The Museum of Eterna's Novel

PROLOGUE READ IN RECOMPENSE FOR THE AUTHOR WHO FORBIDS A BOY FROM ENTERING THE NOVEL

All the characters — and the readers announced so far — warned me that they would judge the interruption of the Boy with a Long Stick in the novel as a kind of “reading bruise” on the forehead. That’s a singular metaphor, of irritating intention; as if a stick or a cane could cause “hematomas” on the reading operation, which is the same as claiming that reading about bananas makes people slip and fall. I understand the warning if it comes from fathers of families who are incapable of achieving at home what I have done in the novel: keeping kids from running around and getting free from the little brats, who are kept outside. For a rest, these fathers resort to whatever reading is hooligan-free; they’ve let me know that they will only take up a novel that won’t be mistaken by those brats as a staircase, a wall, a cornice, or a tree branch, which all function as things to climb, only to fall down, get banged around, and renew any existing swellings and bumps. This taking to heights so as to fall down, and thus authenticate differences in altitude that nature so delicately provided, allows young people to always see these structures from below and to be up high, or falling, in every other circumstance. In this way they don’t stoop to blows, since old age begins with neglecting such things.