...of meaning

Now these arm-paws are pressing a rubber tire against his chest. In the enormous void of his hours, "Copito de Nieve" never abandons the tire. What can this object be for him? A toy? A fetish? A talisman? Palomar feels he understands the gorilla perfectly, his need for something to hold tight while everything eludes him, a thing with which to allay the anguish of isolation, of difference, of the sentence to being always considered a living phenomenon, not only by the visitors to the zoo but also by his own females and his children.
The female also has an old tire, but for her it is an object of normal use; with which she has a practical relationship, without problems: she sits in it as if it were an easychair, sunbathing and delousing her infant. For "Copito de Nieve", on the contrary, the contact with the tire seems to be something affective, possessive, and somehow symbolic. From it he can have a glimpse of what for man is the search for an escape from the dismay of living: investing oneself in things, recognizing oneself in signs, transforming the world into a collection of symbols; a first daybreak of culture in the long biological night. To do this the gorilla possesses only an old tire, an artifact of human production, alien to him, lacking any symbolic potentiality, naked of meanings, abstract. Looking at it, you would not say that much could be derived from it. And yet what, more than an empty circle, can contain all the symbols you might want to attribute to it? Perhaps identifying himself with it, the gorilla is about to reach, in the depths of silence, the springs from which language burst forth, to establish a flow of relationships between his thoughts and the unyielding, deaf evidence of the facts that determine his life...
Leaving the zoo, Mr Palomar cannot dispel the image of the albino gorilla from his mind. He tries to talk about him with people he meets, but he cannot make anyone listen to him. At night, both during the hours of insomnia and during his brief dreams, the great ape continues to appear to him. "Just as the gorilla has his tire, which serves as tangible support for a raving, wordless speech, " he thinks, "so I have the image of a great white ape. We all turn in our hands an old, empty tire through which we would like to reach the final meaning, at which words do not arrive."

[Mr Palomar, Calvino, I.]