The carts are so packed that one has to get down off them to have a chance of making it over even the smallest rise. Feet raise clouds of dust, for September is hot and dry, and the grass by the road is faded from the sun. Most people go on foot, resting every few miles in the shade of the walnut trees, and then all the adults and children look around in the fallen leaves for the nuts, which are as big as their palms.

At crossroads such as this one, pilgrims coming from all different directions join together and greet one another heartily. The majority of them are poor, small tradesmen and craftsmen, the kind who support their families with their own hands, weaving, wiring, sharpening, and mending. The men, in ragged clothing, are bent double from the portable stalls they carry on their shoulders from morning to night. Dusty and tired, they exchange news and offer one another simple food. They don’t need anything other than water and a piece of bread to tide them over until the great event. When you think like that, a person doesn’t want much in order to live. He doesn’t even have to eat every day. What does he need combs, ribbons, clay pots, sharp knives for, when the world is about to be totally transformed? Everything is going to be different, although no one can say how. That’s what they are all talking about.

The carts are full of women and children. Cradles are strapped to the little wagons and hung up under a tree when they stop awhile, mothers putting down their infants in them with relief, their hands having gone numb from holding them. The bigger children, barefoot, grimy, dazed by the heat, doze in their mothers’ skirts or on little beds of hay covered with dirty linen.

In some villages other Jews go out to them and spit at their feet, and children of every origin—Polish, Ruthenian, and Jewish—shout at them as they pass:

“Ne’er-do-wells! Ne’er-do-wells! Trinity! Trinity!”

In the evenings they don’t even ask for a place to sleep, they just lie down by the water, at the edge of a thicket, by some wall still warm from the day. The women hang the cradles, the diapers, light a fire, and the men set out into the village for some food, gathering along the way fallen green apples and purple plums that are swollen from the sun and lure wasps and bumblebees with their profligate sweet bodies.

Yente sees the sky opening over them in their sleep; they sleep strangely lightly. Everything is holy, as though it were special, as though it were Shabbat, as if it had all been washed and ironed. As if one had to walk very straight now and take very careful steps. Maybe the one watching them will finally wake from the numbness that lasts thousands of years? Under the divine gaze, everything becomes strange and heavy with portent. Children, for instance, find a metal cross pressed into a tree so firmly that it cannot be extracted from the bark that has grown around it. The clouds take on unusual shapes, perhaps of biblical animals—maybe those lions no one has ever seen, so that no one even knows what they looked like. Or a cloud that looks like the fish that swallowed Jonah as it floats over the horizon. And in the tiny little cloud beside it someone even spotted Jonah himself, spit out, crooked as an apple core. Sometimes they are accompanied by Noah’s blue ark. It glides across the firmament, enormous, and Noah himself bustles about in it, feeding his animals for a hundred and fifty days. And on the roof of the ark, just look, everyone, look—who is that? That is the uninvited guest, the giant Og, who, when the floodwaters were rising, latched on to the ark at the last minute.

They say: We will not die. Baptism will save us from death. But what’s it going to be like? Will people get old? Will people stay the same age for all eternity? They say everyone is going to stay thirty forever. This cheers the old and scares the young. But supposedly this is the best age, where health, wisdom, and experience are entwined harmoniously, their meanings equal. What would it be like, not to die? There would be a lot of time for everything, you’d collect a lot of groszy, build a house, and travel a little here and there, since, after all, a whole eternity cannot be spent in a single place.

Everything has lain in ruin until now, the world is made up of wants—this is lacking, that is gone. But why is it like that? Couldn’t there have been everything in excess—warmth, and food, and roofs over people’s heads, and beauty? Whom would it have hurt? Why was such a world as this created? There is nothing permanent under the sun, everything passes, and you won’t even have time to get a good look at it. But why is it like that? Could there not have been more time, and more reflection?

It is only when we become worthy of being created anew that we shall receive from the Good True God a new soul, full, whole. And man shall be as everlasting as God. (The Books of Jacob)

We conducted many investigations into the Trinity in Ivanie, and it seemed to me that I had come to grasp its meaning.

What is our real task if not the establishment of equilibrium between the unity of God and the multiplicity of the world created by him? As for ourselves, people—are we not abandoned in this “in-between,” in between the One and a world of divisions? This limitless “between” has its strange critical point—the double. This is the first experience of the thinking man—when he notices the abyss that appears between himself and the rest of the world. This is the painful Two, the fundamental crack in the created world that gives rise to contradictions and all sorts of dualisms. This and that. You and me. Left and right. Sitra Achra, or the other side, the left side, the demonic forces in the guise of the broken shells of the vessels that could not hold the light when they were broken (shevirat haKelim)—that is the Two. Perhaps were it not for the Two in the world, the world would be completely different, although it’s hard to imagine that; no doubt Jacob would be able to. One time we worked ourselves to the bone, late into the night, trying to complete this assignment, but it was to no avail, for our minds think in this rhythm: two, two, two.

The Trinity is holy, like a wise wife, reconciling contradictions. Two is like a young roe doe, leaping over every contradiction. That’s what makes the Trinity holy, that it can tame evil. But because the Trinity must ceaselessly work on behalf of the equilibrium it disturbs, it is shaky, and it isn’t until you get to Four that you attain the highest holiness and perfection that restores divine proportions. It is not in vain that God’s name in Hebrew is composed of four letters, and that all the elements of the world were established so by Him (Yeruhim once told me that even animals can count to four!), and everything that is important in the world must be quadruple.

Once Moshe went to the kitchen, took some challah dough, brought it back, and started forming some sort of shape from it. We laughed at him, especially Jacob, because nothing went together less than Moshe and kitchen work.

“What is it?” he asked us, and revealed the result of his project.

We saw on the table an alef made of dough, and we answered him accordingly. Then Moshe took the ends of the holy letter made of dough and in a couple of simple movements reshaped it.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Now it was a cross.

For, Moshe argued, the holy letter is the germ of the cross, its original form. If it were a living plant, it would grow into a cross. The cross thus contains a great mystery. For God is one in three forms, and then to the threeness of God we add the Shekhinah.

Such knowledge was not for everyone. People who had gathered with us in Ivanie were of such varying backgrounds and had had such different experiences that we all agreed not to give them this holy knowledge, lest they understand it amiss. When they asked me about the Trinity, I would raise my hand to my forehead and touch the skin there, saying, “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

These were the kinds of conversations we had only with each other, in a small group and in hushed voices—for the walls of the Ivanie huts tended to not be sealed completely—when we finished writing letters, and our fingers were all covered in ink, and our eyes were so tired that all they could do was gaze into the dance of the candle flames. And then Moliwda would tell us tales of the beliefs of those Bogomils, as he called them, and in those beliefs we were surprised to determine that we had much in common with them, as if the path taken by both us and them were in the beginning one but later bifurcated to then converge again into one, just like our two roads in Ivanie.

Is life itself not a stranger to this world? And are we not strangers, and is our God not a stranger? Is this not why we appear so different, so distant, so scary, and incomprehensible to those who really do belong to this world? But this world is equally bizarre and incomprehensible to any stranger to it, and its rules are incomprehensible, as are its customs. For the stranger comes from the farthest distance, from the outside, and he must endure the fate of the foreigner, alone and defenseless, completely misunderstood. We are foreigners’ foreigners, Jews’ Jews. And we will always be homesick.

Since we do not know the roads of this world, we move through it defenseless, blind, knowing only that we are strangers to it.

Moliwda said that as soon as we strangers, living amongst those others, get used to and learn to take pleasure in the charms of this world, we will forget where we came from and what sort of origins were ours. Then our misery will end, but at the price of forgetting our true nature, and this is the most painful moment of our fate, the fate of the stranger. That is why we must remind ourselves of our foreignness and care for this memory as we would our most treasured possession. Recognize the world as the place of our exile, recognize its laws as foreign, as strange . . .

Dawn is beginning to break when Nahman finishes; a moment later, just outside the window, the rooster crows in such dramatic fashion that Nahman trembles like a night demon who fears the light. He slips into the warmth of the bed and lies there for a long time on his back, unable to go to sleep. Polish words crowd into his mind, sticking together into sentences, and not even knowing how, he silently composes his prayer for the soul, but in Polish. And since yesterday he saw Gypsies here, they, too, are jumbled up in his mind, and they jump into his sentences, the whole caravan of them:

Like a sailor visiting the sea’s abyss,

Or, in the vast uncharted wilderness,

Like a Gypsy caravan, my dear soul

Won’t travel toward just any goal.

No shackles of iron can close it in,

Nor the pompousness of their chagrin,

No custom, no tradition will strain it.

Not my own heart’s shelter can contain it.

It alters since it doesn’t alter,

My soul won’t let me down or falter.

My soul rises, good Lord, to Your great dome;

Give it a fit room inside Your home.

Not even Nahman himself knows when he falls asleep. (The Books of Jacob)

By the time the Jews left Egypt, the world was ready for salvation and everything was waiting, prepared—both down below and on high. It was unprecedented—the wind died down completely, the leaves did not move on the trees, the clouds in the sky drifted so slowly that only the most patient were able to discern their movement. It was the same with the water—it became thick as cream, while the earth went the other way, became flimsy and unreliable, so that it often happened that people fell into it up to their ankles. No bird chirped, no bee flew, there were no waves in the sea, people did not speak—it was so quiet you could hear the heartbeat of the smallest animal.

