Slipping through the Hourglass

One of my favorite novels is The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, so elegant and profoundly moving. I reread it every few years. Here the Prince of Salina, having suffered a stroke, is in an armchair on the balcony of a grand hotel in Palermo, is dying:

"For a dozen years or so he had been feeling as if the vital fluid, the faculty of existing, life itself in fact and perhaps even the will to go on living, were ebbing out of him slowly but steadily, as grains of sand cluster and then line up one by one, unhurried, unceasing, before the narrow neck of an hour-glass...With the slightest effort of attention he used to notice at all other times' too, the rustling of the grains of sand as they slid lightly away, the instants of time escaping from his mind and leaving him for ever. But this sensation was not, at first, linked to any physical discomfort. On the contrary this imperceptible loss of vitality was itself the proof, the condition so to say, of a sense of living...Those tiny grains of sand were not lost; they were vanishing, but accumulating elsewhere...like the tiny particles of watery vapor exhaled from a narrow pond, mounting then into the sky to great clouds, light and free." (trans. Archibald Colquhoun)

 The scholarly, aristocratic author, eleventh Prince of Lampedusa and twelfth Duke of Palma. wrote from self-knowledge and family history. He died of cancer before this, his first novel, found a publisher; Feltrinelli published it the year after his death and it has been in publication in many languages ever since.

During my last reading, seized visually and kinesthetically by Lampedusa's image, I was inspired to make a drawing of a gentleman slipping through an hourglass. 

Drawing "Through the Hourglass" by Robert Moss