A winter’s day between Zurich and Basel
For two weeks, the air water had been in a fog. It was dirty, dissolute — a depressed charcoal smudge. It wandered through Zurich in a haze of confusion, blindly falling down streets like a man on a bender. Then, last night, it finally fell asleep, and as it slept, its mind began to clear. I think it dreamt of self-coherence, because by morning, it had condensed upon itself. Maybe it recalled how once, as a stream, it was divided from sky as starkly as the waters of the first firmament.
Anyways, by the morning, it was still asleep. But it had stretched itself over the earth in a patina of silver — a crystal frost which coated the grass, and brush, and roofs. As it gently expired, the mist of its breath caught the bright, winter sun, whose gold it shone back outwards in a dream so frozen that the world that morning could have been the Platonic world — the model which only is seen by the mind. The fields my train passed were the ideals of fields. The trees were the ideals of trees. The hills rolled in silence as all true hills do. And it was as simple and true as mathematics.