Everything stopped in anticipation of the new Law, and all eyes were turned to Moses, who was climbing Mount Zion to receive it directly from God’s hands. And so it was that God Himself engraved the Law on two stone tablets in such a way that it would be discernible to the human eye and comprehensible to the human mind. This was the Torah of Atzilut.

During Moses’s absence, his people gave in to temptation and indulged in sin. Then Moses, coming down from on high and seeing what was going on, thought: I left them for such a short time, and yet they were unable to persist in virtuousness. Thus they are unworthy of the beneficent and noble law God appointed them. In his great despair Moses shattered the tablets on the ground so that they broke into a thousand pieces and turned to dust. Then a terrible wind rose up and threw Moses against the rock and set the clouds and the water in motion and made the earth solid again. Moses understood that his people were not mature enough for the law of liberty intended for the saved world. All day and all night he sat resting against the rock and looking down at the fires burning in the camp of his people, and he heard their voices, their music, and the cries of their children. Then Samael came to him in the guise of an angel and dictated to him the commandments that from then on would keep God’s people enslaved.

In order that no one would know the true Law of Freedom, Samael carefully gathered the little pieces of the shattered Torah of Atzilut and scattered them around the world among many different religions. When the Messiah comes, he will have to pass over into Samael’s kingdom to collect the tablets’ shards and present the new Law in its final revelation.

“What was this lost Law all about?” asks Wajgełe, when she and Nahman climb into bed.

“Who could possibly know, since it has been dispersed?” he answers warily. “It was good. It respected people.”

But Wajgełe is stubborn.

“Was it the opposite of what we have now? The opposite of ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ would be ‘Thou shalt commit it.’ And the opposite of ‘Thou shalt not kill’ would be: ‘Kill.’”

“It’s not that simple.”

“You always tell me that—‘It’s not that simple, it’s not that simple . . . ,’” she mocks him. She pulls a pair of woolen stockings up over her skinny legs.

“People want easy explanations, and so we must simplify everything for their sake, and since it cannot be written down, it all becomes rather stupid . . . This or that, black, white—it’s like digging with a hoe. Simple is dangerous.”

“But I want to understand it, and I can’t.”

“Wajgełe, my time will come, and your time will come. That is grace. Sabbatai, the old Mosaic law, the one given by Samael, is no longer in effect. That also explains the conversion of our Lord, Sabbatai, to Islam. He saw that Israel, in obeying the Mosaic law, was no longer in the service of the God of the Truth. That is why our Lord gave up the Torah in favor of the Din Islam . . .” (The Books of Jacob)

There exists in Ein Sof, that is, in the Infinite itself, in the divine source, absolute good, which is the origin and source of all perfection and all good in the world. It is perfection, and perfection requires no alterations, it is dignified and immovable, there can be no movement in it. But for us, who look upon it from the underside of creation, from afar, this motionlessness seems dead, and therefore bad, yet perfection excludes movement, creation, change, and therefore the very possibility of our freedom. That is why it is said that in the depths of absolute good, the root of all evil is concealed, and that root is the negation of every miracle, every movement, and all that is possible and all that might still happen.

For us, then, for people, good is something other than what it is for God. For us, good is the tension between God’s perfection and his withdrawal in order that the world might arise. For us, good is the absence of God from where he could instead be.

Nahman rubs his chilled fingers. He can’t stop, the sentences attack his brain one after the next:

When the vessels broke, and the world came about, it immediately began to climb up to where it fell from, gathering itself from bottom to top, from least to most perfect. The world ascends higher and higher and works to perfect itself, obtaining new goods and adding them to the previous ones, organizing the sparks released from the shells of matter into brilliance and strength. This is tikkun, a process of repairing in which mankind can assist. The process of ascent must transcend the law that is already in place and create a new law, in order to then transcend it again. In this world of dead husks, nothing has been given once and for all. Whosoever does not move up stands still, that is, falls downward. (The Books of Jacob)

I take it all back. I take it all back. There are certain kinds of men in every field that I can talk to as well as I can talk to a good scientist. I met a historian, a writer of history from France once, and had a marvellous conversation with him. Maurois, his name was, André Maurois. And then I met an artist, Robert Irwin, who’s a very important artist in Los Angeles, in modern art, and I could talk to him at the same depth of excitement.

So I take it all back. If you give me the right man, in any field, I can talk to him. I know what the condition is: that he did whatever he did as far as he can go, that he studied every aspect of it, that he has stretched himself to the end. He’s not a dilettante in any way. Therefore he’s up against mysteries all the way around the edge. We can talk about mystery and awe. That’s what we have in common.

The cowherds pulled her out when they watered the cattle at dawn. By the time we arrived there on our way to school, she was lying on the thin ice formed by the water which had been spilt from the well. Under this covering the black clods of earth, the pieces of straw and dung glinted and sparkled like rare jewels under glass. There she lay with open eyes in which, like the small objects under the ice, was frozen the broken terror of a startled glance. Her mouth was open, her nose rather haughtily tilted, and on her forehead and beautiful cheeks there were huge scratches which had either occurred during her fall, or had been made by the cowherds as they let down the bucket before they caught sight of her among the ice-patches in the dark winter dawn. She was barefooted, she had left her boots in the assistant farm-manager’s room, by the bed from which she had suddenly leapt and dashed straight as an arrow to the well.

I first read these words ten years ago, on a hot day in February. Early in the morning of that day I had closed the window of this room and had pulled down the blind in order to keep out the sunlight and the north wind. I had then taken a book down from one of the shelves and had sat at this table and begun to read.

The name of the book that I read on that hot day has already been written on one of these pages. I had taken the book down from the shelf in the morning because I wanted to read a book about grasslands. Even then, ten years ago, I had grown tired of most of the books on my shelves. Each year I had read fewer books. The only books I was still interested in reading were books about grasslands.

Until that hot day in February I had never opened the covers of the book containing the words that I wrote on this page fifteen minutes ago. I took down the book from the shelf on that hot day because I understood that one of the words on the cover of the book was the word for grassland in the Magyar language.

Ten years ago I believed that any person named or referred to in a book was already dead. The person named on the cover of the book might have been alive or dead, but any person named or referred to inside the book was unquestionably dead.

On the hot day when I first read in a certain book the words beginning, The cowherds pulled her out when they watered the cattle at dawn...I did not at once cease to believe what I had believed all my life concerning the people named or referred to in books. What I did was to write on a page.

Of the many hundreds of pages I have written in this room, the first page I wrote was a letter. After I had written the letter I addressed it and posted it to a woman who had once lived in a street named Daphne in the district where I was born. Then I went on writing on other pages, every one of which is still lying somewhere around me in this room. On every day while I was writing on pages, I thought of the people referred to or named in the book with the word for grassland on its cover.

At first while I was writing I thought of those people as though they were all dead and I myself was alive. At some time while I was writing, however, I began to suspect what I am now sure of. I began to suspect that all persons named or referred to in the pages of books are alive, whereas all other persons are dead.

When I wrote the letter which was the first of all my pages, I was thinking of a young woman who was, I thought, dead while I was still alive. I thought the young woman was dead while I remained alive in order to go on writing what she could never read.

Today while I write on this last page, I am still thinking of the young woman. Today, however, I am sure the young woman is still alive. I am sure the young woman is still alive while I am dead. Today I am dead but the young woman remains alive in order to go on reading what I could never write. (Inland)

Then let them that are in Judaea flee to the mountains...

In the spring of 1951 I first saw the leaves coming forth on the fig-tree in my backyard two months before I heard the fig-tree mentioned in the gospel. When I first saw the leaves I was living in the house with the fish pond behind it. I could not have imagined when I first saw the leaves that before I heard the gospel I would have travelled two hundred kilometres across the Great Divide to the district between the Ovens and Reedy Creek and then back again to the old weatherboard house on the edge of a grassland near the backyard where my father had held me for my first photograph.

I heard the last gospel of the church year only a half-hour’s walk from where I had seen the leaves on the fig-tree but I knew while I heard the gospel that I would never see that particular fig-tree again – or the house with the fish pond or the girl from Bendigo Street.

When I heard the gospel I felt a heaviness pressing on me, but not for long. I was still only twelve years old, and the summer and the new church year were beginning. I had thought, as I thought every year on the last Sunday after Pentecost, of the end of the world drifting towards me like clouds or smoke from the direction of Europe or the Middle East; but then I had thought of a greenness within the greyness.

I was thinking every day of the settlement in the mountains between the King and the Broken. I was going to ask my parents not to take me to the other side of the city of Melbourne but to let me live with one of the families who grew potatoes in the red soil of clearings in the green forest and who sang the office of vespers and compline every evening in the timber chapel built with their own hands.

Something else kept me from feeling heaviness. Among the first words of the gospel for the last Sunday after Pentecost are the words addressed to the reader. I had always considered those words as addressed in a special sense to me.

Like many children, I was afraid of the end of the world. But even at the worst moment – even when the stars of heaven were falling and the sun was being darkened – I could still hear the sound of the words being read. Not even the end of the world could drown out the sound of the words describing it.

I considered myself the Reader. Even after the greenness of the world had been buried under the greyness, the Reader would have to remain alive in order to read what the Writer had written about the green and the grey.

