My poem had seven parts, representing the seven stages of life, seven colors, seven metals, seven planets, seven chakras, seven steps in falling from paradise to hell. It was supposed to be a colossal, astonishing waterfall from the eschatological to the scatological, a metaphysical gradation on which we set demons and saints, labia and astrolabes, stars and frogs, geometry and cacophony, with the impersonal rigor of the biologist who delineates the trunk and branches of the animal kingdom. It was also an enormous collage, since my mind was just a jigsaw puzzle of citations, it was a summum of all that could be known, an amalgam of the church fathers and quantum physics, genetics, and topology.

With every move we make in our lives, we make a choice or we are blown by a breath of wind down one aisle or another. The line of our life only solidifies behind us, it becomes coherent as it fossilizes into the simplicity of destiny, while the lives that could have been, that could have diverged, moment by moment, from the life that triumphed, are dotted, ghostly lines: creodes, quantum differences, translucid and fascinating like stems vegetating in the greenhouse. If I blink, my life forks: I could have not blinked, and then I would have been far different from the one who did, like streets that radiate out from a narrow piaţa. In the end, I will be wrapped in a cocoon made of the transparent threads of millions of virtual lives, of billions of paths I could have taken, each infinitesimally changing the angle of approach. After an adventure lasting as long as my life, I will meet them again, the millions of other selves, the possible, the probable, the happenstance, and the necessary, all at the end of their stories; we will tell each other about our successes and failures, our adventures and boredoms, our glory and shame. None of us will be more valuable than any other, because each will carry a world just as concrete as the one I call “reality.” All the endless worlds generated by the choices and accidents of my life are just as concrete and real as any other. The millions of my brothers I will talk to at the end, in the hyperspherical summation of all the stories generated by my ballet through time, are rich and poor, they die young or in deep old age (and some never die), they are geniuses or lost souls, clowns or entrepreneurs selling funeral banners. If nothing human is foreign to me, by definition, I will embrace, through my real-virtual brothers, all possibilities, and fulfill all the virtualities meshed in the joints of my body and mind. Some will be so different from me they will cross the barrier of sex, the imperatives of ethics, the Gestalt of the body, becoming sub- or superhumans or alternative-humans, others will only differ from me in unobservable details: a single molecule of ACTH that his striated body released while your striated body did not, a single extra K cell in your blood, an odd glint in his eye …

Like sex, like drugs, like all the manipulations of our minds that attempt to break out of the skull, literature is a machine for producing first beatitude, then disappointment. After you’ve read tens of thousands of books, you can’t help but ask yourself: while I was doing that, where did my life go? You’ve gulped down the lives of others, which always lack a dimension in comparison to the world in which you exist, however amazing their tours of artistic force may be. You have seen colors of others and felt the bitterness and sweetness and potential and exasperation of other consciousnesses, to the point that they have eclipsed your own sensations and pushed them into the shadows. If only you could pass into the tactile space of beings other than you—but again and again, you were only rolled between the fingertips of literature. Unceasingly, in a thousand voices, it promised you escape, while it robbed you of even the frozen crust of reality that you once had.

I came upon a place unlike any other in the world. When you are four years old, every new place is like this. You move in the field of hallucination and vision, until the trails of memory are worn into your brain. Any new sight feels like a fable, however banal it might be, because expressions such as “in reality,” “truly,” or “as it is” are meaningless to one who sees reality the way that later we relive our earliest memories or live within our dreams.

