Something that was neither light nor matter but an intermediate substance
The fog has returned. But it is not the same. The fog of my first day was white, cold, a fog that erased. Tonight's is golden. It rose as night fell, as though the ground were exhaling the day's warmth, and the city has wrapped itself in a haze that does not erase but dissolves. I do not know if you understand the difference. To erase is to make disappear. To dissolve is something slower, more intimate, more final. What is erased can be written again. What dissolves, cannot.
Something drove me out of my lodgings at an hour when no sensible traveller ventures out. The cathedral square was unrecognisable. I will not forget what I found there for as long as I live.
The cathedral was dissolving. I can find no other word. The floodlights aimed at its facade from below sent columns of golden light against the stone, and the fog turned them into something that was neither light nor matter but an intermediate substance, as though the stone itself were evaporating toward the sky.
Something that was neither light nor matter but an intermediate substance
The towers had ceased to be solid
They were dissolving in the haze like a memory one tries to hold and slips through the fingers. This is precisely what happened. The principality did not fall defeated: it dissolved. There was no battle, no siege, no resistance — only an evaporation of the meaning of things, and then a decree arrived to certify what reality had already done. Tonight the fog was repeating that process before my eyes.
The principality did not fall defeated: it dissolved
The domes were no longer domes but shadows
It seemed to me that this is how one lives in the ruins of power: without looking up, without knowing that what floats above our heads is the spectre of something that once decided over the life and death of all. Beneath the arcades the fog thickened and the domes were no longer domes but shadows of something not entirely present.
Nothing was solid. Nothing was certain.
The whole city was dissolving in its own light.
I write upon returning. I am cold, and I have the certainty of having seen something that should not have allowed itself to be seen. What I witnessed tonight is not sentiment — you who know me are well able to distinguish the two. It is a fact. This city dissolves every night and every morning solidifies again, and in that cycle there is a truth no history book can tell: that power is not destroyed, it evaporates. That eight hundred years of principality ended not with a thunderclap but with a whisper. And that the fog knows this.