For twenty-five years, until I began to write on these pages, I would have said that the child had been right. I would have said that I had remained alive. I was alive and reading.

When I began to write on these pages I thought often about a person I called my reader. Sometimes I addressed the person named Reader. I could not think of words without a reader. I could not think of a reader who was not alive. But since I first began to write on these pages I have learned that a reader need not be alive. I can think of this page being read by a person who is dead as easily as you, reader, can think of this page as being written by someone who is dead.

Heaven and earth shall pass away but my words shall not pass away. (Inland)

And from the fig-tree learn a parable: when the branch thereof is now tender, and the leaves come forth, you know the summer is nigh. So likewise you, when you shall see all these things, know that it is nigh, even at the doors.

Even the gospel was more than one gospel. The reading for the last Sunday after Pentecost began with the abomination of desolation and with a warning to the reader. For three quarters of its length, the gospel for that last Sunday of the year continued to warn. Near the end came the clouds and the four winds, and then the last pause before the ultimate turmoil. And in that last pause, startlingly under the terrible sky, the fig-tree appeared, with its leaves coming forth.

More clearly than anything I read or heard in my childhood, that last pause near the end of the last gospel of the year told me that every thing would always be more than one thing. The last pause told me that every thing would always contain another thing, which would contain still another thing or which would seem, absurdly at first sight, to contain the thing that had seemed to contain it.

Five years after I had heard the last gospel of the ecclesiastical year in the parish church of Saint Mark, Fawkner, I listened for the first time in my life to a piece of what I called classical music. Near the end of that music I heard a pause. The solemn themes of the music paused for a moment. Just before the clouds had drifted over all the sky and just before the four winds whistled and the last struggle began, I heard the pause of the summer that seemed nigh.

I have heard that pause many times since in pieces of music. I have heard the pause while I read the next-to-last page in many a book. The larger, the solemn themes are about to go into battle for the last time. By now, of course, the solemn themes are not themes but men and women, and when they pause for the last time they look over their shoulders.

They look back towards some district where they lived as children or where they once fell in love. Perhaps they see the green lawn or even the branch with green leaves that they saw in their native district. For a moment a simple theme is the only theme heard; the greenness appears in place of the greyness.

For an absurd moment within that moment, the listener or the reader dares to suppose that this after all is the last theme; this and not the other is the end; the green has outlasted the grey; the grey has been covered over at last by the green.

But this is only a moment within a moment. The clouds resume their drifting; the four winds whistle. The solemn themes turn to meet the storm. (Inland)

 hen you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, standing in the holy place (he that readeth, let him understand)...

These words, like most of the words of my religion, had many meanings. Whenever I heard these words as a child, I was standing myself in the holy place: in a large weatherboard church in McCrae Street, Bendigo; or in a tiny church with poles propping its walls on the continuation inland of the Great Ocean Road at Nirranda; or in the fibro-cement and weatherboard church-school in Landells Road, Pascoe Vale. I was standing in the holy place and hearing the words, but I had my missal open in my hands – I was also reading. I was he who reads: he who was commanded to understand.

Around me in the church, hundreds of other people – children and adults – were reading the same words that I was reading. Yet I had no doubt that I was the one commanded to understand; I was of all those readers the true reader.

I was the true reader because I had always known that everything I read was true. If it was not true in the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri, or wherever I happened to be standing or sitting when I read, still it was true in some district elsewhere.

When I had read those words in weatherboard churches or in the fibro-cement and weatherboard church-school, I had understood that all the districts of the world would one day be destroyed. At some time before the end, the people of all the districts of the world would flee from their homes; they would flee with their few sticks of furniture and their rags of clothes, but they would not escape. The people of every district would suffer, and the females would suffer worst. Then, while the people were still fleeing, they would see Jesus himself: the person who had first spoken the words that had later been written by Matthew. The people trying to escape would see, towards the end, the true speaker of the words they had once read, coming in the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty.

Whenever I had read the gospel for the last Sunday after Pentecost I had seen a sky darkening, men and their wives and children fleeing, and then the grey clouds of heaven drifting towards the people. But without lifting my eyes from the page, I knew that the sky was mostly blue over the district where I was standing; I knew that men were pushing lawnmowers across their backyards and women were opening the doors of ovens and then pouring cups of water into baking-dishes where legs of lamb or rolls of beef were roasting. I knew that these men and women saw no clouds drifting towards them. (Inland)

On grasslands I almost forget my fear of drowning. Grasslands have waves and hollows, but the shape of the land under the waves is easy to dream of seeing. If the shape of a grassland changes, it changes too little to be noticed during a lifetime. When the wind makes waves in the grass, I lie under the leaning stems. I am not afraid of drowning in grass. On grasslands I have solid soil under me, and under the soil rock – the one thing I have always trusted.

I walk long distances across grasslands before I come to a creek or a river. And even I, who was always too frightened to learn to swim, can wade across a stony bed and poke a short stick into the deeper holes, and can find bottom and come out safely on the other side.

Ponds, swamps, bogs, and marshes frighten me, but I know where to look out for them. Much more alarming is to learn from seeing a subsided place or a sudden, cream-coloured cliff at my feet that for some time past, while I thought I was safe, I was walking over limestone country.

After I had written the sentence above, I remembered a thin book of poems by W. H. Auden that I had put on my shelves twenty years ago. I found the book and I turned to a long poem I had remembered as praising limestone country. I began to read the poem, but I stopped half-way through the third line of the first stanza after reading that the poet is homesick for limestone because it dissolves in water.

I did not want to read the words of a man sick, or pretending to be sick, for stone that dissolves in water. I did not want to hear from a man wanting to stand at the site of the wearing away of the thing I most trust; at the site of the melting of the most solid thing I know into the thing I am most afraid of.

I did not read any further into that poem, but I turned to another poem I had remembered: ‘Plains’.

This time I read the whole of the first stanza, but I did not read past the poet’s announcing that he cannot see a plain without a shudder and his pleading to God never to make him live on a plain – he would prefer to end his days on the worst of seacoasts in preference to any plain.

I put the book back on the shelf where it had stood unopened for twenty years, and I thought of all the poets who have stood on the seashores of the world watching the sea pulling idiot-faces at them or listening to the sea making idiot-noises at them. I thought the reason for my never having been able to write poetry must be that I have always kept well away from the sea. I thought of all the lines of poetry in the world as the ripples and waves of an idiot-sea, and all the sentences of prose in the world as the clumps and tussocks, leaning and waving in the wind but still showing the shape of the soil and the rock underneath, on a grassland.

I am hardly frightened of the creeks or the slow, shallow rivers of grasslands. But I prefer not to think of the underground streams of limestone country. The worst death would be to drown in a tunnel, in darkness.

I am not likely to die in limestone country. I am more likely to learn one day that the grass of the world is all one grassland. For most of my life I have looked at strips and patches of grass and weeds among the outlying streets of districts or beside railway lines or even in corners of graveyards. Or I have looked at the bare spaces between streams on maps of landlocked districts and great plains far from my own district. More likely than my being tricked by limestone country, I expect to find one day that I can walk easily across all the grasslands of the world: I can walk easily because the seas and the deep rivers have shrunk to the corners and the margins of the pages of the world.

Even the rain on grasslands seems no threat.

From a certain cloud high above the horizon a grey feather hangs down. The clouds around are whitish and drifting steadily, but one grey cloud drags a wing like a bird trying to lead the eye away.

Later a fine rain falls. The drops cling to skin, or they slide slowly down the sides of grass-stems. The feel of rain on grasslands is no more than the brushing past of a wing of water.

Whenever I want to read about the rain on grasslands, I take down from my shelves the book Proust: A Biography, by André Maurois, translated by Gerard Hopkins, and published by Meridian Books Inc. of New York in 1958.

In the last paragraph of that book I read the words:

Yet it is his exaltation that has brought us the perfume of the hawthorn trees that died long years ago; that has made it possible for men and women who have never seen, nor will ever see, the land of France, to breathe with ecstasy, through the curtain of the falling rain, the scent of invisible yet enduring lilacs. (Inland)

Some people have said that an eye is a window, but anyone who has looked carefully has seen that an eye is a mirror.

[...]

I put Tess of the D’Urbervilles back in its place on my shelves, and I took down Wuthering Heights and looked at certain pages. At first I looked as though I was looking through window-pages, but then I saw that the young woman I saw was not even a young woman but a girl-woman and that the grassy place I saw was not a moorland but part of a paddock of grass in the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. When I had seen this I was ready to acknowledge that a page of a book is not a window but a mirror. But in order to prove this finally to myself I looked for a certain page that I remembered in Wuthering Heights. The words on that page describe a man sleeping in a room and dreaming of the ghost of a female child who is trying to get into the room from outside by way of the window.

I stood in this room of my own and I held out in front of me the page where the word window is printed. If a page of a book is a window, I should have seen at that moment – in order from the nearest to my eyes to the furthest from them – the man in his room, the window of that room, and on the other side of that window the face of a female child calling herself Catherine Linton. I should have seen, while I went on looking at the page which was itself a window and which had the word window printed on it, the man thrusting his fist through the glass from inside outwards, then the female child gripping the man’s hand with one of her own hands, then the man trying to shake his hand free from the grip of the hand of the female child, then the man dragging the wrist of the female child backwards and forwards across the edge of the broken pane until the wrist is marked by a red circle of blood.

