Gerald Murnane

A History of Books

A History of Books

After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal’s Pensées in an advertisement for soap.

MARCEL PROUST, Remembrance of Things Past

A man and a woman, husband and wife, were standing in the main square of a town such as might have been depicted, fifty and more years ago, in one or another so-called article about one or another country in Central America in one or another issue of the National Geographic Magazine. The time was probably mid-afternoon, and the air was surely hot. The man and the woman debated several matters during their time in the square. Once, at least, the woman struck the man and was struck in return. None of the disputes between the man and the woman had been resolved when he and she became a male and a female jaguar, or it may have been a male and a female hummingbird or a male and a female lizard.

At some time during the 1970s, or it may have been earlier, the phrase magical realism became fashionable among the sorts of person who are paid to write comments on published works of fiction. Those persons mostly used the phrase when commenting on works of fiction by authors from the region known as Latin America. The persons seemed to believe that the authors mentioned had devised a new way of writing fiction. The authors themselves seemed mostly followers of fashion and ignorant. In their fiction, they reported things becoming other things or persons becoming other than persons as though such reports had not been included in works of fiction since so-called classical times. The phrase magical realism later fell out of fashion, and most of the works of fiction by the so-called magical realists seem nowadays forgotten.

One of the least-praised of the works of fiction mentioned above might be reported as having been still remembered when the sentences hereabouts were being composed, which was about forty years after the publication of the English translation of the seldom-praised work. Not a word of the text itself was still remembered. The design of the dust jacket and even its predominant colours had been forgotten long before. The man who might have claimed to remember the work of fiction would have claimed no more than to be sometimes aware of the matters reported in the following paragraphs.

A man and a woman, husband and wife, were lying on a double bed in an upstairs flat in a certain inner suburb of Melbourne. The time was mid-afternoon, and the air in the flat was hot. The man and the woman debated several matters during their time on the bed. Once, at least, the woman struck the man and was struck in return. None of the differences between the man and the woman had been resolved when he and she copulated on the bed or when she afterwards turned away and fell asleep while he remained lying on the bed and watching images in his mind of a male and a female jaguar or it may have been a male and a female hummingbird or a male and a female lizard.

The man watching the images supposed that he was remembering the contents of a certain book of fiction that he had read several years before. The man still remembered the title of the book and the name of the author and the colours and the design of the dust jacket. Now, so the man supposed, he was remembering some of the contents of the book. He could not remember any of the text of the book but he was remembering some of the characters and some of the action, or so he would have said if the woman had woken and had asked him what he was thinking about.

The images in the mind of the watching man — the imagejaguars or the image-hummingbirds or the image-lizards — debated several matters with one another or savaged one another or copulated for as long as the man supposed that he was remembering a certain book of fiction. The man believed himself to be a careful reader of books of fiction. He felt obliged to read carefully and to think afterwards about the fiction that he read. He hoped that he himself might become in the future the author of some or another work of fiction, but he supposed that he had first to learn certain secrets known only to authors of fiction. The man had never written more than a few pages of fiction before he had discarded them because he had seemed, while he was writing, merely to be reporting details of images of persons or of places or of objects or of events in his own mind whereas he had wanted his writing to give rise to images that would surprise him as he had been surprised at first by the images of the jaguars and of the hummingbirds and of the lizards while he had been reading the book of fiction that he supposed he was remembering while he lay on his and his wife’s bed during the hot afternoon.

The man’s wife remained asleep, but the man remained awake. The woman wore, while she slept, an undergarment that she called a slip. While he lay on the bed, the man began to look at the woman through half-closed eyes and with his head held at an angle. The man soon observed that the smoothness of the fabric on the woman’s hips brought to his mind an image of the skin of the lizard that he had lately seemed to remember having read about. The colour of the hair on the woman’s head was golden brown. Sometimes, the man observed that the shining of the sunlight on a few stray hairs at the woman’s forehead brought to his mind an image of the plumage of the hummingbird that he had lately seemed to remember having read about.