It was a round, gilded coin set in a metal frame. There were letters on both sides of the coin: A, O, R on one side, M and U on the other. Several days passed before I solved the mystery when on a whim I flicked the coin and it spun so quickly in its metal frame that it became a gold sphere, as free and transparent as a dandelion, with the ghostly word AMOUR in the middle. This is what my life is like, how it has always seemed: the singular, uniform, and tangible world on one side of the coin, and the secret, private, phantasmagoric world of my mind’s dreams on the other side. Neither is complete and true without the other. Only the rotation, only the whirling, only vestibular syndromes, only a god’s careless finger spins the coin, adds a dimension, and makes visible (but for whose eyes?) the inscription engraved in our minds—on one side and the other, on day and night, lucidity and dream, woman and man, animal and god, while we remain eternally ignorant because we cannot see both sides at the same time. And it doesn’t end there, because you need to comprehend the transparent inscription of liquid gold in the middle of the sphere, and in order to understand it with your mind, not just to see it with your eyes, your mind must become an eye in a higher dimension. The dandelion sphere must itself be spun, on a plane impossible to imagine, in order to become, in relation to the sphere, what the sphere is in relation to the flat disk. The meaning lies in the hypersphere, in the unnamable, transparent object that results from spinning the sphere in the fourth dimension.

As long as I can remember, I have had a strong feeling of predestination. The very act of opening my eyes in the world made me feel like I was chosen—because they weren’t a spider’s eyes, they weren’t the thousands of hexagons of a fly’s eye, they weren’t the eyes on the tips of a snail’s horns; because I didn’t come into the world as a bacterium or a myriapod. The enormous ganglion of my brain, I felt, predestined me to an obsessive search for a way out. I understood I must use my brain like an eye, open and observant under the skull’s transparent shell, able to see with another kind of sight and to detect fissures and signs, hidden artifacts and obscure connections in this test of intelligence, patience, love, and faith that is this world. As long as I can remember, I have done nothing but search for breaches in the apparently flat, logical, fissureless surface of the model within my skull. What am I supposed to think, what am I supposed to understand, what are you saying to me, what are you whispering in an unknown language?

“As long as I exist, as long I have been given the impossible opportunity of being,” I have often told myself, “I am, without a doubt, chosen.” We are all chosen in this sense, we are all illuminated, because the sun of existence illuminates us all. And I am chosen twice over because, unlike a wasp or crustacean, I am able to think in logical space and I can make models of the world in which I can move on their reduced, virtual scale, while my arms and legs move through the inconceivable real world. And I am thrice chosen because unlike shopkeepers and plumbers and warriors and whores and clowns and other groups of people who look like me, I can ponder my choices and think of myself thinking. The object of my thought is my thought, and my world is the same as my mind. My mission is, thus, that of a surveyor and cartographer, an explorer of organs and caves, of the oubliettes and prisons of my mind, as well as its Alps, full of glaciers and ravines.

No one knew what the factory had made. Perhaps pipes, to make the city sewer system, or to help the war? Maybe the pipe factory was nothing but the modern avatar of the factory we were now walking around, through mud full of mortar fragments. But we knew, from what other teachers or a child’s father had said, that nothing of what could be found in the bowels of the halls could have come from any pipe production line, in fact it didn’t fit any production line they were familiar with. More probably, like all of Bucharest, the saddest city on the face of the earth, the factory had been designed as a ruin from the start, as a saturnine witness to time devouring its children, as an illustration of the unforgiving second law of thermodynamics, as a silent, submissive, masochistic bowing of the head in the face of the destruction of all things and the pointlessness of all activity, from the effort of carbon to form crystals to the effort of our minds to understand the tragedy in which we live. Like Brasília, but more deeply and more truly, Bucharest was born on a drawing board from a philosophical impulse to imagine a city that would most poignantly illustrate human destiny: a city of ruin, decline, illness, debris, and rust. That is, the most appropriate construction for the faces and appearances of its inhabitants. The old factory’s production lines, driven by long-immobile motors, had produced—and perhaps, in a quiet isolation beyond humanity, continued to produce—the fear and grief, the unhappiness and agony, the melancholy and suffering of our life on Earth, in sufficient quantities for the surrounding neighborhood.