But what I saw instead was myself in the room and a girl-woman on the other side of the window and trying to get in. I was a man whose hair had turned grey at its edges and whose belly had begun to protrude. The girl-woman was someone I had last seen when she and I were twelve years old. And I did not thrust my fist through the glass; I turned a key in one of the double panes of the window and swung the panes apart and then back against the walls of the room. Then I took hold of the wrist of the girl-woman and guided her into the room.

I had believed for most of my life that a page of a book is a window. Then I had learned that a page of a book is a mirror. (Inland)

Play the game. Don’t make it all about you. Look for challenges. But don’t aim for a specific outcome. Eschew ulterior motives. Hold nothing back. Be gentle and strong. Get involved, and the hell with winning. Don’t over-analyze, don’t calculate, but stay alert, alert for signs. Be vulnerable. Show your eyes, invite others to look deep; make sure there’s enough space, and try to recognize everyone’s own image. Make no decisions you don’t feel excited about. Let yourself fail. Above all, give yourself time and take the long way round. Never ignore what a tree or a body of water has to tell you. Turn in where you drawn to do so, and give yourself permission to bask in the sun. Never mind your relatives, offer support to strangers, bend down to look at trifles, duck into deserted places, don’t fall for the high drama of destiny, laugh conflict to bits. Show your true colors till you prove to be right, and the rustling of leaves turns sweet. Walk about the villages. (Walk About the Villages)

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)

I have not gone deep enough, that’s the thing. In solitude one must penetrate, one must endure. The icy beginning is where it is worst. One must pass all that. One must go forward all the way, through bitterness, through righteous feelings, advancing upon it like a holy city, sensing the true joy. I try to summon it to me, to make it appear. I am certain it is there, but it does not come easily. Of course not. One must waver. One must struggle. Beliefs are meant to cleave us to the bone. (A Sport and a Pastime)

I am writing in a room of a house. All over the table in front of me and all around on the floor behind me are pages. On the walls around me are shelves of books. Around the walls of the house are grasslands.

Sometimes I stare out through my window and I suppose that if I set out walking I would never reach the end of grasslands. Sometimes I stare at the bookshelves and I suppose that if I began to read the books I would never read to the end of books. Sometimes I stare at these pages; and pardon me, reader, but what I suppose would place a heavy burden on you.

Luckily for you, reader, you know I was wrong in some of my supposing. You have these pages in your hand and you can see to the end of them. You are reading these pages now because at a certain time in the past (as you see it) and in the future (as I see it) I came and I will come to the end of these pages.

It is easier for you than for me, reader. While you read you are sure of coming to the end of the pages. But while I write I cannot be sure of coming to the end. I may go on with my endless writing here among the endless grasslands and the books that can never be read to the end.

You are a reader of books, reader. You can suppose what a reader would feel in front of a book that is endless. Myself, I do not read books, as you well know. I do hardly more than stare at covers and spines, or I dream of pages drifting. But I am in danger of writing on endless pages.

Read on, reader. I am about to write about myself living on grasslands in your part of the world and a long way from Szolnok County. You may well suspect me of having changed the names of streams only to confuse you. You may suspect me again of writing about the district between the Sio and the Sarviz. But if I do not write what I am about to write, reader, these pages will be endless. (Inland)

Reader, I may be far from the man you think I am. But who, in any case, do you think I am? I am a man, as you know; but ask yourself, reader, what you consider a man to be.

You can dream easily enough of the body of a man sitting at this table where all these pages have been strewn. The body is not yet old, but certainly it is no longer young, and the belly on the body protrudes a little, and the hair on the head of the body is turning grey at the edges. You can dream of yourself seeing that body, and I was going to write that you can dream of the words that the hand of the body writes on the pages in front of the belly of that body, but of course you do not have to dream, since you are reading this page at this moment.

Do you suppose then, reader, having dreamed and read, that you have learned what I am?

Let me tell you, reader, what I consider you to be.

Your body – whether or not the belly of it protrudes or the hair on the head of it is turning grey, and whether the hand in front of the belly is writing or at rest or busy at something else – your body is the least part of you. Your body is a sign of you, perhaps: a sign marking the place where the true part of you begins.

The true part of you is far too far-reaching and much too many-layered for you or me, reader, to read about or to write about. A map of the true part of you, reader, would show every place where you have been from your birthplace to the place where you sit now reading this page. And, reader, even if you tell me you have lived all your life in a place of books and colour-plates and hand-written texts deep in the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute – as well you may have lived it – even then, reader, you know and I know that every morning when you first turned your eyes on that place it was a different place. And when every place where you have ever been on every day of your life has been marked on the map of the true part of you, why then, reader, the map has been barely marked. There are still to mark all those places you have dreamed about and all those places you have dreamed of yourself seeing or remembering or dreaming about. Then, reader, you know as well as I know that when you have not been dreaming you have been looking at pages of books or standing in front of bookshelves and dreaming of yourself looking at pages of books. Whatever places you saw at such times, along with all the places you dreamed of yourself seeing, must all appear on the map of the true part of you. And by now, you suppose, the map must be almost filled with places.

Do not merely suppose, reader. Look with your eyes at what is in front of you. All the places you have so far marked have only sprinkled the wide spaces of the map with a few dots of towns and hairlines of streams. The map shows many hundreds of places for every hour of your life; but look, reader, at all the bare spaces on the map, and see how few the marked places still seem. You have looked at places and dreamed of places and dreamed of yourself looking at places or remembering places or dreaming of places during every hour of your life, reader, but still your map is mostly empty spaces. And my map, reader, is hardly different from yours.

All those empty spaces, reader, are our grasslands. In all those grassy places see and dream and remember and dream of themselves having seen and dreamed and remembered all the men you have dreamed you might have been and all the men you dream you may yet become. And if you are like me, reader, those are very many men, and each of those men has seen many places and dreamed of many places and has turned many pages and stood in front of many bookshelves; and all the places or the dream-places in the lives of all those men are marked on the same map that you and I are keeping in mind, reader. And yet that map is still mostly grasslands or, as they are called in America, prairies. The towns and the streams and the mountain ranges are still few, reader, compared with the prairie-grasslands where you and I dream of coming into our own. (Inland)

I learned that no thing in the world is one thing; that each thing in the world is two things at least, and probably many more than two things. I learned to find a queer pleasure in staring at a thing and dreaming of how many things it might be.

[...]

No thing was one thing. Beside every path that I followed, some plant had the look or the feel of human skin. Parts of the flowers of plants had the shapes of parts of men and women. Each thing was more than one thing. The long green leaves bunched around the agapanthus were the grass skirts of women who were naked above their waists. But any one of those leaves, if I put my hand in among them, was the strap of leather that my teachers at school brought down with all the strength of their arms on the palms of boys for punishment. (Inland)

On each Sunday of my childhood, the colour that I saw in the silk of the vestments and the altar-cloths in church was green or red or white or violet. For one hour each week one or another of those colours appeared, in strict accordance with the calendar of the Roman Church.

The colours coming and going were like the threads that I watched in the hands of the girls during sewing class, on Friday afternoon in the schoolroom. I sometimes asked a girl to let me look at the underside of the cloth in her hands – the side away from the pattern of leaves or flowers or fruit slowly forming. I trusted that a pleasing pattern was beginning to appear on the upper side of the cloth, under the eyes of the girl. But I studied the side of the cloth that seemed to matter less. I watched the tangled strands and the knots of mixed colours underneath for hints of shapes quite different from leaves or flowers or fruit. I would have enjoyed the game of pretending to the girl that I knew nothing of the pattern she was working at: of pretending to think that the tangled colours were all I could admire.

The colours and the seasons of the Church were complicated, but I saw them only from beneath. The true pattern was on the other side. Under the clear morning sky of eternity, the long story of the Old Testament and the New was a richly coloured tapestry. But on my side, under the changeable skies of Melbourne County, I saw only the green and the white and the red and the violet strangely interlaced, and I made from them whatever patterns I could. (Inland)

If I were to try in front of you people today to write in the air the beginnings of a piece of short fiction, I would begin by reporting in a sentence or two certain details from the image that I recalled this morning when I was trying to recall images the details of which I have noted during recent years in the file mentioned earlier. I would report details that might seem banal or trivial to you people, although I would assure you of my confidence that those details were full of meaning for me. Why else, I would ask you rhetorically, would the image and all its details have stayed in my mind for year after year when so many other images had disappeared? In short, I would write in the air between you and myself one or two sentences reporting that a hen crouched on the ground in an unkempt front garden of a house of red bricks on a certain afternoon of the fifth decade of the twentieth century when the sky was filled with close-packed and fast-moving grey and black clouds and when the same wind that drove the clouds across the sky ruffled tufts of feathers on the crouching hen.

I would report much more of this single image. I would report that a male child who happened to notice the hen from the rear seat of a motor car while it drove out of the unkempt garden and who wondered why the hen was crouching when it might have been foraging noticed in an instant before the car turned out of the garden and north-wards towards a place called Kinglake, where he had never yet been and about which he had often speculated, that the wind had ruffled in the same instant not only the hackles of the hen, which were of a rich, copper-orange colour, but a few of the under-feathers, which were of a glossy black colour, and that the ruffling of the under-feathers had caused to be exposed to the wind the head of a chicken, only a few days old and of a pale, creamy colour.

