Reading a Wave

 

Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar, Reading a wave

Finally, it is not “the waves” that he means to look at, but just one individual wave: in his desire to avoid vague sensations, he establishes for his every action a limited and precise object… But isolating one wave is not easy… you cannot observe a wave without bearing in mind the complex features that concur in shaping it and the other … there are some forms and sequences that are repeated, though irregularly distributed in space and time…

In any case, Mr. Palomar does not lose heart and at each moment he thinks he has managed to see everything to be seen from his observation point, but then something always crops up that he had not borne in mind…