The man would have liked to observe some or another detail of the woman’s appearance that would bring to his mind some or another image-detail of a certain jaguar, but before he could observe such a detail the man fell asleep.

While he slept, the man was, of course, unaware of his surroundings and of his own appearance. If, however, he could have observed his and his wife’s bedroom as though it had been a room about to be mentioned in a work of fiction that would later become a book of fiction and as though he had been the writer of the work and had been in possession of certain secrets known only to writers of fiction, then the man might have observed the bag that his wife called her toiletry bag, which lay just then in a drawer behind him and the fabric of which was spotted like the skin of some or another beast of prey. Or, the conjectured writer might have observed that the man asleep on the bed had assumed a posture not unlike that of some or another beast preparing to leap towards its prey.

A naked woman, or a statue of a naked woman, may have been standing for some time in the main square of a town that may have lain beside the Mediterranean Sea. The woman, or the statue of the woman, may have been the only person or object in the square. The time may have been mid-afternoon, and the weather was surely hot.

The naked woman was, in fact, an image of a naked woman; or, the statue was an image of a statue. Likewise, the main square was an image of a main square. These images appeared in various parts of a reproduction of a photograph of some or another painting. The reproduction had appeared at some or another time in some or another book, or it may have been some or another illustrated magazine.

An image of the reproduction mentioned above had later appeared in the mind of a man who was lying on a couch in the lounge room of a certain house in a certain outer suburb of Melbourne on a hot afternoon. The image had appeared only a few moments after the man had woken from a brief sleep. The man had lain on the couch during the early afternoon because he had been unable to sleep during much of the previous night. During that night, the man had debated many matters with his wife.

The man lying on the couch was at home alone while his wife was at work and while their children were at school. The man and his wife had agreed, more than a year before, that the man would stay at home for two years so that he could write a work of fiction that he had wanted for long to write. Now, the first of the two years had passed. During that year, the man had done all the housework and the shopping that he had previously agreed to do and had likewise cared for his and his wife’s children but he had written only a few pages of the work of fiction that he had wanted for long to write. During much of the time when he might have been writing, the man had read one or another of the many books that he owned. Sometimes, while he read, the man had felt as though he was about to learn some or another secret known only to writers of fiction but later, when he had tried to go on writing his own fiction, he had found that what he wrote brought to his mind only images that had first appeared there while he had been reading one or another book of fiction whereas he had hoped that his writing would bring to his mind images that had never previously appeared there. Whenever he had found this, the man had discarded the pages that he had been writing at the time.

When the man had first lain on the couch in the early afternoon mentioned above, he had had in mind an image of a certain disciple of a certain male character whose name was also the title of a book of fiction that the man had read several years before but had mostly forgotten. The man who lay on the couch had remembered, while he lay, that the book had been first published in the French language ten years before he had been born and that the author of the book, whose name seemed Italian, had been born in Greece and was known as a painter of paintings rather than as an author of books of fiction. The subject matter, so to call it, of many of the author’s paintings was often described as surrealistic. The man lying on the couch had once seen a reproduction of a photograph of one of the author’s paintings. Of the images in the reproduction, the man recalled only an image of a naked woman or of a statue of a naked woman alone in a large square at a time that was surely afternoon on a day of exceptional heat. The man on the couch could recall none of the text of the book of fiction written by the painter. Of the hours that he had spent in reading the book, the man could recall only a few moments when he had learned from the text that the chief character of the fiction had once advised one of his disciples that the clearest and most memorable dreams were those that occurred to a person when he or she had fallen asleep during the afternoon of some or another day of sunshine and heat.