I would then pause in my reporting and would assure you that I was not, most emphatically not, writing a sort of autobiography while I was reporting the details of the hen and the ruffled feathers, even though I myself happened to have lived in a house of red bricks during a few years of the decade mentioned earlier and even though my father happened to have won so much money on Dark Felt in the Melbourne Cup of 1943 that he bought a huge brown Nash sedan and took his wife and children for Sunday drives for several months until he had to sell the Nash sedan to settle his latest debts with his bookmakers. If I were writing a sort of autobiography, I would say to you good people, I would be reporting the sort of detail just mentioned. I would be reporting my memories of the summer of 1943–44, when my father took me and my two brothers and my mother for a drive every Sunday. I would be reporting conversations, shaping anecdotes, trying to suggest motives…

I would go on with my reporting of details of images. I would report that the noise of the car caused the hen to rise to its feet, enabling the male child in the back seat to notice that the cream-coloured chicken was the only chicken of the black hen with the copper-orange hackles and causing the child to wonder why his father, who owned the hen and the chicken and many other hens and chickens and roosters, had not dashed the head of the chicken against a post as he had dashed the heads of a number of other chickens in the past when he had not wanted to have the mothers of the chickens looking after only one or two or even of a handful of chickens when she might have rejoined the flock of hens that laid eggs daily.

I would report a few details of a few more images. In the meanwhile I would remind you that my noting the details of image after image was not at all what is sometimes called free association. I would point out that my looking at the details of the image of the hen with the ruffled feathers brought to my mind a succession of images that I took no interest in: images of, for example, the garden where the hen sat in the wind or of the house nearby. I would explain that I usually discovered each of the images that I needed for a piece of fiction while I stared in my mind at the details of a previously discovered image and looked out for the detail that winked at me. Soon after I had noticed the winking of the detail of the copper-orange hackles of the hen, for example, I had seen in my mind for the first time, so I believed, an image of an illustration in a book for children in which illustration a number of infant children were either dead or asleep or beneath the surface of a stream the water of which had been coloured an orange-gold colour by the artist.

I would have been aware, as soon as I had used the word winking in my report of my means of discovering images, that one at least of you, my listeners, would have wanted me to explain further what exactly I saw when an image winked at me. And I would have been prepared to explain, when one of you questioned me after I had finished talking to you, that a detail of an image does not wink in quite the way a human being winks to another. The detail of an image, being almost always something other than a human face, has no eye with which to wink, and must signal to me by a sort of flickering or fluttering or nodding or trembling. Even so, I choose deliberately the word winking to describe this primitive signal to me from some patch of colour or some shape in my mind. I so choose, because my seeing the signal never fails to make me feel reassured and encouraged as many a person must feel after being winked at by another person. And I choose the word winking in this context because a wink from one person to another often signals that the two persons share a secret knowledge, so to speak, and I often feel, after some detail in my own mind has winked at me, that I have been shown proof that the farthest parts of my own mind are friendly towards me; that whatever may be hidden in those far parts of my mind is willing to reveal itself to me; that all is well in what passes with me for the world. ("The Breathing Author" in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs)

On Approach 

• Fiction should have a ghostlike presence in it somewhere, something omniscient. It makes it a different reality.

• Writing is about discovering things hitherto unseen. Otherwise there’s no point to the process.

• By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment.

• Expressionism was really a kind of willful avant-gardism after the First World War, an attempt to wrench language into a form it does not normally have. It must have purpose, though. It hasn’t really occurred in English but is very common in German.

• Write about obscure things but don’t write obscurely.

• There is a certain merit in leaving some parts of your writing obscure.

• It’s hard to write something original about Napoleon, but one of his minor aides is another matter.

On Narration and Structure 

 • In the nineteenth century the omniscient author was God: totalitarian and monolithic. The twentieth century, with all its horrors, was more demotic. It took in people’s accounts; suddenly there were other views. In the natural sciences the [twentieth] century saw the disproving of Newton and the introduction of the notion of relativity.

• In the twentieth century we know that the observer always affects what is being observed. So, writing biography now, you have to talk about where you got your sources, how it was talking to that woman in Beverly Hills, the trouble you had at the airport.

• Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.

• The present tense lends itself to comedy. The past is foregone and naturally melancholic.

• There is a species of narrator, the chronicler; he’s dispassionate, he’s seen it all.

• You can’t attribute a shortcoming in a text to the state a character is in. For example, ‘he doesn’t know the landscape so he can’t describe it’ ,‘he’s drunk so he can’t know this or that’.

 On Description 

• You need to set things very thoroughly in time and place unless you have good reasons [not to]. Young authors are often too worried about getting things moving on the rails, and not worried enough about what’s on either side of the tracks.

• A sense of place distinguishes a piece of writing. It may be a distillation of different places. There must be a very good reason for not describing place.

• Meteorology is not superfluous to the story. Don’t have an aversion to noticing the weather.

• It’s very difficult, not to say impossible, to get physical movement right when writing. The important thing is that it should work for the reader, even if it is not accurate. You can use ellipsis, abbreviate a sequence of actions; you needn’t laboriously describe each one.

• You sometimes need to magnify something, describe it amply in a roundabout way. And in the process you discover something.

• How do you surpass horror once you’ve reached a certain level? How do you stop appearing gratuitous? Horror must be absolved by the quality of the prose.

On Detail 

 • ‘Significant detail’ enlivens otherwise mundane situations. You need acute, merciless observation.

• Oddities are interesting.

• Characters need details that will anchor themselves in your mind.

• The use of twins or triplets who are virtually indistinguishable from each other can lend a spooky, uncanny edge. Kafka does it.

• It’s always gratifying to learn something when one reads fiction. Dickens introduced it. The essay invaded the novel. But we should not perhaps trust ‘facts’ in fiction. It is, after all, an illusion.

• Exaggeration is the stuff of comedy.

• It’s good to have undeclared, unrecognized pathologies and mental illnesses in your stories. The countryside is full of undeclared pathologies. Unlike in the urban setting, there, mental affliction goes unrecognized.

• Dialect makes normal words seem other, odd and jagged. For example, ‘Jeziz’ for Jesus.

• Particular disciplines have specialized terminology that is its own language. I could translate a page of Ian McEwan in half an hour—but golf equipment! another matter. Two Sainsbury’s managers talking to each other are a different species altogether.

On Reading and Intertextuality 

 • Read books that have nothing to do with literature.

• Get off the main thoroughfares; you’ll see nothing there. For example, Kant’s Critique is a yawn but his incidental writings are fascinating.

• There has to be a libidinous delight in finding things and stuffing them in your pockets.

• You must get the servants to work for you. You mustn’t do all the work yourself. That is, you should ask other people for information, and steal ruthlessly from what they provide.

• None of the things you make up will be as hair-raising as the things people tell you.

• I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice. You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt.

• Don’t be afraid to bring in strange, eloquent quotations and graft them into your story. It enriches the prose. Quotations are like yeast or some ingredient one adds.

• Look in older encyclopaedias. They have a different eye. They attempt to be complete and structured but in fact are completely random collected things that are supposed to represent our world.

• It’s very good that you write through another text, a foil, so that you write out of it and make your work a palimpsest. You don’t have to declare it or tell where it’s from.

• A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom.

• If you look carefully you can find problems in all writers. And that should give you great hope. And the better you get at identifying these problems, the better you will be at avoiding them.

On Style 

 • Every sentence taken by itself should mean something.

• Writing should not create the impression that the writer is trying to be ‘poetic’.

• It’s easy to write rhythmical prose. It carries you along. After a while it gets tedious.

• Long sentences prevent you from having continually to name the subject (‘Gertie did this, Gertie felt that’ etc.).

• Avoid sentences that serve only to set up later sentences.

• Use the word ‘and’ as little as possible. Try for variety in conjunctions.

On Revision 

 • Don’t revise too much or it turns into patchwork.

• Lots of things resolve themselves just by being in the drawer a while.

• Don’t listen to anyone. Not us, either. It’s fatal.

I see myself as an agent provocateur or as a double agent, first on one side–that of truth–and then on the other, but between these, in the reversals, the sudden defections, one can easily forget allegiance entirely and feel only the deep, the profound joy of being beyond all codes, of being completely independent, criminal is the word. Like any agent, of course, I cannot divulge my sources. I can merely say that some things I saw myself, some I discovered, for after all, the mutilation, the delay of as little as a single word can reveal the existence of something worthy to be hidden, and I became obsessed with discovery, like the great detectives. I read every scrap of paper. I noted every detail. Some things, as I say, I saw, some discovered, and some dreamed, and I can no longer differentiate between them. But my dreams are as important as anything I acquired by stealth. More important, because they are the intuitive in its purest state. Without them, facts are no more than a kind of debris, unstrung, like beads. The dreams are as true and manifest as the iron fences of France flashing black in the rain. More true, perhaps. They are the skeleton of all reality.

