The ancient Aramaic phrases, such as “the days of old,” “not of this world,” “the concealed side,” filled Fima with a sense of mystery and awe. For a moment he asked himself if it was not possible after all that the light and the mud, the glowworms in the almond tree and the radiant sky, the arid land extending eastward from here to Mesopotamia and southward to Bab el-Mandeb at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, and indeed his shabby flat and his aging body and even his broken telephone, were all nothing but different expressions of the same being, a being condemned to be broken into countless flawed, perishable embodiments, even though in itself it was whole and eternal and one. Only on a winter morning like this, under the nuptial veil of limpid light, which is perhaps what is meant by the ancient Aramaic phrase “supernal radiance,” does the earth along with your watching eyes recover the thrill of that primordial touch. And everything returns to its state of original innocence. As on the day of creation. And for an instant the constant murky cloak of dreariness and deceit is removed.

And so Fima’s thoughts arrived at the hackneyed concept of “the heavenly Jerusalem,” to which he gave his private interpretation, valid solely for what he felt at that particular moment. He mused that there were times when the state of sleeping seemed less tainted with falsehood than the state of waking, and times when it was the other way around, and that ultimate wakefulness was the most longed-for ideal. He now reached the thought that it might be a matter of three states and not two: sleeping, waking, and this light that had been flooding him both from without and within ever since the start of this morning. For want of a suitable name he described the light to himself as the Third State. And he felt that it was not only a matter of the pure light on the hills but of the light truly flowing out of the hills and out of himself too, and that it was in the commingling of these rays of light that the Third State came into being, equidistant from complete waking and from the deepest slumber and yet distinct from both.