The man lying on the couch had dreamed a clear and memorable dream before he had woken on the hot afternoon. The events of the dream resembled some of the events that had taken place on a certain hot afternoon ten years before. On that afternoon, the man and his wife had attended a wedding in a certain provincial city far from Melbourne. The man’s wife wore to the wedding an expensive dress and hat that she had bought for the occasion. In mid-afternoon, when the guests were arriving at the wedding reception, the man’s wife had asked him to take a photograph of her in her new outfit, as she called it. The man had then gone to fetch his and his wife’s camera from their motor car. When the man met up again with his wife, she was standing alone in a small paved courtyard. She then stood in front of two ornamental columns while the man took several photographs. While his wife posed for the photographs, the man became aware that he and his wife had not been alone together during the previous three days and two evenings. He and she had spent most of that time in a house belonging to relatives of his wife and had had to sleep in separate bedrooms. After the wedding reception, the man and his wife would have to return once more to the house mentioned and to sleep once more in the bedrooms mentioned. On the following morning, they would set out for Melbourne. They would set out early in order to avoid the heat of the day.

While the man was taking photographs of his wife, he foresaw the two of them arriving in the early afternoon at their upstairs flat in a certain inner suburb of Melbourne and soon afterwards lying on their bed wearing only their underclothes and without having debated any matters beforehand.

An image of a marble statue of a naked man appeared in the mind of a boy of ten years. The details of the image, so the boy supposed, were such as might have appeared just then in the mind of a girl of about ten years who was sitting in sight of the boy and was looking into a certain volume of an encyclopedia. The most noticeable of those details were an image-sac and an image-tube that dangled between the image-legs of the image-statue.

The boy and the girl sat at separate desks in the single classroom of a primary school with no more than a dozen pupils. The large window at one side of the classroom overlooked mostly level grassy countryside with a line of trees in the far distance. The trees were the nearest trees of a forest extending on its far side further than the boy had ever travelled in that direction. The boy had once travelled with his parents and his brother on a road of red gravel that led for a few miles in among the overarching trees of the forest. After that day, the boy had sometimes seen in his mind an image of some or another clearing in some or another forest and had wished that he could have gone alone into such a clearing whenever he had feared that some or another person or persons might infer from his, the boy’s, demeanour what sort of images he saw for the time being in his mind or what sort of feelings those images caused in him.

Each of the children in the classroom mentioned had a book in front of him or her, although some children whispered or fidgeted rather than read. The teacher’s desk was in a corner behind the children. The teacher was a man considered by the children to be old but was perhaps no older than forty years. His chair was tilted backwards, and he sat with his head against the wall behind him and with his eyes closed. Some of the children supposed that the teacher had fallen asleep because the afternoon was hot. The oldest girl often asserted that the teacher fell asleep on most afternoons because he drank during every lunch hour from a flask of brandy that he kept inside his jacket. The girl asserted also that her parents were going to report the teacher soon to the district inspector of schools.

At some time during the last hour of every school day, the teacher allowed the children to put away their schoolbooks and to do what he called free reading. Each child then chose a book from the cupboard that was called the library. The boy in whose mind the image-statue had appeared had read every book in the so-called library. Some books he had read several times. On the day when the image-statue was in his mind, he was reading for the third or the fourth time a book that would never be mentioned in any text that he would read during the sixty-one years before he read the page proofs of this present work of fiction. The boy had never taken note of the name of the author of the book. The title of the book comprised two words: a surname in the possessive case and the word Fag. The two words of the title were the only words from the book that the boy would remember, even a few years afterwards, but he would still remember, sixty and more years afterwards, some of what he had seen in his mind while he read and some of what he had felt. He would remember, for example, an image of a boy-man seated at a desk in an upstairs room that he called his study. The image-boy-man sometimes read from an image-book in which the image-words were in the Greek or the Latin language and sometimes wrote on an image-page with an image-pen image-lines of poetry or image-sentences of prose that he himself had composed just then in the one or the other language. The image-boy-man sometimes looked out through the image-window above his image-desk at an image-view of low green image-hills with a line of image-trees in the image-distance. The image-trees were the nearest image-trees of an image-woodland that extended a little way in among the image-hills. The image-boy-man admired the image-trees but had never wished to go alone into the image-woodland.