I am the pursuer. The essence of that is I am the one who knows while Dean does not, but still it is far from even. To begin with, no matter what I do, I can never uncover everything. That alone is enough to make him triumph. I can never anticipate; it is he who moves first. I am only the servant of life. He is an inhabitant. And above all, I cannot confront him, I cannot even imagine such a thing. The reason is simple: I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love. That is the source of his power. (A Sport and a Pastime)

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future. But there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change. In fact, there is the danger that if I continue to try, the whole concert of events will begin to fall apart in my hands like old newspaper, I can’t bear to think of that. The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design. (A Sport and a Pastime)

If it is the fulfillment of man’s primordial dreams to be able to fly, travel with the fish, drill our way beneath the bodies of towering mountains, send messages with godlike speed, see the invisible and hear the distant speak, hear the voices of the dead, be miraculously cured while asleep, see with our own eyes how we will look twenty years after our death, learn in flickering nights thousands of things above and below this earth no one ever knew before; if light, warmth, power, pleasure, comforts, are man’s primordial dreams, then present-day research is not only science but sorcery, spells woven from the highest powers of heart and brain, forcing God to open one fold after another of his cloak; a religion whose dogma is permeated and sustained by the hard, courageous, flexible, razor-cold, razor-keen logic of mathematics.

Of course there is no denying that all these primordial dreams appear, in the opinion of nonmathematicians, to have been suddenly realized in a form quite different from the original fantasy. Baron Münchhausen’s post horn was more beautiful than our canned music, the Seven-League Boots more beautiful than a car, Oberon’s kingdom lovelier than a railway tunnel, the magic root of the mandrake better than a telegraphed image, eating of one’s mother’s heart and then understanding birds more beautiful than an ethologic study of a bird’s vocalizing. We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one’s big and second toes; there’s work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving. It is exactly as though the old, inefficient breed of humanity had fallen asleep on an anthill and found, when the new breed awoke, that the ants had crept into its bloodstream, making it move frantically ever since, unable to shake off that rotten feeling of antlike industry. There is really no need to belabor the point, since it is obvious to most of us these days that mathematics has taken possession, like a demon, of every aspect of our lives. Most of us may not believe in the story of a Devil to whom one can sell one’s soul, but those who must know something about the soul (considering that as clergymen, historians, and artists they draw a good income from it) all testify that the soul has been destroyed by mathematics and that mathematics is the source of an evil intelligence that while making man the lord of the earth has also made him the slave of his machines. The inner drought, the dreadful blend of acuity in matters of detail and indifference toward the whole, man’s monstrous abandonment in a desert of details, his restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, money-grubbing, coldness, and violence, all so characteristic of our times, are by these accounts solely the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen logical thinking! Even back when Ulrich first turned to mathematics there were already those who predicted the collapse of European civilization because no human faith, no love, no simplicity, no goodness, dwelt any longer in man. These people had all, typically, been poor mathematicians as young people and at school. This later put them in a position to prove that mathematics, the mother of natural science and grandmother of technology, was also the primordial mother of the spirit that eventually gave rise to poison gas and warplanes. (The Man Without Qualities)

Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos, to Francis Bacon 

Dear and esteemed Sir, 

You will have received from my husband Philip a letter dated this 22nd August. Ask me not how, but a copy of that letter has come under my sight, and now I add my voice to his. I fear you may think my husband wrote in a fit of madness, a fit that by now may have passed. I write to say: It is not so. All that you read in his letter is true, save for one circumstance: no husband can succeed in concealing from a loving wife distress of mind so extreme. These many months have I known of my Philip's affliction, and suffered with him. 

How did our sorrows come to be? There was a time, I remember, before this time of affliction, when he would gaze like one bewitched at paintings of sirens and dryads, craving to enter their naked, glistening bodies. But where in Wiltshire will we find a siren or a dryad for him to try? Perforce I became his dryad: it was I whom he entered when he sought to enter her, I who felt his tears on my shoulder when again he could not find her in me. But a little time and I will learn to be your dryad, speak your dryad speech, I whispered in the dark; but he was not consoled. 

A time of affliction I call the present time; yet in the company of my Philip I too have moments when soul and body are one, when I am ready to burst out in the tongues of angels. My raptures I call these spells. They come to me -I write without blushing, this is no time for blushing--in my husband's arms. He alone is guide to me; with no other man would I know them. Soul and body he speaks to me, in a speaking without speech; into me, soul and body, he presses what are no longer words but flaming swords. 

We are not meant to live thus, Sir. Flaming swords I say my Philip presses into me, swords that are not words; but they are neither flaming swords nor are they words. It is like a contagion, saying one thing always for another (like a contagion, I say: barely did I hold myself back from saying, a plague of rats, for rats are everywhere about us these days). Like a wayfarer (hold the figure in mind, I pray you), like a wayfarer I step into a mill, dark and disused, and feel of a sudden the floorboards, rotten with the wetness, give way beneath my feet and plunge me into the racing mill-waters; yet as I am that (a wayfarer in a mill) I am also not that; nor is it a contagion that comes continually upon me or a plague of rats or flaming swords, but something else. Always it is not what I say but something else. Hence the words I write above: We are not meant to live thus. Only for extreme souls may it have been intended to live thus, where words give way beneath your feet like rotting boards (like rotting boards I say again, I cannot help myself, not if I am to bring home to you my distress and my husband's, bring home I say, where is home, where is home?). 

We cannot live thus, neither he nor I nor you, honoured Sir (for who is to say that through the agency of his letter or if not of his letter then of mine you may not be touched by a contagion that is not that, a contagion, but is something else, always something else?). There may come a time when such extreme souls as I write of may be able to bear their afflictions, but that time is not now. It will be a time, if ever it comes, when giants or perhaps angels stride the earth (I cease to hold myself back, I am tired now, I yield myself to the figures, do you see, Sir, how I am taken over?, the rush I call it when I do not call it my rapture, the rush and the rapture are not the same, but in ways that I despair of explaining though they are clear to my eye, my eye I call it, my inner eye, as if I had an eye inside that looked at the words one by one as they passed, like soldiers on parade, like soldiers on parade I say). 

All is allegory, says my Philip. Each creature is key to all other creatures. A dog sitting in a patch of sun licking itself, says he, is at one moment a dog and at the next a vessel of revelation. And perhaps he speaks the truth, perhaps in the mind of our Creator {our Creator, I say) where we whirl about as if in a millrace we interpenetrate and are interpenetrated by fellow creatures by the thousand. But how I ask you can I five with rats and dogs and beetles crawling through me day and night, drowning and gasping, scratching at me, tugging me, urging me deeper and deeper into revelation--how? We are not made for revelation, I want to cry out, nor I nor you, my Philip, revelation that sears the eye like staring into the sun. 

Save me, dear Sir, save my husband! Write! Tell him the time is not yet come, the time of the giants, the time of the angels. Tell him we are still in the time of fleas. Words no longer reach him, they shiver and shatter, it is as if (as if, I say), it is as if he is guarded by a shield of crystal. But fleas he will understand, the fleas and the beetles still creep past his shield, and the rats; and sometimes I his wife, yes, my Lord, sometimes I too creep through. Presences of the Infinite he calls us, and says we make him shudder; and indeed I have felt those shudders, in the throes of my raptures I have felt them, so much that whether they were his or were mine I could no longer say. 

Not Latin, says my Philip - I copied the words - not Latin nor English nor Spanish nor Italian will bear the words of my revelation. And indeed it is so, even I who am his shadow know it when I am in my raptures. Yet he writes to you, as I write to you, who are known above all men to select your words and set them in place and build your judgements as a mason builds a wall with bricks. Drowning, we write out of our separate fates. Save us. 

Your obedient servant 

Elizabeth C. 

This II September, AD 1603 (Elizabeth Costello)

'Do you see many people like me, people in my situation?' she continues urgently, out of control now, hearing herself out of control, disliking herself for it. In my situation: what does that mean? What is her situation? The situation of someone who does not know her own mind?

She has a vision of the gate, the far side of the gate, the side she is denied. At the foot of the gate, blocking the way, lies stretched out a dog, an old dog, his lion-coloured hide scarred from innumerable manglings. His eyes are closed, he is resting, snoozing. Beyond him is nothing but a desert of sand and stone, to infinity. It is her first vision in a long while, and she does not trust it, does not trust in particular the anagram GOD-DOG. Too literary, she thinks again. A curse on literature!

The man behind the desk has evidently had enough of questions. He lays down his pen, folds his hands, regards her levelly. 'All the time,' he says. 'We see people like you all the time.'

At such moments even a negligible creature, a dog, a rat, a beetle, a stunted apple tree, a cart track winding over a hill, a mossy stone, counts more for me than a night of bliss with the most beautiful, most devoted mistress. These dumb and in some cases inanimate creatures press toward me with such fullness, such presence of love, that there is nothing in range of my rapturous eye that does not have life. It is as if everything, everything that exists, everything I can recall, everything my confused thinking touches on, means something. (Elizabeth Costello)

'At that hearing you appeared to disparage belief, calling it an impediment to your calling. At today's hearing, however, you testify to a belief in frogs, or more accurately in the allegorical meaning of a frog's life, if I understand your drift. My question is: Have you changed the basis of your plea from the first hearing to the present one? Are you giving up the secretary story and presenting a new one, based on the firmness of your belief in the creation?'

Has she changed her story? It is a weighty question, no doubt about that, yet she has to struggle to fix her attention on it. The courtroom is hot, she feels drugged, she is not sure how much more of this hearing she can take. What she would like most is to lay her head on a pillow and have a snooze, even if it has to be the filthy pillow in the bunkhouse.

