… in which we grew to the height of fathers’ and mothers’ knees until our shoulders became tall, and equal to them… in which we journeyed to the end of everything precious and enchanting, in which we ate and drank foods and drinks more pleasing than the foods and the drinks here and now and we wore clothes woven in a way we do not weave today whose aroma our nostrils sometimes catch from the garment of a rare man, a soul-friend, who has been cast into our midst as if by a miracle…. Without all this, would there be any desire in the world, would any heart rejoice at the end of the day anywhere in the world? Would we set out in great ships from one end of the sea to the other and tears form in our eyes as if recalling an obscure thing and its fragrance? Truly the power of the desire that attacks us suddenly in the present is owed to the memory-scents of vistas more beautiful than all beauty: when we stroll on boardwalks along the canals in the evening or on the warm spreading paths through a red mulberry forest, or in the view, filled with desire, through the window of a train of a small railway station in a field outside a town…. Scent-memories of distant furrowed scenes which we inhabited in our previous wanderings and loved with the love of youth: for all the wines and all the colors and all the odors of the flowering landscapes and all the melodies of all the instruments were to be found…there. So that whoever inhales it, in its sweetness, for a moment has the sensation of a rendezvous with a woman who is late, who was no longer expected but like a miracle has arrived, in the torrid dusk, redolent of the forest. In those landscapes our utterances were like musical notes, we can still hear a hint of them sometimes in the most exquisite songs and sometimes in the voice of a woman who is with someone else but in those landscapes was with us, she was ours — We slept in other kinds of nocturnal beds made of wood that grows in no garden here, we wore clothes of a different fabric that our melancholy and discriminating hands occasionally discover when they brush against someone’s sleeve: a precious miraculous event in the present…. If not for those landscapes, what would our life be now? Translated by Leon Wieseltier