The surname of the image-boy-man was part of the title of the book mentioned earlier, and the boy who had read the book several times always considered the image-boy-man the chief character of the book. Sixty and more years after he had last read the book, and when he better understood the workings of books of fiction, the man who had been the boy-reader understood that the chief character of the book was he who was denoted by the second word of the title. This character was an image-boy no older than the boy-reader himself had been while he was reading. The narrator of the book reported many of the images that appeared in the mind of this image-boy and many of his image-feelings but nothing of what took place in the mind of the image-boy-man who employed the chief character as his fag.

The chief character was reported as first disliking and fearing his employer but later admiring him — disliking him because the boy-men, his employer’s classmates, all disliked him and shunned him; fearing him because he spoke always sternly to the chief character; admiring him because he seemed not to care that his classmates disliked him and shunned him and because he went on reading or writing in his study every evening in such a way that he, the chief character, could never suppose what his employer might have seen in his mind, much less what he might have felt; admiring him also because he trained during many an afternoon for a certain long-distance race conducted by the school and later came from far back in the field and won the race.

The boy in the classroom mentioned earlier seldom recalled any character from any book. In the books that he read were too many so-called adventures. The characters in those books took part in one after another so-called adventure whereas the boy wanted to read about male and female characters falling in love with one another. The boy himself often fell in love — mostly with girls of his own age but often with young women and sometimes with young men. A few months before he had begun to read for the third or the fourth time about the image-boy-man whose surname was part of the title of a book of fiction, the boy had fallen in love with the girl in whose mind, so he supposed a few months later, was an image of a marble statue. Sometimes the boy wished that he could write books instead of merely reading them. The girl-characters or the young-women-characters in his books would understand why the boy-characters had fallen in love with them, but the boy could never have found the words for writing about such a matter. Nor could he have found the words for writing about boy-characters or young-men-characters who were able to prevent other persons from knowing what images they, the characters, saw in their minds or what feelings those images gave rise to, although he sometimes wished to write about those matters also.

The boy reading in the classroom wanted to conceal his thoughts and feelings from the girl who was looking into the volume mentioned earlier. A few days before, the boy had given the girl to understand that he had fallen in love with her, but he was still waiting to learn what this had caused the girl to think or to feel.

When the boy had taken from one of the shelves in the classroom the book about the fictional character whose fictional feelings remained unknown, the girl had taken from another shelf a certain volume of an encyclopedia. The older children knew that the volume contained illustrations of statues of naked men and women. The boy himself sometimes looked at the image-breasts of the image-women and at the smooth image-places between their image-thighs. The boy could not recall the girl’s having previously looked into the volume, but while he was reading that a fictional boy-man sat reading or writing in his fictional study he suspected that the girl was looking at the image-details between the image-thighs of the naked image-men.

Two patches of dried gum lay on a mostly white page. The patches had formerly held in place a coloured reproduction of a painting. The title of the painting and several other details were still printed at the foot of the page. The man remembering these details could not recall the title of the painting but he recalled that its subject was a group of naked women beside a pool in a large room with a tiled floor and marble columns. The man could not recall any detail of any of the images of the women, but he recalled that he had stared at detail after detail on many an afternoon from his eleventh to his fifteenth year.

On each of the afternoons mentioned, the boy had found the reproduction mentioned in a book containing numerous reproductions of paintings but only one in which were images of naked women. He had then looked at the images of the women for as long as he had dared before he replaced the book and then reached for the book of fiction that he was presently reading during each afternoon. This book was one or another work by a famous author of fiction who had been born in England one hundred and twenty-seven years before the boy had been born. The boy had first been recommended to read these works of fiction by an aunt who was one of his father’s unmarried sisters and after he had boasted to her that he, the boy, was capable of reading the books that adults read. His aunt had told him that the famous author had not belonged to their church but that his books of fiction would be safe to read. She had then given the boy permission to take down one or another of those books from the tall glass-fronted bookcase in the parlour of the house where she lived with her two unmarried sisters and their unmarried brother.