'It depends,' she says, playing for time, trying to think (Come on, corne on! she tells herself: Your life depends on this!). 'You ask if I have changed my plea. But who am I, who is this I, this you? We change from day to day, and we also stay the same. No I, no you is more fundamental than any other. You might as well ask which is the true Elizabeth Costello: the one who made the first statement or the one who made the second. My answer is, both are true. Both. And neither. I am an other. Pardon me for resorting to words that are not my own, but I cannot improve on them. You have the wrong person before you. If you think you have the right person you have the wrong person. The wrong Elizabeth Costello.'

Is this true? It may not be true but it is certainly not false. She has never felt more like the wrong person in her life.

Her interrogator waves impatiently. 'I am not asking to see your passport. Passports have no force here, as I am sure you are aware. The question I ask is: you, by whom I mean this person before our eyes, this person petitioning for passage, this person here and nowhere else--do you speak for yourself?'

Yes. No, emphatically no. Yes and no. Both.' (Elizabeth Costello)

She steps forward. 'What I believe,' she reads in a firm voice, like a child doing a recitation.'I was born in the city of Melbourne, but spent part of my childhood in rural Victoria, in a region of climatic extremes: of scorching droughts followed by torrential rains that swelled the rivers with the carcases of drowned animals. That, anyhow, is how I remember it. 

 'When the waters subsided--I am speaking of the waters of one river in particular now, the Dulgannon--acres of mud were left behind. At night you would hear the belling of tens of thousands of little frogs rejoicing in the largesse of the heavens. The air would be as dense with their calls as it was at noon with the rasping of cicadas. 

 'Where do they suddenly arrive from, these thousands of frogs? The answer is, they are always there. In the dry season they go underground, burrowing further and further from the heat of the sun until each has created a little tomb for itself. And in those tombs they die, so to speak. Their heartbeat slows, their breathing stops, they turn the colour of mud. Once again the nights are silent. 

 'Silent until the next rains come, rapping, as it were, on thousands of tiny coffin lids. In those coffins hearts begin to beat, limbs begin to twitch that for months have been lifeless. The dead awake. As the caked mud softens, the frogs begin to dig their way out, and soon their voices resound again in joyous exultation beneath the vault of the heavens. 

'Excuse my language. I am or have been a professional writer. Usually I take care to conceal the extravagances of the imagination. But today, for this occasion, I thought I would conceal nothing, bare all. The vivifying flood, the chorus of joyous belling, followed by the subsiding of the waters and the retreat to the grave, then drought seemingly without end, then fresh rains and the resurrection of the dead--it is a story I present transparently without disguise. 

'Why? Because today I am before you not as a writer but as an old woman who was once a child, telling you what I remember of the Dulgannon mudflats of my childhood and of the frogs who live there, some as small as the tip of my little finger, creatures so insignificant and so remote from your loftier concerns that you would not hear of them otherwise. In my account, for whose many failings I beg your pardon, the life cycle of the frog may sound allegorical, but to the frogs themselves it is no allegory, it is the thing itself, the only thing. 

'What do I believe? I believe in those little frogs. Where I find myself today, in my old age and perhaps my older age, I am not sure. There are moments when it feels like Italy, but I could easily be mistaken, it could be a quite different place. Towns in Italy do not, as far as I know, have portals (I will not use the humble word gate in your presence) through which it is forbidden to pass. But the Australian continent, where I was born into the world, kicking and squalling, is real (if far away), the Dulgannon and its mudflats are real, the frogs are real. They exist whether or not I tell you about them, whether or not I believe in them. 

'It is because of the indifference of those little frogs to my belief (all they want from life is a chance to gobble down mosquitoes and sing; and the males among them, the ones who do most of the singing, sing not to fill the night air with melody but as a form of courtship, for which they hope to be rewarded with orgasm, the frog variety of orgasm, again and again and again)--it is because of their indifference to me that I believe in them. And that is why, this afternoon, in this lamentably rushed and lamentably literary presentation for which I again apologize, but I thought I would offer myself to you without forethought, toute nue so to speak, and almost, as you can see for yourselves, without notes--that is why I speak to you of frogs. Of frogs and of my belief or beliefs and of the relation between the former and the latter. Because they exist.' 

She comes to a stop. From behind her, the sound of gentle handclapping, from a single pair of hands, the cleaning woman's. The clapping dwindles, ceases. It was she, the cleaning woman, who put her up to it--this flood of words, this gabble, this confusion, this passion. Well, let us see what kind of response passion gets. 

One of the judges, the man on the extreme right, leans forward. 'Dulgannon,' he says. 'That is a river?' 

'Yes, a river. It exists. It is not negligible. You will find it on most maps.' 

'And you spent your childhood there, on the Dulgannon?' 

She is silent. 

'Because it says nothing here, in your docket, about a childhood on the Dulgannon.' 

She is silent. 

'Is childhood on the Dulgannon another of your stories, Mrs Costello? Along with the frogs and the rain from heaven?' 

'The river exists. The frogs exist. I exist. What more do you want?' 

The woman among them, slim, with neat silver hair and silver-rimmed glasses, speaks. 'You believe in life?' 

'I believe in what does not bother to believe in me.' 

The judge makes a little gesture of impatience. 'A stone does not believe in you. A bush. But you choose to tell us not about stones or bushes but about frogs, to which you attribute a life story that is, as you concede, highly allegorical. These Australian frogs of yours embody the spirit of life, which is what you as a storyteller believe in.' 

It is not a question, it is, in effect, a judgement. Should she accept it? She believed in life: will she take that as the last word on her, her epitaph? Her whole inclination is to protest: Vapid! she wants to cry. I am worth better than that! But she reins herself in. She is not here to win an argument, she is here to win a pass, a passage. Once she has passed, once she has said goodbye to this place, what she leaves behind of herself, even if it is to be an epitaph, will be of the utmost inconsequence. 

'If you like,' she says guardedly. 

The judge, her judge, looks away, purses her lips. A long silence falls. She listens for the buzzing of the fly that one is supposed to hear on such occasions, but there does not appear to be a fly in the courtroom. 

Does she believe in life? But for this absurd tribunal and its demands, would she even believe in frogs? How does one know what one believes in? 

She tries a test that seems to work when she is writing: to send out a word into the darkness and listen for what kind of sound comes back. Like a foundryman tapping a bell: is it cracked or healthy? The frogs: what tone do the frogs give off? 

The answer: no tone at all. But she is too canny, knows the business too well, to be disappointed just yet. The mud frogs of the Dulgannon are a new departure for her. Give them time: they might yet be made to ring true. For there is something about them that obscurely engages her, something about their mud tombs and the fingers of their hands, fingers that end in little balls, soft, wet, mucous. 

She thinks of the frog beneath the earth, spread out as if flying, as if parachuting through the darkness. She thinks of the mud eating away at the tips of those fingers, trying to absorb them, to dissolve the soft tissue till no one can tell any longer (certainly not the frog itself, lost as it is in its cold sleep of hibernation) what is earth, what is flesh. Yes, that she can believe in: the dissolution, the return to the elements; and the converse moment she can believe in too, when the first quiver of returning life runs through the body and the limbs contract, the hands flex. She can believe in that, if she concentrates closely enough, word by word. (Elizabeth Costello)

'I am a writer. You may think I should say instead, I was a writer. But I am or was a writer because of who I am or was. I have not ceased to be what I am. As yet. Or so it feels to me.

'I am a writer, and what I write is what I hear. I am a secretary of the invisible, one of many secretaries over the ages. That is my calling: dictation secretary. It is not for me to interrogate, to judge what is given me. I merely write down the words and then test them, test their soundness, to make sure I have heard right.

'Secretary of the invisible: not my own phrase, I hasten to say. I borrow it from a secretary of a higher order, Czeslaw Milosz, a poet, perhaps known to you, to whom it was dictated years ago.'

She pauses. This is where she expects them to interrupt. Dictated by whom? she expects them to ask. And she has her answer ready: By powers beyond us. But there is no interruption, no question. Instead their spokesman wags his pencil at her. 'Go on.'

'Before I can pass on I am required to state my beliefs,' she reads. 'I reply: a good secretary should have no beliefs. It is inappropriate to the function. A secretary should merely be in readiness, waiting for the call.'

Again she expects an interruption: Whose call? But there are going to be no questions, it would seem.

'In my work a belief is a resistance, an obstacle. I try to empty myself of resistances.'

'Without beliefs we are not human.' The voice comes from the leftmost of them, the one she has privately labelled Grimalkin, a wizened little fellow so short that his chin barely clears the bench. In fact, about each of them there is some troublingly comic feature. Excessively literary, she thinks. A caricaturist's idea of a bench of judges.

'Without beliefs we are not human,' he repeats. 'What do you say to that, Elizabeth Costello?'

She sighs.'Of course, gentlemen, I do not claim to be bereft of all belief. I have what I think of as opinions and prejudices, no different in kind from what are commonly called beliefs. When I claim to be a secretary clean of belief I refer to my ideal self, a self capable of holding opinions and prejudices at bay while the word which it is her function to conduct passes through her.'

'Negative capability,' says the little man. 'Is negative capability what you have in mind, what you claim to possess?'

'Yes, if you like. To put it in another way, I have beliefs but I do not believe in them. They are not important enough to believe in. My heart is not in them. My heart and my sense of duty.'

The little man purses his lips. His neighbour turns and gives him a glance (she can swear she hears the rustle of feathers). 'And what effect do you think it has, this lack of belief, on your humanity?' the little man asks.

