Macedonio Fernández - The Museum of Eterna's Novel

Consciousness without a living person, not obligated to a “body.”

Plurality of all those who were not “existences” but “lives,” which is to say consciousnesses connected to material instruments.

The individual consists of memory: each one, in his differing mnemonic path; while still living at home, the feeling of he who feels the most is transmitted to the others, so that there’s no more than a single sentiment; the strongest state is like a tonic and it invades the other consciousnesses, to the point of weakening whoever feels it the most and unifying the surrounding field of consciousness. The individual sustains himself in these multiple memories of corporeal existence that each one has; plurality is only in the conscious existence in which they find themselves now.

The spontaneous apparition of conscious states in me, I attribute to their apparition in others. Now, I don’t know why these conscious intercommunications are established, their point of departure being the mind in which they first appear. Because I can conceive of being the only consciousness, and in this case nothing and no one else will be the cause of my states, neither other people, nor material existence. Why this plural world of consciousnesses? I don’t know where the series of states began, what person began this contagion to all other incorporeal consciousnesses, without obvious or direct communication. I truly believe that the only feeling in this life is that consciousness operates on bodies and never directly, never without these bodies’ mediation, which includes objects as well as bodies, which the World constitutes as temporal and spatial, and from which spatio-temporal constitution arises the illusion that we call Memory and the illusion of individual Identity, out of this memory, which seizes upon the external. Pure consciousness that has neither time nor space nor memory.

Are these beings equivalent to dreams, then? Is the dream-state equivalent to this state of pure consciousness? Is there nothing left over for daydreams? I think there is: a dream of the nearness of another consciousness.

An endearing insinuation: a pot of boiling milk (an earthly event) that makes these worldless beings shudder.

Francisco began to despair of his valet duties. Not even the unhinging of delirium saved him. “No,” he said to himself, pondering, “I am not made to be a valet in such a rowdy house full of people with bodies; I’m going to offer my services to a house of people who are only consciousness.” So he went looking for a Mystic who would assist him with a voluntary death. After an intermission in which this was effected, we have him here. “Someone’s coming, Francisco, answer the door,” he thinks, for example, now. Or: “Francisco, you must understand that things aren’t exactly like they were before.” And he goes for the door. He opens Nothing with a nothing key, and in an instant of immobile time later, he’s chatting with the Forgetter.

This is the climate of dreams in which the President operates. Will Art save him?

(The President goes off a ways, arguing with the Author, saying it’s in poor taste to talk so much about his projects and so little about Eterna. And they come to a compromise, which is that her name should appear on every page.)

And Sweetheart, who went away in the night accompanied only by her dog and a willow cane that Maybegenius has peeled for her today, thinks gently of the light of the little house during the moonlit night, just as at other times she had liked to contemplate the lighted house from the dark fields.

She remembers that in the afternoon, when she was walking in the garden, the President had made up a story for her about the gardener’s madness before the spectacle of the flowers, which presented to him an unlimited succession, each flower surpassing the last in beauty. Everything is possible in creation, there’s nothing that can’t be dreamed, that can’t come to pass. Being does not understand no. The President told her this in his favorite formula: the totalpossibility of occurrence, the liberty of Reality.

INSTANT IN WHICH THE DENIZENS OF "LA NOVELA" APPEAR

Maybegenius and Simple suspended their chores of cutting the grass around Sweetheart’s lodgings, an isolated, circular room with windows facing all four directions. Instead, they amused themselves with shared knowledge: Maybegenius says, “Signs kill things: widow’s weeds kill sorrow; going to mass kills faith; theology creates atheists.” Or “God made the world and I give it to you for study.” (He notices the influence of the President-in-diminishment, and he fights against it: Since Progress sticks to the Present like a shadow, God is in Being and in Passion; the Present takes nothing away from Passion.) Or he even goes deeper with his meditation on human conduct: “Humans close their eyes thousands of times without a thought of death.” Simple answers with his own thoughts, like “There are two truths that ugly women don’t want to know, two fidelities they hate: one is the mirror, and the other is the photograph.” Or: “Selflessness is possible, but not by throwing himself into the water to save a drowning fish.”

The Lover dreams, because meanwhile he dreams that he exists; and meanwhile his beloved smiles at him, since they are sure of a venturesome encounter via a love made beautiful by death. Or he says these enigmatic words aloud: “The Depths of Life. (There is pleasure in all pain.) The fast watch and the majesty of Life: white fingernails and the exact time and fingernails painted with the illusion of Life.”

From between their leaves Eterna picks violets for the little vase on the President’s nightstand, violets she leaves without anyone seeing her, with a little card on which she had written:

Violets…

Violets…

And an Eterna

And on whose back the President will write:

Love sealed with violets.

You freed your hand from my hand

And so captured my heart!

Or she sends him a paper flower, with ferns, and on each one of its six petals she has written a letter of her name; and he will respond on the stem of this flower:

He who lived without seeing her

Feels himself late

And now sees Eterna

(Even though one night he had confessed to her that someone who had lost everything in a long life would recover everything in finding Eterna.)

The President and Sweetheart returned from their walk to the swamp by the bank of the river, a grotto formed by six willows, an intriguing place because of its teruteru birds, ducks, and the occasional small snake, and whose profound mystery they hoped to one day penetrate. Sweetheart drove the carriage, the same one in which the President drove everyone to the train station every day, and she let herself be convinced by various ideas or observations.

“The two Murmers I’ve discovered,” the President says, “are Death and Old Age, or the Passing of Time. The inevitability of death and aging are as if time alone could make things slow down, and change. This involves two betrayals: Death, which I’ve already explained is no betrayal, and that the most intense form of old age, in a large number of cases, is young old age, which occurs between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, when a man must assume all the responsibilities and demands of life, leaving behind the life watched over by his mother and father, which he so enjoyed. Old age is simply not about the years but about the entire relationship of the life’s excessive charge with respect to the reactivity of an individual psyche.” And also the President made her see the ridiculousness of his life: that he’d studied the same biological time since he was thirty, which is to say, how not to die, and metaphysics, which is to say, how nobody dies.

Then Sweetheart said to the President, in an undertone: