The Museum of Eterna's Novel

ALSO A PROLOGUE

I would have liked this novel to have something of a daydream about it, the most subtle kind. I dreamed in 1928 (dating dreams, these can be dated by their concomitance with the series of wakefulness, and also by reference to other dreams which came before or afterwards): ‘I found myself in a house where the floor was in shadow or covered with a curtain, either dark or half-opened, as it appeared to me alternatively. And there was a woman whose face I could not distinguish, only the vague contours of feminine dress; and I knew who it was, I felt she was someone I knew without really seeing her; I felt her cordiality, her company, that her soul was not my enemy; also at moments I wasn’t sure whether or not I saw and recognized her. Upon my subsequent awaking, or the state that we call awake, referring to the idea or concept, I could not remember her face.’ I use quotation marks for dreams, and I’ll use them for everything I write specifically about them, so that if I, who am a dream for others, at one time appear in the reader's mind, I'll have the quotation marks to distinguish me as such. All art could be set in quotation marks, and everything I wrote, my three books: Not All Consciousness is Wakefulness, Newcomer's Papers, and Museum of Eterna’s Novel, in each I wanted to evoke or feature the state of recent wakefulness, when we are not yet fully free of our dreams. It’s the state that we should conserve to confront pain, and the presentiments of passion, since the ideal of passion is that we create for ourselves a hyper-wakefulness, even though passion is already such a state.

It seems to me that this dream, which I only had once, has a certain divinity, or mysticism, a sense of auto-existence: a certain slippage of personal identity, the eternal escape of individual continuity and its recognition, confirmation.

Outside the state of passion (only passion is altruistic), which is always a state of certainty, the only state of reality for dreams in which both lovers converge and in which everything must be risked, everything must be promised in full awareness, all happiness, all pain — outside of this, we must live in half light, and with half-actions,

half-awake, without entirely knowing events and states, since outside of passion the probability is that suffering will prevail; the dream I remember here is the formula of the state of half denial of all certainty and effectivity.