The Museum of Eterna's Novel

ANOTHER ATTEMPT AT SALUTATION

Why not? And why not call it a salutation, even if it doesn’t end up being one? I haven’t promised you my mental continuity and congruency as a man, but only as an author — to give a novelistic definition. Here I am, with all of the cravings that happen between the self and the intimate movements of every day; I live my day before the reader’s eyes. The reader is by definition a sympathizer, and I can be interesting to him in what I show of my doubt and inconstancy.

Knowledge is a deep and complex thing, nothing like the melancholy thing which is to know words. That’s the worst thing that can happen to us, and at the same time, it engenders such infatuation. I say that we live with very little knowledge, as if to convince ourselves we don’t need it. And if it were true that our knowledge is very small, it would be doubtful if it were true: if we know scarcely anything in depth, it’s probable that our vast ignorance includes ignorance of whether it’s certain we know nothing.

This isn’t what I wanted to say. I wanted to say that everyone has deep knowledge of two or three complex truths, but that our experience with life embraces a thousand more aspects, so that we live almost all of our lives in darkness, something that is not conducive to constant misfortune, not least of which because pain tends to engender pleasure on its own just by ceasing, and vice versa. What’s certain, knowledge, counts for very little in light of this rule.

But if we lived in constant surprise; almost totally in the unexpected. We don’t know a single scrap integrally (integrally, scrap, these words denounce the fragility of human mental labor), not even a total fraction of our lot in life, unless we dedicate the better part of our lives to learning all the motivations of every action and passion, which is rarely possible. We like to reconstruct the beginning of effects and events that continue a long time or a short time, and connect us, but rarely do we find the stamina for a methodical evocation of an effect or event.

We also rarely know whether we are dealing with ideas, or with conduct.

In music, for example, if we were to document the immensity of the small melodic labor of artists who were contemporaries of Bach, or who came before him, the common people of the past and of the present, and of Bach himself, it’s possible to doubt regarding Beethoven that we have really, even now, been dealing with music; or if we only consider music to be this remote music which is not artistic in itself (even less so with earlier music). Maybe all that we call music, starting from Bach, and fragments of song which these musicians and people left behind in an immense number is nothing but the elaboration of an obsession tied to fear. Perhaps genuine music has never, or almost never existed: it’s the traffic of the state that the individual artist feels and its direct and personal expression, the search for a means and the desire to express oneself. What I have here is how we work for a long time in darkness and then give our work a name that it has not earned.

So now I also ask myself: What has motivated the idea and the will to make a novel? Do these last two or three years of my life not show me any one of these motivations, not because nothing should be mysterious or inaccessible, but because inquiries are tiring or troubling, even though we are all interested in the search for origins in our history and in schemas of the whole motivation for an action or a sentiment.

At first, I wanted to express myself, and also I wanted to look at life psychologically, and I wanted to commit myself to a general study of aesthetics, and I wanted to better myself economically, and thereby make a bit of a reputation for myself which would facilitate my means in difficult circumstances. All of this was erased by a great, new motivation, which coincided with my unexpected meeting of a person of such elevated influences on my spirit, such incredible grace, that sometimes I don’t know if I only dreamed her.

To show my gratitude — or to keep her dream alive — I began the manuscript. This remained the main motive, though there was one other, smaller motivation, which will interest the public more: to execute a theory of Art, particularly of the Art of the Novel.

So it is that we even write a letter to this novel in darkness, and in darkness the person to whom it is dedicated asks to read it, and a consternation arises in her that she cannot define. She also cannot guess Eterna’s motives, because she does not know herself well, and so she writes this missive for unknown reasons.

The reader will have equally confused impressions of this Novel. I don’t believe I’ve made a novel that’s faithful to the doctrine that it expresses. If both were excellent, the reader would still have plenty of time to form his impression, finding much to doubt, to declare vague or contradictory or inartistic, since in order to justify these imperfections I’ve just argued that it’s difficult to really know motivations and impressions.

Goodbye, reader!…