These creatures were alive, but did they really live? They doubtless sensed the world around them, but how? And what did the fact that they sensed it mean? What kind of life was that? Ever since I found, at age sixteen, the treatise in the agricultural engineer’s house, I hadn’t stopped wondering what it would have been like to be born as a mite or a louse, or one of the billions of polyps on coral reefs. I would have lived without knowing that I lived, my life would have been a moment of obscure agitation, with pains and pleasures and contacts and alarms and urges, far from thought and far from consciousness, in some abject hole, in a blind dot, in total oblivion. “But that is what I am, it is,” I suddenly found myself saying out loud. This is what we all are, blind mites stumbling along our piece of dust in an unknown, irrational infinity, in the horrible dead end of this world. We think we have access to the logical-mathematical structure of the world, but we continue to live without self-consciousness and without understanding, digging tunnels through the skin of God, causing him nothing but fits and irritation. The mite that burrows through my skin does not know me and cannot understand me. Its ganglions of nerves are not made for it. Its sensory organs do not spread their sails more than a few millimeters around the body it does not know it has. Neither can we know the miraculous creatures that are to us what we are to the parasites in our skin and the mites on the pillow where we sleep. We cannot detect their chemical secrets, and our thought is equally powerless. All our knowledge is a stammering tactility. But just as their bodies are made of the same substance as ours, our thoughts are the same substance as those creatures who are nothing but thought. To know them, however, you need thought of another nature and on another level, thought of a body of thought we cannot conceive of, just as the mite cannot conceive of our thought and cannot, truly, think.

Nothing is strange to a child, because he lives in the strange, thus dreams and old memories seem made from the same substance.

I said “metaphysical motor,” but just as well I could have said “paranoid motor,” since all metaphysics is actually paranoia. There’s a day when you see three or four blind people, after not seeing any for years, not even in a dream. You meet a woman named Olimpia, and a few minutes later you open a dictionary to the page showing Manet’s Olympia, then two hours later, on the street, you pass Olimpia’s Flowershop. These are nodes of meaning, plexuses of the world’s neural system, they connect organs and events, signals that you ought to pursue until they wave a white flag—and you would, if you didn’t have this stupid prejudice for reality. We ought to have a sensory organ that can tell sign from coincidence. In a single day, you see three pregnant women one after another: what does this mean? If there had only been two, would the coincidence have affected you as much? What if these three were joined by one more, suddenly emerging from a house and walking down the street in front of you? And if she stopped and quickly turned around and handed you a crumpled scrap of paper, where only this was written: “Help!”—and then she fled awkwardly up the street? How long would the ice of reality hold? When—at what moment—do you feel it crack beneath your feet? First you see the fine cracks of coincidences, these ramify and expand unsettlingly, but the ice still holds and so far you’re not worried: it was just another pregnant woman, a fourth. It happens. It is not impossible that they all should cross your path in a single day. But then she hands you the note, you read it, and the ice shatters, you fall into the freezing water, and suddenly you are underneath, searching like a sea lion for a hole where you can breathe.

I would have forgotten that a book, in order to mean something, must appear at a certain perspective. I would have written immanent, aesthetically autonomous books, which the reader would have looked at the way a cat looks at a finger pointing to the ball of yarn on the floor. But a book should be a sign, should tell you to “go over there” or “stop” or “fly” or “disembowel yourself.” A book should demand an answer. If it doesn’t—if your gaze ends on its ingenious, inventive, tender, wise, joyful, and wonderful surface instead of pointing you in the direction this book shows—then you have read a literary work and you have missed, once again, the meaning of any human effort: to escape from this world. Novels hold you here, they keep you warm and cozy, they put glittering ribbons on the circus horse. But when, for God’s sake, will you read a real book?

I don’t believe in books—I believe in pages, in phrases, in lines. There are some, in some books, like in the coded text a general receives on the battlefield: only some of the words mean anything, surrounded by meaningless blather. The general places his cardboard stencil over the letter and reads only the words that appear in the cutout spaces. That’s how we should read the three-dimensional text of existence. But who gives you the stencil, who tells you the real words, who sifts the diamonds out of the slag? Which wire will you cut in the bomb in front of you, ticking as though it were your own heart, the red one or the blue one? When everything is urgent, when there is no time, when you are under pressure, you make mistakes, even if you have the stencil. When you don’t have it, when you rely on the intuition of the blind, on the vigilance of the deaf, everything becomes unimaginably complicated, hopeless, and absurd. I will die before I unravel the enigma, I tell myself every day of my life.

