The Museum of Eterna's Novel

WHAT'S HAPPENING TO ME

I, who once upon a time imagined himself a man of complete good fortune, a man who elbowed his way through the multitude shouting, Make way for a happy man! — on the contrary, I must ask that you favor me with a show of compassion for all that’s happening to me, because everything is. See for yourselves:

I yearn for the destruction of cities, and what happens? I end up with a cousin who toils, with extraordinary talent and vehement determination, on behalf of urban prosperity and growth and resolves transit problems.

I invent the best titles for novels and essays, and upon reflection discover that it is ridiculously unjustifiable to title a work of art.

I seek out the most dolorous and intense of affairs for a novel, poem, or play, and some time later my meditations on aesthetics impose upon me the obvious truth that affairs are utterly worthless in art, they are extra-artistic, and that moreover in art the invention of affairs is superlatively lazy, since life is full of affairs of all sorts.

I conceive and produce a few captivating, eloquent poems, and, as I’m always in search of truth, I later discover the truth of the artistic nullity of poems, in prose and especially in verse, in so many stories and personifications.

I deny death and spend my time researching a way to prolong life, and all I’ve managed is to avoid medication.

I go to a lot of trouble to cultivate elegance and talent in literary redaction, and I end up with a character, the President, who eclipses me with the grandiloquence and tear-jerking desperation of his letters, and another character, Maybegenius, who tries to woo me as a protagonist in the most counterproductive and boring system ever: short story writing.

I expect that a story that turns the corner will only turn up jokes.

I make friends with the reader, who makes me write better, and he confides that in me he found an author who gives his readers a bad reputation.

In the end, when I had assembled a complete cast of aesthetic experts, scientists, and philosophers in this novel (three grammaticians, a chemist, a historiographer, two inventors, two biologists, a man of genius, a painter with talent, three poets, an astronomer, two musicians, a mathematician, a psychiatrist); when my inventive plan was ripe, full of embryonic theories, and deciphered palimpsests, with the characters at the helm of scintillating dialogues about art and philosophy, just now I’m captivated by the simple, amiable, and generous conversation of friendship; and all my plans, to present the first novel to come complete with a lab and technicians, pathetically crumbled.

Now the only thing left for me is to make a proverb of my misfortune, saying:

After wrongdoing

The worst you can do

Is to think it through