Cartographies

The Miniaturist

92 The Miniaturist Her brush clinks in the glass—water blooms milkily with a million particles of pigment swirling like a cosmic ocean. Fine sable hairs bleed themselves briefly, then they’re lifted again to their pointed task: to touch up a polar night where the stars are as delicate as mites, where indigo shadows pirouette from pine tree to peasant, with his tiny lamp. It is here, in such reduced visions, that proverbs are born: a heart knows best the needle’s prick, or: earth is the queen of beds, or: silence hears its own music. Seldom are yearnings as transparent as in the minutiae of the locust’s smile, or in the diatomic dance of air against flesh. Objects materialize like crystals in her eye. Ambitious electrons colonize her mind. Aggrandizer of moments, the artist breathes out shallow tufts of air, drying the moon’s thumbprint. She pauses until she becomes a still life. Surely, there’s a pond quietly lapping in her skull, that she should see the world’s burnished tokens as vessels for carrying her further inward; that 93 she can make matter matter as deeply as spirit. Her universe is vast—a thimbleful of tides. ...