I do not read books nowadays but I sometimes handle books and sometimes I even look into a book. If the book is a book that I read long ago, I look at a few pages. But if the book is one of the many that I have never read, I read the words on the dust-jacket and in the preliminary pages. I am not so stupid that I suppose the words I read are telling me about the other pages – the pages of the text that I will never read. I suppose instead that the words I read at the front and the back of the book and even the illustrations and the patterns on the dust-jacket are telling me about the pages of text in some other book. The other book is nowhere on my shelves. I may never see the other book. I cannot guess what colours might be on the dust-jacket of that other book, or what words at its front and its back might tell about the inner pages of some other book still.

Or the other pages – the pages of the text that I only read about – are between the covers of no other book. Those pages have drifted away who knows where. Sometimes I think of all the drifting pages of the world as having been collected and brought together in buildings of many rooms in grassy landscapes under skies filled with clouds, and as having been bound, after all their drifting, into dream-books with dream-patterns on their jackets and dream-colours on their spines and dream-words on their preliminary pages, and as having been stored on the shelves of a dream-library.

Yet sometimes a drifting page drifts away from the drifting pages around it. Such a page might drift in among other sorts of pages – even in among the preliminary pages of books such as these books around me here.

One day in this room I read in the preliminary pages of an unlikely book these words:

There is another world but it is in this one.

Paul Eluard

I cannot remember having read the inner pages of the book in whose outer pages I found these words. I have never taken the trouble to find out who Paul Eluard is or was. I prefer to think of who he might have been: a man whose life’s work was to compose, perhaps in some language other than my own, a sentence that has drifted far away from the pages where it was first written and has come to rest for the time being in one of the preliminary pages of a book in this room where I sometimes get up from my table in order to open the front pages of some book whose spine has made me dream of myself reading the pages that must have drifted long before into some dream-book.

There is another world, and I have seen parts of that world on most days of my life. But the parts of that world are drifting past and cannot be lived in. For as long as I used to see drifting past me those parts of the other world, I used to wonder about the place where all the drifting parts drifted together. But I no longer wondered after I had read the words attached to the name Paul Eluard.

There is another world but it is in this one...So say the words printed among the preliminary pages of one of the books that I have never read. But what place exactly do the words this one refer to? They cannot refer to the space between the covers of the book where I found them. I have never yet found a book whose preliminary pages and whose inner pages belong together. And in any case, the name of the author on the front of my book is not Paul Eluard but Patrick White. The words this one can only refer to the so-called world between the covers of a book I have never seen: a book whose author is a man named Paul Eluard.

Perhaps those words from Paul Eluard first appeared in the preliminary pages of a book of his. But I repeat: I have never found any book whose preliminary pages belonged with its inner pages, which means that the other world is within drifting pages that I will almost certainly never see: pages in a dream-book that I can only dream of.

On the other hand, the words of Paul Eluard might have first appeared on the inner pages of one of his books. In that case, I have to understand the words somewhat differently. If the words were in the inner pages of a book, they can only have been uttered by a narrator or a character – by one of those people who inhabit the inner pages of books. There is another world, says one of those people deep inside the pages of a book, but it is in – and therefore at one remove further from you out there – this world where I am now.

The other world, in other words, is a place that can only be seen or dreamed of by those people known to us as narrators of books or characters within books. If you or I, reader, happen to glimpse part of that world drifting past, as it were, it is because we have seen or dreamed of ourselves seeing for a moment as a narrator or a character in a book sees or dreams of seeing.

If someone reading this page is thinking of Paul Eluard as a living man uttering his words in the place that is usually called the real world and referring perhaps to something as simple as a world he has dreamed of or the world in which the characters in books lead their so-called lives, then I can only answer that if a man named Paul Eluard walked into this room tonight and uttered his mysterious words, I would understand Mr Eluard as my reader wants to understand him. But until Paul Eluard comes into my room I have only a copy of his written words. He wrote his words and at the instant of his writing them the words entered the world of narrators and characters and landscapes – not to mention pages that drift into other books where they might be read by people such as myself.

But what if Paul Eluard wrote no book? What if the only words he wrote in all his life are the ten mysterious words, which he wrote only once on a blank page before setting the page adrift? There is another world but it is in this one...Even then, the words are still written. However, in this case the other world must be understood as lying within the virgin whiteness which is all that part of the page where, as yet, no word has been written. (Inland)