The peacock
Wednesday, 11. June 2008, 23:02:15
An ultramarine vase with a long narrow neck stands within our field of vision. Although it isn't a vase either, if a bit above the blue neck you can also make out a little crown.
The tail is still furled. He'll unfurl it when he's ready. He almost waits for us to ask him to unfurl it. Sometimes he doesn't unfurl it at all. He drags it behind like a rather dry and unprepossessing bundle of twigs, although some of those twigs are thick, thicker than his blue neck with its irridescent blue scales.
He struts on wide feet.
The ancient world was filled with admiration for the peacock. Kings, queens, generals, and senators gazed at him. Now he's lost significance as one of life's adornments. In Europe, by the way, his role was and still is performed by the swan. I like the peacock less than I do the swan. My northern European soul shuns the peacock, which somehow seems hot to it. I get a migraine of the soul whenever I see one.
The peacock is the East. It's just as nakedly without shade, without twilight, as are the buildings of the Alhambra, the ornamental designs of the Registan, the verses of the Eastern poets, or the precise and mistless Eastern fountains, whose streams evoke more a sense of precious stones than of water.
The swan swimming away into a greenish penumbra of ooze and willow is mysterious; the peacock stands in the midst of sunlight - clear, docile, yet harsh like the rule of a tyrant.
Yury Olesha, No Day without a Line: From Notebooks (1998), p. 196.
(Translation Judson Rosengrant)
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