The Museum of Eterna's Novel

THE PRESIDENT AND DEATH

The President sought the happiness of his companions, but after he had achieved something of that in a deeply held Friendship and in a sustained and amenable Action, plus the most joyful of returns to the home of the novel with high hopes for regaining the happiness of the past, his sick impulse was to impose upon them a goodbye that, robbing them of speech, would only exempt them from the inevitable heartbreak of seeing each other die (only an earthly death, since to his credit the President had given them eternal serenity by inculcating them in his “Metaphysics without Death”).

The author is only happy with this novel of mine because there’s no Death in it, even though, to his great surprise, it’s so sad in the end. (Not as sad as the Quixote, the most spontaneous, unpredictably pessimistic novel in all of literature, even for its author; the Quixote is much more sad than this fancy of mine; in the Quixote the failure of Living is sanctioned — involuntarily, I believe — and also its Fleetingness, and that of Innocence: justice; in mine only Happiness, not Personality or Eternity, meets with failure).

The President resists this adieu in the face of the Nothing, before the eternal concealment of existences. (Even though he knows that the presence of bodies in the absence of love is harder still: Oblivion). The President also believes, perhaps thinking of the Lover, that if something big and new doesn’t happen after seeing the beloved, we’ll always see her with the same feeling that we did when we saw her before she “died;” because without new things happening there’s no forgetting, because there’s no Time — which is nothing — outside of events, which weaken our images of the past. It could be a formula for unforgetfulness: to remove oneself from new important events when one is obliged to stop seeing the beloved.

In the end, the President believes in an eternity of Personal memory, individual memory, of all that once made up someone.

It’s also known that, in addition to his general obligations in this novel, the author — who sometimes is and sometimes is not the President — has two different metaphysical obligations: one to Eterna: to show her the nothingness of the Nothing, that is, of Death, because for those who already have Love their entire concern is the future and the possibility of its ending; the other obligation is to Sweetheart: to show her the nothingness of the Past, where she had her greatest humiliation and sadness, thus liberating her from the tinge of reality that she gives to a certain tortuous scene. This image must be annihilated as such so as to convert it into an image without this tinge of reality, which is to say, a fantasy image of mere unreality.

But what is the President’s personal metaphysical anguish? He doesn’t believe in Death, but he can’t love what he believes to be mortal, or what he does not know to be immortal; he describes this sentimentally as a disaster of destiny: “He who cannot love someone whom Death awaits.” From which it follows that Eterna’s misfortune (to believe herself mortal) is the immortalist President’s misfortune as well (incapacity to love the mortal). Such is the President’s metaphysics, which we found among his papers, finished, period.