I have always wondered whether everyone’s interior life is as exhaustingly complicated as mine, if everyone is placed, like a white mouse, in the middle of their labyrinthine mind, through which they have to find a path, just one, the true one, while all the others lead to traps with no escape.

I had always thought you couldn’t talk about things that reveal yourself. Not face-to-face with the other person. That is why I write instead of talk. When you’re face-to-face, eye-to-eye with someone close to you, as though your face were actually poured into his and your eyes were enclosed by his, like in a spherical box, only then do you feel the insurmountable wall between your minds (“What does blue look like to you?”, “How can I feel your toothache?”). That’s why people used books to say important things, because a book assumes an absence, on one side or the other: while it is being written, the reader is missing. While it is being read, the writer is missing. The disgust and abjection that come from putting the judge face-to-face with the condemned thus disappear.

With the somber sensitivity of an adolescent, the most unhappy of human avatars, I suddenly understood the entire world as an enormous riddle. One word was missing, just one, but this absence caused everything to be lost, because enigmas, mazes, jigsaw puzzles, cryptograms were nothing but questions, worlds left incomplete in the absence of an answer. This was what we were all looking for: the answer, the answer that was the truth. For a long time I simply stood at the window, without looking at anything, listening to the dozens of voices inside me. One of the threads would disappear and return, until it presented itself as a strange image: what if our cerebral hemispheres were eyeballs? What if their specialization, so well known (the left—reason, mathematics, speech, “masculine”; the right—intuition, space, emotion, art, “feminine”), were the equivalent of the difference between the viewing angles of two eyes? What if our thoughts and, certainly, our egos were born from the convergence of these two types of cognition? Focusing them would itself keep us from reading reality, from understanding its encoded message. Wouldn’t we need—when we regarded every enigma—to let both hemispheres gaze inattentively, like in a dream, making the two faces of the world change position slightly, until they superimposed? Wasn’t everything somehow right in front of our eyes, like in the autostereogram I held between my fingers, but our habits, learned from our predecessors, kept us from seeing the message in their depths?

In this period, my nocturnal hallucinations and dreams alternated with novelties from the Old Testament, the book to end all books, the book which—after the hundreds and thousands of texts I had read up until then with great pleasure: poems, novels, stories, essays, and literary studies—showed me, and everyone else, that it was possible to speak the truth, to lay the truth out over pages as thin as the discarded skins of vipers. That little book with thousands of transparent pages, with its twin columns of tiny type, with its numbers and footnotes, with the maps of Judea at the end, seemed as valuable to me as the tablets of Moses, where, it was said, the writing was not carved but floated one finger-width above the stone’s polished surface: written by the finger of God, floating in the air, glittering a holographic blue, casting a gentle light just like the face of the prophet who, on the mountain, neither ate nor slept for forty days. That’s what literature must be, in order to mean anything: an act of levitation over the page, a pneumatic text without any point of contact with the material world. I knew that I would never write anything that could burrow into the page, buried within its ditches and tunnels like semantic mites, the way all storytellers wrote, all the authors of books “about something.” I knew that you shouldn’t really write anything but Bibles, anything but Gospels. And that the most miserable fate on Earth belongs to him who used his own mind and his own voice to utter words that had never been dictated to him, had not been placed in his mouth: the false prophets of all literature.

It was the era of renewed interest in the ancient wisdom of humanity, the search for the mythical Agartha, or the nightmarish Shambala, the era of spirits conjured by grotesque mediums, of walking specters drooling from the corner of their mouths or spurting ectoplasm from their fontanelles like blue cigar smoke, the age of moving tables and fingers selecting letters on a board to piece together messages from the beyond. All these were the exuviae of an era that passed from steam technology to electricity, meant so people would not forget that technology and magic are two sides of the same medallion, that in their primitive-sophisticated minds the miracle of technology was always counterbalanced by the technology of miracles.

