The Museum of Eterna's Novel

PROLOGUE OF INDECISION

The past, art, and the present offers four marvels: cold, fatalism, negation of the Human as a possibility for happiness and intellection, and indirect affirmation of the hedonistic and intellectual failure of the Human, which is Cervantes’s attitude in Quixote and Sancho’s, the only great and genuinely ironic attitude, the only authentic pessimism presented in literary art, where so many cardboard pessimists seek to persuade; Rabelais’s negation, which is equally rotund, happier, and not as sentimental, since it’s sometimes direct and as if deliberate, doctrinal, thus less secure; Beethoven’s Joy and Torment, whose joy is rarer and more prodigious, never joyful in itself, but in sympathy, opening itself in the storm that, in his music, is always approaching; and one of Eterna’s Gestures which I haven’t yet seen, yet I know how it will be, and I’ll see it in her face the day I make a certain request, if I ever make it.

One can live well on a single Story, and, in truth, totalovers live on only the news of Being, of the Mystery that one is for the other.

And even when I found Eterna in fantasy, I discovered, and I now am certain, that I could live on only one of her gestures, and there are others in her, so many, just to live on one. This gesture is so immense, so full of personal and total signification, that without having it, but feeling it possible in her, and knowing that it must show itself before a demand that I have yet to make, I find myself in the fullness of being.