Twenty-one

At every awakening, every morning – a reluctant awakening, which might also be described as lazy – this gentleman begins the day with a rapid inventory of the world. He realized some time ago that he always awakens in a different point of the cosmos, even if the earth, the capsule in which he dwells, does not look extrinsically modified. As a child he was convinced that the movements of the earth through space direct it from time to time into the near vicinity or even through the interior of hell, whereas it is never permitted to pass through paradise, since that experience would render all further continuance of the world impossible, superfluous and ridiculous. So paradise must avoid the earth at all cost, so as not to wound Creation’s plans, which are meticulous and incomprehensible. Even now – as an adult man who drives and owns an automobile – something of that childhood hypothesis has remained with him. By now he has cast it in slightly more secular terms, and the question he asks himself is more metaphoric and apparently detached: he knows that while he sleeps the whole world moves – as dreams demonstrate – and that every morning the pieces of the world, no matter if involved in a game or not, are arrayed differently on the board. He claims no right to know what this shift may mean, but he knows that at times he can feel the presence of abysses, the temptations of sheer cliffs, or rare, long plains on which he’d like to roll – there are times when he comes to see himself as a spherical celestial body – on and on. There are moments, too, of confused impressions of grasses, and as well of the exciting but not infrequently unpleasant sensation of being illumined by several suns, suns not always reciprocally friendly. At other times, he clearly hears the sound of waves, sent by either storm or calm; and on occasion he is brutally reminded of his own position in the world: for example, when cruel and attentive jaws take him by the back of the neck, as must have happened countless times to doomed and exhausted forebears between the teeth of beasts whose faces they never saw. He learned some time ago that you never wake up in your own room: he has concluded in fact that there are no such things as rooms, that walls and sheets are illusions, a fakery; he knows that he is suspended in the void; that he, like every other person, is the centre of the world, from which infinite infinities radiate. He knows he could not hold his own in the face of so much horror, and that the room, and even the abyss and hell, are inventions intended to defend him.