'On my own humanity? Is that of consequence? What I offer to those who read me, what I contribute to their humanity, outweighs, I would hope, my own emptiness in that respect.'

'Your own cynicism, you mean to say.'

Cynicism. Not a word she likes, but on this occasion she is prepared to entertain it. With luck it will be the last occasion. With luck she will not have to subject herself again to self-defence and the pomposities that go with it.

'About myself, yes, I may well be cynical, in a technical sense. I cannot afford to take myself too seriously, or my motives. But as regards other people, as regards humankind or humanity, no, I do not believe I am cynical at all.'

'You are not an unbeliever then,' says the man in the middle.

'No. Unbelief is a belief. A disbeliever, if you will accept the distinction, though sometimes I feel disbelief becomes a credo too.'

There is a silence. 'Go on,' says the man. 'Proceed with your statement.'

'That is the end of it. There is nothing that has not been covered. I rest my case.'

'Your case is that you are a secretary. Of the invisible.'

'And that I cannot afford to believe.'

'For professional reasons.'

'For professional reasons.'

'And what if the invisible does not regard you as its secretary? What if your appointment was long ago discontinued, and the letter did not reach you? What if you were never even appointed? Have you considered that possibility.'

'I consider it every day. I am forced to consider it. If I am not what I say I am, then I am a sham. If that is your considered verdict, that I am a sham secretary, then I can only bow my head and accept it. I presume you have taken into account my record, a lifetime's record. In fairness to me you cannot ignore that record.'

[...]

'Do you believe the voices come from God? Do you believe in God?'

Does she believe in God? A question she prefers to keep a wary distance from. Why, even assuming that God exists--whatever exists means--should His massive, monarchical slumber be disturbed from below by a clamour of believes and don't believes, like a plebiscite?

'That is too intimate,' she says. 'I have nothing to say.'

'There are only ourselves here. You are free to speak your heart.'

You misunderstand. I mean, I suspect that God would not look kindly on such presumption--presumption to intimacy. I prefer to let God be. As I hope He will let me be.' (Elizabeth Costello)

[...] So let me just make one observation: that the programme of scientific experimentation that leads you to conclude that animals are imbeciles is profoundly anthropocentric. It values being able to find your way out of a sterile maze, ignoring the fact that if the researcher who designed the maze were to be parachuted into the jungles of Borneo, he or she would be dead of starvation in a week. In fact I would go further. If I as a human being were told that the standards by which animals are being measured in these experiments are human standards, I would be insulted. It is the experiments themselves that are imbecile. The behaviourists who design them claim that we understand only by a process of creating abstract models and then testing those models against reality. What nonsense. We understand by immersing ourselves and our intelligence in complexity. There is something self-stultified in the way in which scientific behaviourism recoils from the complexity of life. (Elizabeth Costello)

'In 1912 the Prussian Academy of Sciences established on the island of Tenerife a station devoted to experimentation into the mental capacities of apes, particularly chimpanzees. The station operated until 1920.

'One of the scientists working there was the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. In 1917 Köhler published a monograph entitled The Mentality of Apes describing his experiments. In November of the same year Franz Kafka published his "Report to an Academy". Whether Kafka had read Köhler 's book I do not know. He makes no reference to it in his letters or diaries, and his library disappeared during the Nazi era. Some two hundred of his books reemerged in 1982. They do not include Köhlers book, but that proves nothing.

'I am not a Kafka scholar. In fact, I am not a scholar at all. My status in the world does not rest on whether I am right or wrong in claiming that Kafka read Köhler's book. But I would like to think he did, and the chronology makes my speculation at least plausible.

'According to his own account, Red Peter was captured on the African mainland by hunters specializing in the ape trade, and shipped across the sea to a scientific institute. So were the apes Köhler worked with. Both Red Peter and Köhler's apes then underwent a period of training intended to humanize them. Red Peter passed his course with flying colours, though at deep personal cost. Kafka's story deals with that cost: we learn what it consists in through the ironies and silences of the story. Köhler's apes did less well. Nevertheless, they acquired at least a smattering of education.

'Let me recount to you some of what the apes on Tenerife learned from their master Wolfgang Köhler, in particular Sultan, the best of his pupils, in a certain sense the prototype of Red Peter.

'Sultan is alone in his pen. He is hungry: the food that used to arrive regularly has unaccountably ceased coming.

'The man who used to feed him and has now stopped feeding him stretches a wire over the pen three metres above ground level, and hangs a bunch of bananas from it. Into the pen he drags three wooden crates. Then he disappears, closing the gate behind him, though he is still somewhere in the vicinity, since one can smell him.

'Sultan knows: Now one is supposed to think. That is what the bananas up there are about. The bananas are there to make one think, to spur one to the limits of one's thinking. But what must one think? One thinks: Why is he starving me? One thinks: What have I done? Why has he stopped liking me? One thinks: Why does he not want these crates any more? But none of these is the right thought. Even a more complicated thought--for instance: What is wrong with him, what misconception does he have of me, that leads him to believe it is easier for me to reach a banana hanging from a wire than to pick up a banana from the floor?--is wrong. The right thought to think is: How does one use the crates to reach the bananas?

'Sultan drags the crates under the bananas, piles them one on top of the other, climbs the tower he has built, and pulls down the bananas. He thinks: Now will he stop punishing me?

'The answer is: No. The next day the man hangs a fresh bunch of bananas from the wire but also fills the crates with stones so that they are too heavy to be dragged. One is not supposed to think: Why has he filled the crates with stones? One is supposed to think: How does one use the crates to get the bananas despite the fact that they are filled with stones?

'One is beginning to see how the man's mind works.

'Sultan empties the stones from the crates, builds a tower with the crates, climbs the tower, pulls down the bananas.

'As long as Sultan continues to think wrong thoughts, he is starved. He is starved until the pangs of hunger are so intense, so overriding, that he is forced to think the right thought, namely, how to go about getting the bananas. Thus are the mental capabilities of the chimpanzee tested to their uttermost.

'The man drops a bunch of bananas a metre outside the wire pen. Into the pen he tosses a stick. The wrong thought is: Why has he stopped hanging the bananas on the wire? The wrong thought (the right wrong thought, however) is: How does one use the three crates to reach the bananas? The right thought is: How does one use the stick to reach the bananas?

'At every turn Sultan is driven to think the less interesting thought. From the purity of speculation (Why do men behave like this?) he is relentlessly propelled towards lower, practical, instrumental reason (How does one use this to get that?) and thus towards acceptance of himself as primarily an organism with an appetite that needs to be satisfied. Although his entire history, from the time his mother was shot and he was captured, through his voyage in a cage to imprisonment on this island prison camp and the sadistic games that are played around food here, leads him to ask questions about the justice of the universe and the place of this penal colony in it, a carefully plotted psychological regimen conducts him away from ethics and metaphysics towards the humbler reaches of practical reason. And somehow, as he inches through this labyrinth of constraint, manipulation and duplicity, he must realize that on no account dare he give up, for on his shoulders rests the responsibility of representing apedom. The fate of his brothers and sisters may be determined by how well he performs.

'Wolfgang Köhler was probably a good man. A good man but not a poet. A poet would have made something of the moment when the captive chimpanzees lope around the compound in a circle, for all the world like a military band, some of them as naked as the day they were born, some draped in cords or old strips of cloth that they have picked up, some carrying pieces of rubbish.

'(In the copy of Köhlers book I read, borrowed from a library, an indignant reader has written in the margin, at this point: "Anthropomorphism!" Animals cannot march, he means to say, they cannot dress up, because they don't know the meaning of march, don't know the meaning of dress up.)

'Nothing in their previous lives has accustomed the apes to looking at themselves from the outside, as if through the eyes of a being who does not exist. So, as Köhler perceives, the ribbons and the junk are there not for the visual effect, because they look smart, but for the kinetic effect, because they make you feel different--anything to relieve the boredom. This is as far as Köhler, for all his sympathy and insight, is able to go; this is where a poet might have commenced, with a feel for the ape's experience.

'In his deepest being Sultan is not interested in the banana problem. Only the experimenter's single-minded regimentation forces him to concentrate on it. The question that truly occupies him, as it occupies the rat and the cat and every other animal trapped in the hell of the laboratory or the zoo, is: Where is home, and how do I get there?

'Measure the distance back from Kafka's ape, with his bow tie and dinner jacket and wad of lecture notes, to that sad train of captives trailing around the compound in Tenerife. How far Red Peter has travelled! Yet we are entitled to ask: In return for the prodigious overdevelopment of the intellect he has achieved, in return for his command of lecture-hall etiquette and academic rhetoric, what has he had to give up? The answer is: Much, including progeny, succession. If Red Peter had any sense, he would not have any children. For upon the desperate, half-mad female ape with whom his captors, in Kafka's story, try to mate him, he would father only a monster. It is as hard to imagine the child of Red Peter as to imagine the child of Franz Kafka himself. Hybrids are, or ought to be, sterile; and Kafka saw both himself and Red Peter as hybrids, as monstrous thinking devices mounted inexplicably on suffering animal bodies. The stare that we meet in all the surviving photographs of Kafka is a stare of pure surprise: surprise, astonishment, alarm. Of all men Kafka is the most insecure in his humanity. This, he seems to say: this is the image of God?' (Elizabeth Costello)