The house mentioned was a farmhouse surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside. The view of countryside ended in one direction in a distant line of trees and in another direction in a line of cliffs overlooking an ocean. During each of the years mentioned earlier, the boy had spent several weeks of his summer holidays in the house. During each of those weeks, he had read often from one or another book of fiction by the famous author mentioned and had looked often at the reproduction of the painting mentioned earlier until the day during the summer holidays of his fifteenth year when he had found, on the page where the reproduction had previously lain, only the two patches of dried gum mentioned earlier.

Thirty and more years after he had found the two patches mentioned, the man who had been the boy mentioned was standing on one of the cliffs mentioned and was trying to remember what he had read about in the many books of fiction by the famous author mentioned, none of which books he had read since the summer holidays of his fifteenth year. The man had brought his wife and their two children to the cliffs during their summer holidays. While the man was standing on the cliff, his wife and their children were scrambling down a steep path into a bay or cove where waves broke against a strip of sand at the foot of the cliff. Before the man had turned to look across the grassy countryside towards the nearest farmhouse and to try to remember what he had read about in the parlour of that house more than thirty years before, he had been pleased to hear his wife and their children calling to one another and laughing on the steep path. During the previous year, his wife had been often ill and had spent several periods in one or another hospital.

While the man looked towards the nearest farmhouse, there appeared in his mind an image of a sailing ship lying on a reef within sight of cliffs. Tall waves were breaking against the ship, and the wind had torn the sails from the masts. Groups of people were huddled on the deck of the ship. Other people were trying to launch lifeboats. Noticeable among these people was a man who was taller and more enterprising than his fellows and who helped to launch several lifeboats and to guide people into the boats.

The man standing on the cliff took an interest in the few details that he seemed to remember from books that he had read. He had been trying for some years to complete the final draft of a long work of fiction, although he had excused himself from writing during the previous year on account of his wife’s illness. While he stood on the cliff, he seemed about to learn something that would be of much use to him as a writer of fiction but he was not observant enough to notice such a detail in his mind as that the image of the wrecked sailing ship in his mind was not an image of any sort of nineteenth-century vessel. Not until twenty years later would the man notice that the details of the imageship were those of a line drawing of a Portuguese caravel from the fifteenth century. The man knew hardly anything about any sort of ocean-going vessel, but in his twelfth year he had copied into a school exercise book as part of a so-called project a line drawing of a caravel. As part of the same so-called project, he had searched several pages in his atlas for places bearing names that seemed to be Portuguese. One such place that he found was the island named Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean, which island his teacher had not previously known about and which she supposed at first to be a fictional island in some or another book of fiction that the boy had read.

Sometimes while the man saw in his mind the image of the foundered ship, he saw also indistinct images of persons struggling in the ocean or being swept onto the shore. Some of these images may have first appeared to the man while he had read, more than thirty years before, some or another book by the famous author; others of the images may have first appeared while he had been reading a certain book about shipwrecks on the south-west coast of Victoria. This book had been recommended to him by one of the sisters of the woman who had recommended the works of fiction by the famous author. The sister, who was, of course, another of the boy’s aunts, had recommended especially the chapter in the book reporting the wreck of a certain vessel, sixty years before the boy’s birth, in a small bay beneath tall cliffs about thirty miles from the farmhouse where the four unmarried siblings lived. The wreck of this vessel was famous, so the aunt told the boy, because only two persons had survived it: a young apprentice seaman and a young female passenger. The young seaman had saved the young woman from drowning, and their story was later reported in newspapers in Australia and England. According to the aunt, many people expected that the two young persons would later marry, but they went their separate ways.

