The Museum of Eterna's Novel

SALUTATION

What I have here is, strangely enough, now the promised Novel, which certainly had the instinct of assuring itself a state of effective non-existence — it hasn’t emerged from non-being because a promised book traces the border between being and non-being, and from a distant perspective, such as the mind of the author, its place in existence is being prepared, and energy, curiosity, and attention are reserved for it; even promising it so much existence that juries have reserved prizes for it — and it had the instinct of maintaining itself in this non-existence for a half-dozen years, so that it can appear as if its being had never known nothingness, which, doubling the virtue of its reality, makes possible such an abundance thereof that, in a fantasy, non existence lives in the person of the Gentleman Who Doesn’t Exist, whose insinuated substance is only effective, can only breathe, whose slender shadow can only have a place in a novel whose existence is as strong as this one, whose beginning has not been preceded by a nothing.

I’ll say goodbye here, too, reader, not because you can ever forget me — you can’t, this is an unforgettable novel — but because I’m just a poor novel, ardent, but short on tremulous dreams, a little curtain of shadows that has decided to pull itself back so as to reveal everything, assuming you begin to read it: Sweetheart, the President, GWDE-Eterna is not on the same path — the sad being-characters only live in the minutes that someone spends writing them: once their making is concluded, they are concluded, they are nothing, they’re even sadder now because the ticklish feeling of being read ran over their dead figures like a butterfly, or disquieting peals of laughter, or even the piety that you will disgorge it gave them goosebumps all over their bodies because they never had access to Life.

My Novel has been executed without life, and yet it’s not to be forgotten. It’s worse that way, even sadder, even more pitiless. You who are eternal, the living, are those who can weep for it, since you have touched Life and there’s no death when there is a present, a single instant of Life is followed by eternity; you can cry, your tears burn your face, they run, they wet your cheeks; I, the Novel, am only made of daydreams, and the day you dream me you’ll forget me; I’ll be over forever, and I’ll end each time that, because he’s happy, because he’s triumphant, he doesn’t dream me; meanwhile you will never forget existing.