In the complicated spiderweb of railway tracks, there occasionally are movable sections which, before the trains pass, change the line, with a simple and sometimes barely observable slide from one divergent track to the next. Every moment in our life is this kind of a switch; we are at every moment at a switch point, and we have the illusion that we are choosing one of the two ways ahead, with all the ethical, psychological, or religious dimensions of our choices. But, in fact, the path is the one that leads us, the maze of rails makes every decision for us, constructing us along the way, a real and virtual anatomical model, from which we hang with our organs eviscerated, like pigeons and rats in natural science museums. The path, on which—as it chooses for us each moment, with each breath, heartbeat, secretion of insulin, thought, love, eclipse, and orgasm—we advance dreamlike through the spiderweb of life, solidifies and becomes history, that is to say memory, while all the possible but unrealized other paths, the enormous reservoir of our virtualities, all our billions of lookalikes (those who, moment by moment, turned left when we turned right), form, on the skeleton of reality, on our time-solidified bone structure, the hyaline organs that we see in mirrors and dreams, the ghosts with our face, the puffy, abstract pleroma, curving around us like a dandelion sphere. For the divine eye that looks at us from above, I am not my life—the accidental, zigzagging path through the giant maze, the line that leads from the periphery to the center—for it, I am the labyrinth itself, because there is one for each of us, constructed unconsciously by our own selves, as the snail secretes his calcinated shell, as we secrete, without knowing in what way, our brain and vertebrae.

Here, in the cardboard box of my manuscript, I have dumped a heap of jigsaw puzzle pieces, each one in itself incomprehensible, each one falling faceup or facedown onto the others, scattering across the vast field of play. Out of these pieces, the long fingers of the logic of dreams could—through meticulous maneuvers of combination, rotation, positioning, augmentation, and diminution, centralization and lateralization, highlighting and blurring—arrive at a partially coherent picture, at least coherent for me, while for everyone else it would remain absurd, because there are both intelligible and unintelligible coherences, just as there are comprehensible and incomprehensible absurdities. You can understand the intelligible, and this is calm; you can understand the unintelligible, and this is power, you can not understand the intelligible, and this is terror; you can not understand the unintelligible, and this is enlightenment. As in the deepest darkness, you can no longer tell if your eyes are open or closed, sometimes I feel that in the midst of my life’s fears and tremors, I do not know on which side of my brain I am.

If dreams had never been, we would never have known we have a soul. The concrete, tangible, real world would have been all there was—the only dream permitted to us; and because it was the only one, it would have been incapable of recognizing itself as a dream. We doubt the world because we dream. We perceive it as it is—a sinister prison for minds—only because, when we close our eyes at night, we always wake up on the other side of our eyelids. It is like the way traveling opens your eyes and mind, it is like a bird’s high flight, where it sees far-off realms. Your village is not the only one in the world and not the navel of the world. Dreams are maps, where the widespread territories of our interior lives appear. They are worlds with one more dimension than the diurnal, and many more than our brains, which cross new landscapes without being able to understand them.

I had a smile on my face, the only immaterial, though precisely outlined, thing: as life is a certain disposition of the body, and as the sound of the Platonic lyre is, in its harmony, a certain disposition of the parts of the lyre, the smile only appears when everything is the way it should be. Happiness burns and transmutes with petrifying speed into its inverse, or maybe it is only an unstable amalgam of happiness-unhappiness; and joy, the luminous state of the soul, is the true substance from which reality is made. Nothing concrete and true can exist without it, just as sight does not exist separately from light.

I always knew that writing was a palimpsest, scraping away at a page that already contains everything, a revelation of signs and curls brought to light for the first time, the way as children we turn big rocks over to see, in the wet impression left in the dirt, the panic of disturbed ants, fleeing with white larvae in their mandibles, the lazy unraveling of wiry centipedes, the dazed flight of a translucent spider. The subterranean murmur of white sheets, their avidity for all stories, all the glory and all the shame and all the thought and all the inferno on Earth.

