The Golden Age

First encounter with the Book

The story I told at the feast was no doubt influenced at least a little by the island’s Book, although for a long time I found this maze of adventure stories, fairy tales and myths about rabbits, princes and princesses, whose descriptions, insertions, digressions, improbabilities and anachronisms knew no end, quite insufferable. It took me far longer to find in it something that appealed to me than it did to get used to the island’s cuisine and its board games without rules. Now is perhaps the time for me to say something more about the Book, which I have mentioned a number of times already. I confess that I have kept putting off talking about the Book because I don’t have much of an appetite for it, but having discussed board games and food I can’t think of anything else of particular interest: I will just have to tackle the Book here and now.

The main reason for my avoiding writing about the Book was the fear that I would lack the strength to negotiate its labyrinth, which has become yet more intricate since the time it left the island and settled in my brain. I found the Book puzzling enough when I read it on the island, and then I had no idea of its extent; indeed, it is unlikely that I even discovered what was its main part. Since then it has become even more difficult to survey, having become something of a hybrid, in which pages woven from the fine fibres of memory and pages born in the realm of dreams sit side by side. When I think of the Book I see its long insertions emerging from the blurred landscapes of memory, stretching to infinity as they grow around tremulous pictures produced by the imagination. Dear reader, I believe I told you in the first chapter of this book that I was looking forward to wandering in ghostly realms ruled by the triumvirate Memory, Dream, and Desire, and to having adventures there; but now, having reached the twenty-ninth chapter, I am feeling very tired. I hadn’t realized how exhausting it is to wade about in the swamp of memory.

As I said, the islanders took no great interest in art. After the apotheosis of the Stain, when the building efforts of the Europeans in the lower town ceased, no architecture existed on the island. The islanders needed no temples or offices. Sometimes they would build a simple house on the islet of rock on which the upper town was accommodated, but, as the island population was in decline and no new houses were needed, they tended to repair old dwellings instead. The islanders had no painting and sculpture (which is perhaps surprising considering the great roles these play in the story-lines of the Book); they were satisfied by the shapes of stains, the movements made by the shadows of leaves on walls, the ever-changing white figures described by the foam of the waves of the sea. They had no music because it was enough for them to listen to the rustlings of the island; indeed, in the tapestry of island sounds there was no tear by which music could enter.

For a long time I believed that the islanders cultivated no art at all. But one morning, having awoken in Karael’s house, lying there with my eyes closed, listening to the chatter and trickle of water, I realized I was hearing occasional sounds which escaped the classifications I had established for familiar island sounds. A sound kept returning that reminded me of the opening of a Velcro, or a cookie being bitten into, and this was usually followed by the kind of sound made by a cloth fluttering in the wind or the rapid flapping of a bird’s wings; the third sound was a light swish or perhaps a quiet sigh. I tried to guess what was making these sounds, but the only idea that came to me was the improbable one of a sorrowful bird groaning in pain, pecking intermittently at a cookie and flapping its wings. I got up and walked through the wall of water to the stone terrace. There I saw something that surprised me more than the sight of a sorrowful bird nibbling cookies would have done: Karael was sitting on the terrace reading from a large book which was lying on the stone table in front of her.

I sat down next to her and watched. I saw that the pages of the book were neither stitched nor glued to a spine, that they were gathered like those of a children’s foldout picture book, and that they were written on one side only. At a number of places on a page there was some kind of paper patch-pocket attached; these pockets looked a little like ears or mushrooms. At certain places in the text there was another kind of attachment: a thin strip of paper which became wider and thicker two or three centimetres along to form a kind of oval (the cap of a mushroom) whose axis (the stalk of the mushroom) was perpendicular to the paper strip. The upper side of the oval was sealed along its whole length and contained a number of slits. Although Karael paid no attention at all to some of the pockets, others she opened (this was the sound that had reminded me of Velcro or the crunching of cookies) and pulled from them a small pleated strip of thin paper. This strip, too, had attachments like those I’ve just described, and some of these (somewhat smaller) ears, too, Karael opened, pulling out more paper concertinas with ears. I looked on in amazement, trying to work out how many levels the book had. I counted six, but even at the sixth level there was a little ear jutting out; there was no way of telling how many more concertina strips with ears were hidden within it.

At some moments all the concertinas were folded inside the pockets; at others Karael would have left open several pockets simultaneously, having opened out not only the strips which they had contained but also some of the strips which these gave issue to. Whenever there was a gust of wind, all the concertinas were lifted up and began to flutter (explaining the sounds of bird’s wings), reminding me of those little flags we used to wave on May 1^st. When the wind dropped, the concertinas lay limp across the table, their ends hanging over its edges and shivering (the murmuring, whispering, sighing sound).

A short time later Karael carefully folded all the concertinas back into the pockets and closed the book. But her agitation remained inside the book; indeed it was even more obviously present when Karael’s hand was not on it. Inside the closed book, the ears formed a bump which reached its highest point in the book’s centre. The front cover — which was not joined to the back cover by means of a spine, only by the round shape of the largest paper concertina (the only one which did not belong in a pocket) — rocked from side to side ceaselessly. I was concerned that the book would topple, and this indeed happened, the front cover tipping over slowly to the ground, the paper concertina unfurling in an arc, leaving the ears so shamelessly exposed that I turned my eyes away.

Karael told me this was the island’s Book. I’ll write it with a capital letter because the islanders have only one book. I was surprised to discover that any form of art existed on the island, and that this should be literature was astonishing to me. Why should the islanders, who have such a love of formlessness, choose an art form that works with words? Words are surely more hostile than colours, lines or tones to a formless life. But once I familiarized myself with the Book and its history I realized it could not have been any different. I have already mentioned — in the chapter on the phonetics of the island’s sounds and rustlings — that the shapeless whirling the islanders love to watch is really the life of many waning and emerging images and shapes, that the whirring they listen to is the voice of a thousand fused stories. In this whirring the islanders recognize the appeal to protect the formless from a humiliating lapse into form; and they hear in it another appeal, too: to affirm and celebrate the wealth of the formless by hunting in its depths for some of the treasures hidden there, and to show these off to the world. It seemed to me that the islanders thought the formless resounded with the quiet plea to expose at least some of the pictures that glimmer through the whirring, thus releasing at least some of the plots and stories whose telling weaves the murmur of stillness. The appeal to keep silent and the appeal to tell become entwined, revealing a single, formless longing — a longing to unfurl the monstrous, stupefying whirling of which it has long been part and product. A whirling in the life of the formless dreams of shape that allows itself to give birth to a complicated architecture, but this soon caves in, disintegrates and crumbles to formlessness so that the process can start again at the beginning.

But a new beginning is only possible at the very end of the shaping process, not until it seems — no doubt deceptively — that the last trace of the formless has been eradicated. Tones and colours would not be able to maintain the progress of this ages-old cycle: their borders do not stretch to the most distant headland on the continent of shapes. Tones and colours would not be able to bring about the glorious re-emergence of the formless because they would be unable to eradicate these traces completely. For this you need words, sentences and stories. The murmurs, rustlings and blurred shapes of the island did not dream of pictures, sculptures and tones; the murmurs and rustlings of the island could bring forth nothing but a book. I have mentioned already that the islanders loved border territories; life on the island was played out on two borderland strips — the world of shapeless murmurs and whirls and the world described in the Babylonian architecture of the Book. Each of these territories worked on the other; the one was born out of the other and they were astonishingly similar — the monotonous murmurs and whirls were really a complicated mesh of many shapes, pictures and actions, and in the intricacy of the Book’s architecture it was not difficult to trace the monotonous principle that determined the inserting ad infinitum of one into the other.