On every night that he spent at the farmhouse, the boy heard before he fell asleep the sounds of the ocean in the bay or cove beneath the nearby cliffs. After he had read the chapter about the famous wreck, he saw often before he fell asleep images of a young man and a young woman whom he had dragged to shore and whom he had carried from the beach to a cave under a tall cliff where he had laid her down before going in search of grass and bunches of foliage to cover her and to keep her warm, all the while averting his eyes so that she might later fall in love with him because he had behaved differently from many another young man who would have stared at her nakedness.

While the man mentioned earlier was going down from the cliffs to join his wife and their children in the bay or cove, an image occurred to him of the corpse of a tall young man lying on a beach with a wrecked vessel in the background. The head of the image-corpse rested on a folded arm in the same way that the head of the young man, during his life, had rested often before sleep. When the man had first read, as a boy, the passage that had given rise to one of the very few images that would survive from among the countless images that occurred to him while he read the works of the famous author — when the man had first read about the folded arm of the corpse, he was far from wondering at the skill of the author of the passage, who had not needed to name the corpse but had merely reported the detail of the folded arm, after which every reader of the passage would have known the name. Instead, the boy had lain before sleep for many weeks afterwards with his head resting on a folded arm from a wish to acquire one of the distinctive qualities seemingly possessed by characters in works of fiction.

A young man was using a sliver of a blade from a safety razor to cut around the margins of a rectangular illustration of the size of a postage stamp. The illustration was of a bald man of middle age. The young man intended to remove the illustration from the page of the book where it had been printed and then to place his right hand over the illustration and then to slide it across the page and then to slip it between the pages of an opened exercise book lying beside the book where the illustration had been printed.

The exercise book belonged to the young man and was almost filled with handwritten notes that he had made during the previous few months from the book beside it. This book, which comprised more than six hundred pages, belonged to the State Library of Victoria, and the young man had to take care that his removing the illustration would not come to the notice of a man of middle age who wore a grey dustcoat and who sat in a high wooden structure that reminded the young man of a pulpit in some or another cathedral and who looked continually downwards at the many tables radiating outwards from beneath him and at the many persons who were seated at the tables and who had books in front of them.

The illustration of the bald man was the last of four illustrations that the young man had cut from the book in front of him, the title of which was TWENTIETH-CENTURY AUTHORS. The contents of the book were short accounts of the lives and the published works of hundreds of writers from many countries. At the head of each account was a small black-and-white reproduction of a photograph of the writer concerned. On every weekday during the previous two months, the young man mentioned, who worked as a so-called clerical officer in a state government department, had visited the State Library during his lunch hour and had read from the book, the contents of which were arranged in alphabetical order according to the surnames of the authors. The first of the four illustrations mentioned was of a man with long black hair and a full black beard and had been removed by the young man from the very early pages of the book. The second illustration was of a man with short blond hair and had been removed from the middle pages of the book as had the third illustration, which was of a man wearing a patch over his left eye. The fourth illustration came from the last pages of the book.

Several weeks after the young man had removed the four illustrations, and several days after he had moved from his parents’ house to a cabin or shed that was called by its owner, the young man’s landlord, a self-contained backyard bungalow, he, the young man, took out the illustrations from the envelope where he had stored them and fastened them with adhesive tape to the wall above a card table in a corner of the so-called bungalow. The young man intended to use the card table as his desk for as long as he lived in the bungalow and to write there during evenings and at weekends the first of the works of fiction that he intended to write. The young man intended to search in bookshops during his lunch hours for one after another of the published works of the four men whose images were on the wall, and then to buy those works and to read them closely. Often afterwards while he sat at his card table, so the young man hoped, he would look up at one or another illustration, would remember something of what he had read in the book from which he had cut the illustration, would remember also something of what he had read in one of the published works mentioned, and would then be enabled to write some or another passage of fiction that he could not otherwise have written.