I live in such a strange world: it might not be reality, it might be a stage set built just for me, one that will disappear as soon as I stop perceiving it. How often have I thought I could whip around and catch the stuttering stagehands knocking the backdrops together, see the single wall of the propped-up buildings fall over, or catch the moment when all perceptions dissolve into the void of death! I might be the last person on Earth, the maze I am in might be generated, moment by moment, just for me; my consciousness might be the projection of a much vaster mind, one I contemplate without being able to understand it, the way a cat regards its giant master. Can a mind accept, once it imagines totality and eternity, the fact that it is not eternal nor all-encompassing? Can I accept the fact that to contemplate the universe, this life has given me the mind of a cat, crab, or worm? Can I know that the universe is comprehensible, but accept that it is not given to me to understand it?

Some people are functions, they live along one edge of the world for the sake of a single gesture, a single reply, lacking their own life or psychology, like doormen or elevator operators in big hotels.

Nothing has ever seemed more desolate to me than an empty classroom, abandoned by its population of minute people with disproportionately large skulls and eyes that could swallow you whole. When the Mary Celeste was discovered drifting across the endless ocean, on the icy cetacean path, what was shocking and frightening was the disappearance of the crew, the emptiness of the cabins, the inhumanity of a human construction emptied of the inhabitants who had given it a use and purpose. Every empty classroom, with coats still hanging on hooks and heaps of books and notebooks on the writing-covered desks, with a window open and the breeze giving the curtain a ghostly swell, would always bring tears to my eyes, because it reminded me of a day from the depths of time when I went to the school I attended in the middle of summer and I found it vacant, melancholy, and deserted, frozen under the glaze of time like a photo with poorly reproduced colors.

Each morning, before opening my eyes, I feel the same anxiety: This again? This is what’s called reality? This is what my life will be: home–school–home–school, with no chance of breaking this vicious and destructive circle? Why was I given, like everyone else like me, a god’s mind, if it had to come with a mite’s body? Why can I think, when I can think of nothing but how I will perish in my hallway, buried in the skin of a creature I will never come to know? Why can I understand everything, if I can do nothing?

The essential ambiguity of my writing. Its irreducible insanity. I was in a world that cannot be described, and definitely not understood, through any other kind of writing, insofar as it can be truly comprehended. Revealing is one thing, and the painful process of reverse engineering, which is true understanding, quite another. You have before your eyes an artifact of another world, with other dawns and other gods, an enigmatic Antikythera mechanism that shines, floating in the air, in all the details of its metal brackets covered with symbols and gears. It was difficult to retrieve it from the bottom of the sea, from all its oyster beds and undulating algae, to meticulously clean off the crust of petrified sand and rust, to grease it with glittering oil, to set every gear in place so all the teeth fit together, and this is what my manuscript has done, up to this point: it has revealed, brought to light, unveiled what was hidden behind veils, it has decrypted what was locked in the crypt, it has deciphered the cipher of the box where it lay, without even a dash of the unknown object’s shadow and melancholy dripping into our world. The more details we see, the less we understand, because understanding means penetrating the meaning of the mechanism, and that only exists in the mind of its inventor. Understanding means penetrating another mind; any object that asks to be understood is a portal on that mind, and the terror and endless enigma begin the moment when, looking at an object, you are sucked inside it and deposited within an inhuman mind, completely different than your own, a world you call, with all of the word’s ambiguity, sacred, which is to say, foreign, apparently arbitrary, capable of miracles and absurdities, that can feed you or crush you for equally obscure reasons. You can learn this mind’s mannerisms, you can use prayer to receive, invocation to make manifest, the way a cat licks its master at dinnertime, but how the master leads his life, how he built the house, turned on the lights, drove the car, how he learned that the sun will rise tomorrow, how he knows that there is a tomorrow, in what way he deciphers mathematical symbols and their ghostlike movements across the logical field, and countless other details of an unimaginable life within a world and within a mind of another level of complexity—all of this, for the cat, is camouflaged inside another dimension, on another spiral arm of existence. When the master points at something with his finger, the cat looks at the finger, sniffs it, licks it. That is how we understand the Godly: incomprehensible beyond good and evil, lost for us in an unreachable dimension. Religions are, and should be, the mindless contemplation of God’s finger, in our inability to understand that the finger is not the message, it only points toward something else. We think with the ganglion of flesh inside our skull, we are censured by its limitations, just as the fly uses its own ganglion within its world, as the cat uses its brain in its little skull to ask for food and affection from a foreign and incomprehensible creature.

