Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

And another drawing, which might be of the same moment, but with a hundred times more people, which gives me an idea, however remote, of the throngs of readers awaiting my novel.

Everyone has noticed my widespread success as an author, or anyway it behooves them to know it. But someone says that while there’s always a crowd of readers gathered around my novel, it’s not because they want to read it so much, but because there must be near my novel, or across the street, some notice from La Prensa that says (and this is pure conjecture): “Millionare gentleman, celibate and sentimental, seeks agreeable housekeeper to take exclusive care of his house and serve as his sole companion.” They add what the critics of the hard school, who only concern themselves with fundamental merits and essential aesthetics say, when synthesizing their plaudits in the comparative conclusion of whether the statement “My novel has more of a public than one of the most enticing personal ads from a great newspaper” is a concrete reality and not an unfair comparison; they’ve lazily commissioned the personal ad’s efficacy to attract the crowd that was already there. They also explain that there’s a difficulty in syntax in the aforementioned personal ad: it’s not clear whether the millionaire seeks a housekeeper or the housekeeper seeks a millionaire, and this is why half the crowd is female, seeking the millionaire, and the other half are millionaires looking for a housekeeper.

What must be recognized here is that I’ve used the incentive of appearing in the novel with a few people whose sympathy or consideration I wanted; and that sometimes I’ll withdraw someone from the novel because he or she made me angry, either justly or unjustly, or because of an inconsistent fidelity in the character.

I can’t give the anxious young person what he longs for: a certain understanding or a certain power to achieve an ambition, or a steady, secure direction in the darkness of Being, nothing concrete, just a sign in the sky, a tree in Africa, a strange affinity, a turned stone, a shadow profile that, raising or retaining itself in the mind, will signify to him that the act or intuition that he had in his mind in the moment he found it must continue on, and is in fact what led him to the attainment of this desire. But I can send him down the path of such promising thoughts, so ripe with the totalpossibility that is eternity, so heady with mystery, that they will create for him an interior world so strong that no Reality can have the power of sadness or impossibility or limitation for him that it has over someone who hasn’t managed to construct thought-fascinations to accompany him always.

We can all cultivate this constant and powerful daydream that dulls the sharpness of an adverse reality. Religions, patriotism, humanism, all do this in some way; most of all religions. The notion of honor is perhaps a voluntary combination of an anti-Reality analgesic.

But for someone who has not obtained Totalove, which is the Highest form of Daydream, because it is hedonic in two senses: in itself and aesthetically (which is to say in thought, in what appears to it when we contemplate it in ourselves or in another) — there is a still stronger base than these analgesics for construction of Daydream: the mystic’s attitude — the opposite of the religious attitude — which is only achievable by touching the limitation of the Intelligence on all of its limits, the unthinkability of Being, not the small-minded unthinkability of antonyms — a prolific emptiness — but unthinkability itself.

While we await Totalove, let’s emancipate ourselves from the absurd notion of the Unknowable, which is a vestige of that infantile veneration of Reality, the vague fear of Man faced with the World (physical and psychical) derived from a vulgar conception of Intelligence as just one tool among others, just as incapable as any of them of perceiving causes and effects and formulating causal laws for well-being and eluding, anticipating, or preventing good or bad things. And let us emancipate ourselves from the Impossible, from all that we search for and sometimes believe does not exist, and, even worse, cannot exist. Nothing, therefore, should detain us in the search for a full, unrestricted solution, leaving no irreducible remainder.

Because psychical or spatial 1 Reality is full, just as full as its correlative certainty. Up to a certain limit, Certainty and Reality, despite the Error associated with them, are synonyms. It’s not only that Reality is full, familiar, and certain, but also that our Certainty and Familiarity, the aplomb with which we manage or judge it, and all of the metaphysical jargon, cannot vary our conduct, whether or not we feel certain. Example: A worker who puts in eight hours a day breaking glass lands one thousand hammer blows during a given period, always with the fulfilled certainty that the blow of the hammer will break the glass: one thousand instances of Certainty in an hour. And if we put in his place a top metaphysician, the same thing will happen to him (although no metaphysician can clearly tell which is the Fundamental of Induction). Certainty, Fullness, Familiarity of Reality.

The theory of Eternity demands suitable exercises of Emancipation from absurd limitations. And for only one prologue, that’s quite enough metaphysics. To each prologue its own speciality.

1 I don’t say external because everything, psychical or spatial, is exterior to the attention or interest with which we perceive it. This attention can’t go with every perception, not everything is double — subject and object — and that which was in the mind or sensibility without being noticed can be, later, in the image that it leaves behind.

She has tangled tresses, just as my novel does, with which it binds itself to the reader’s heart. She’s tall, shapely, with black eyes and hair. Eterna cannot be described in any other manner than this:

Whoever comes before her loses the power of forgetting. And he who is able to forget her is crippled.

Whoever cannot forget her remains, understands her and loves her without resignation.

And whomever she gives her love is given what nobody has ever had until now: a Past, what he most wanted, what changes his history.

She is so delicate, so just and simple, and her happiness is so without infatuation, that any one, no matter how monstrous, can beg happiness of her.

She’s farthest of all from sensation.

Whoever sees her must by the second day understand her mystery and his own Eternity.

Many can give you a future, but only she can give you a happy past. And even then, she also gives you a future, because you’ll never lose anything again, or know anything again.

Beloved, we feel the emptiness of the world, of the geometrical and physical presentation of Things, of the Universe, and the fullness, the unique certainty of Passion, essential Being, without plurality.

You’ll smile, as if spellbound by this void, from a window that seems to look out over an immense and immovable External Reality that quickly reduces to a point, if you think for a moment how the image of a scene you dream or imagine when you think yourself awake might contain the entire world, and nevertheless it fits in your mind, or spirit, or if you like, in the vibration of an imperceptible molecule of your “gray matter,” as the physiologists say. If, having taken in a panoramic view of sun, earth, sky, forests, river, seas, river banks, or buildings, later you’ll think or dream that you have exactly the same immense image closed in a point of your mind, of your soul, or, if you like, in a microscopic nervous cell in your brain. Moreover, this same gray matter, and the entire brain, is an image in your mind, since you wouldn’t know it existed if it weren’t for the images you have of its form, color, divisions, sketches, or views, and your images of contact, of temperature, if you’ve studied anatomy. If the gray matter existed for itself, how could it think of itself? What we’re devising is precisely the gray matter’s thought about itself, the gray matter’s own imagination of itself. That’s what we are, with the simplicity of a circle, ourselves, the gray matter’s own imagination of itself. How can an imagistic organ have images of itself? How can the gray matter, where thought is said to reside, think of itself, while the eyes cannot see themselves directly; we see everything through the brain, and yet we don’t see the brain itself?