On a certain day in the forty-eighth year after the young man had fastened to the wall of the so-called bungalow the four illustrations mentioned, and when the older man who had previously been the young man had long since stored in some of the hanging files where he stored such things both the illustrations and the few pages on which he had written the beginnings of the few abandoned works of fiction that he had written during the year and more when he sat from time to time at the card table beneath the illustrations — on that day, the older man learned that he could recall from the illustrations only black image-hair and a black image-beard from the first, no image-detail from the second and not even the name of the subject of the illustration, a black image-eye-patch from the third, and a bald image-head from the fourth. Once having learned these facts, the man decided to report them in a work of fiction that he was then planning to write. Soon afterwards, he decided to report in the same work the following facts.

The man could no longer recall whether or not he had read any work of fiction by the writer whose appearance and whose name he could no longer recall.

The man could recall no phrase or sentence from the one work of fiction that he could recall having read from the works of the writer with the black hair and the black beard. However, the man could recall that his reading of the last page of that work had caused to appear in his mind an image of a man walking alone across mostly level and treeless grassy countryside. The man seemed to recall also that the image-man walked boldly and resolutely even though he could not have known his whereabouts in the mostly level and treeless image-countryside that surrounded him, given that he had stepped down impulsively not long before from a railway train that was travelling across a vast country in which were countless districts of mostly level and treeless grassy countryside.

The man could recall no phrase or sentence from the one work that he could recall having read by the man with the bald head. Nor could the man recall any image that had appeared in his mind while he was reading the work.

The man could recall two short passages from the one work that he had read from the works of the man with the eye-patch. The man seemed to recall a number of images that had appeared in his mind while he had read the work, but he suspected that these images had appeared some years later while he was reading a biography of the man with the eye-patch. The two short passages are:

A VOICE: Bloom, are you the Messiah ben Joseph or ben David?

BLOOM: (Darkly) You have said it.

and

BANTAM LYONS: Prophesy who will win the Saint Leger.

The man could recall nothing of what he had learned about the man with the black hair and the black beard from the book where the four illustrations had been printed. He could recall his having learned from that book that the man whose name he could not recall had spent all of his adult life in a small town on a narrow grassy plain with an ocean on one side and with forest-covered mountains on every other side. He, the man, could recall his having learned from the book mentioned that the man with the eye-patch had dressed conservatively but had worn several rings on his fingers. (After he had recalled this, the man had recalled also that he himself, soon after he had learned about the several rings, had begun to wear a ring with a rectangle of black onyx set in nine-carat gold.) He could recall his having learned that the man with the bald head had claimed to believe that the greatest good available to any person was sensual pleasure; that the man had claimed to despise as hypocrites the persons of the so-called middle class or respectable class who claimed to believe otherwise; and that the man claimed that he wrote in order to prove his claims. Finally, the older man could recall that he himself, during the year and more when he had lived in the so-called bungalow, had claimed to believe what the bald-headed man had claimed to believe and had even tried to write fiction in order to prove his claims.

On the day mentioned earlier, the older man could recall many of the images that had appeared in his mind late on many an evening after the young man had got up from his card table and had lain in the bed beside the card table and had recalled a certain evening not more than a year before when he had been invited to the house where one of his fellow clerical officers lived with his parents and his younger sister and where he, the young man, had observed often during the evening the face and the body of both the younger sister and her mother. The older man recalled that the young man had decided during the evening mentioned that he would include in the work of fiction that he was then writing a certain two female characters of the so-called middle class or respectable class a mother and a daughter who were hypocrites. The older man could recall in detail many of the images mentioned earlier in this paragraph but of the work of fiction mentioned he could recall nothing.

Between two pages, each of which was covered with printed words comprising part of a work of fiction, a narrow strip of blank paper appeared. The pages were part of a magazine with a paper cover and of a size supposedly suitable for carrying in a handbag or in a large pocket. The strip of paper was no more than a few millimetres wide and was attached to the spine of the magazine in the same way that the surrounding pages were attached. A boy of fourteen years was holding the pages of the magazine far apart so that he could look more closely at the narrow strip of paper. When he had looked more closely, he saw that the outer edge of the strip was jagged, as though a person had wanted to remove from the magazine as much as possible of the page of which the strip had been a part and had held a pair of scissors so close to the spine of the book that the person was unable to make one continuous cut but had to make successive strokes and to lift the blades away from the paper after each stroke. When the boy had looked more closely still, he saw that the strip of paper was bunched a little at one end and torn a little at the other end, as though the person who had used the scissors had afterwards tried to tear away the strip of paper so that no trace would remain of the page of which the strip had been the inner margin.