Only the eternal Efimov, the eternal dilettante, has anything to say, in the sad world of our impostures. Only the one who, far from the grand whirlpool of glory, fills notebooks with the bizarreries and anomalies of the soft animal between the clam’s valves, writing only for himself; except he understands his situation, his position outside of the rules and customs of his art, outside of the mammoth mausoleum. Only the amateur, who doesn’t even know what he will do with his manuscript, who doesn’t even know if it really exists (how many times have I dreamed of thick notebooks, full of stories, written by me in other dreams, enthusiastically turning through dozens of pages, only for morning to come and everything to turn to ash …); only the disdained janitor, grouchy and taciturn, who leaves behind thousands of pages, illustrated with amazing girls, dragons, butterflies, and bloodshed; the lathe worker who keeps a diary meticulously describing his factory shift, how he uses condoms, what he eats and how he defecates; the hairdresser who compulsively details the terrible pains of her fertility treatments; the hebephrenic student who writes the world’s longest composition about what he did on his summer vacation, throwing in pirates and aliens; all these nutcases, who can’t put a sentence together, who are ignorant of high culture, who make art out of patches, trash, and nothing, only they know the best-kept secret of any art: the blind man’s battle and the lame man’s flight—everything else is barren ritual and Pharisaism. Their books are destined for fires and forgetting. That’s good, that’s real. There comes a moment when each of us must decide to rescue either the work of art or the child from the burning building. With only one of those two will we depict Judgment, and it is the only way we will be judged. The professional, every time, will save the masterpiece. The very one he wrote, painted, composed. The dilettante will save the child and let his own writing burn, along with his body and his mind.

Faced with the terrible gods of death and of rending, the child smiled. Just as miraculous and counterintuitive as the way our improbable consciousness opposes brute matter. A smile is a special arrangement of matter, a fold of our mouth, the way consciousness is a special disposition of our brain’s synapses. We are all a smile of the void, of the night, a fold of the frightening, silent Pascaline spaces. We are an impossible formation of the aleatory, endless world; we are the coin landing on an edge so thin that it cuts itself in half a billion times per second. This continual self-drawing and self-quartering is our pathetic being. Only Simmias got it right in the great debate over immortality, he who called the spirit a harmony, impossible without the lyre, because it came from the special, unique combination of its parts: the ivory frame and sheep-gut strings, so finely tuned that it will always defy the monstrous roar of matter. We are chords made of chords made of chords, layer upon layer of folds of space and time and energy, from the smile of quarks impossibly isolated from each other to the smile of bosons and pheromones, from the atomic smile to the molecular, with their three-dimensional contortions, from the smile of ultra-hyper-superorganized living substances, their inflorescence wonderfully unfolding in spite of the laws of statistics and thermodynamics, to the great and overwhelming smile of self-knowledge. A holarchy of smiles, miracles, and impossibilities that led to the infant who was us all, passed from hand to hand by the angels of destruction and yet surviving, with a smile, the long line of horrors that is our life in the world. Human consciousness (“ce seul objet dont le néant s’honore”) is a smile, the smile of providence. Its death is absolute murder, it cannot be accepted and never excused. It is that against which you must rage, with all your might: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light!”