The boy mentioned was sitting in a corner of the lounge room of a house in a certain outer suburb of Melbourne. The boy lived in the house with his parents and a younger brother. In the corner where the boy was sitting was a bookcase containing about thirty books and perhaps a hundred magazines of different kinds. The boy had read a few of the books and had looked into all of the others. He had read several of the articles in each of the magazines.

More than fifty years after the boy had sat in the lounge room and had found in a certain magazine the strip of paper mentioned, the man who had been the boy could remember from all the words that he had read and from all the illustrations that he had looked at in all the magazines mentioned some of the details of each of two black-and-white illustrations and some of the words from the caption beneath one of the illustrations. The last-mentioned illustration had been printed in one or another issue of a magazine with the title WALKABOUT. The man remembered from the illustration certain details of certain images of young female persons. The persons were members of a group of perhaps ten such persons. Some of the persons had seemed to the boy to be young women and some had seemed to be older girls. More than one of each sort of person had a child standing beside her or resting in her arms or sucking at one of her breasts. Some of the persons were sitting and some were standing but all were facing the camera. Each of the persons wore a piece of cloth in front of her groin but no other covering. At the centre of the seated persons was seated a bearded man who seemed to the boy very old. The boy had often read the caption beneath the illustration of these image-persons, but the man remembered from the caption only that the bearded man had had the title King before his name and that the female persons were his wives.

The second of the two illustrations mentioned had been printed on the page the innermost margin of which was described in a previous paragraph. The illustration had been of a naked young woman sitting on a narrow expanse of sand in front of an expanse of rock that the boy had always supposed to be the base of a tall cliff beside a small bay or cove. The young image-woman had been sitting in such a way that her groin was hidden from the camera although her breasts were visible.

The boy mentioned had first seen the image of the naked young woman more than a year before he had found the strip of paper mentioned. When the boy had first seen the image, he had supposed that the pages of fiction surrounding the illustration included a report of the presence in a seemingly deserted bay or cove of a naked young woman. Later, the boy had learned that the pages of fiction reported seeming-events that might have taken place during the nineteenth century in one or another western state of the United States of America. The boy had then concluded that the image of the naked young woman had been printed in the magazine for no other reason than to enable a certain sort of boy or young man in whose mind was often an image of some or another isolated bay or cove beneath tall cliffs — to enable him to see more readily in such a place an image of a naked young woman.

More than fifty years after the boy mentioned had found the strip of paper mentioned, the man who had been the boy could remember no phrase or sentence from any page that he had read in any of the books that were kept in the shelves mentioned earlier. He sometimes remembered, however, a few words from one of the last pages in one of the books and what might be called the import of one of the sentences on that page.

A certain book on the shelves mentioned had been read and praised by many thousands of persons since its publication in the third decade of the twentieth century, so the boy had learned from the dust jacket of the book during one of the years before he had found the strip of paper in the magazine mentioned earlier. The boy might have set out to read the book if he had not learned also from the dust jacket that many passages in the book reported seeming-events that might have taken place in England or in France or in Belgium during the First World War. The boy chose never to read about soldiers and battles or about weapons and machinery or about bombed houses and ruined landscapes; he preferred to read about unremarkable image-scenery where an image-person not greatly different from himself might have lived a mostly uneventful image-life, going sometimes to an image-race-meeting, looking out always for a young image-woman who might fall in love with him, reading often from one or another book that brought to his mind unremarkable image-scenery and mostly uneventful image-lives, perhaps even writing a work of image-fiction set in unremarkable image-scenery where an image-person not greatly different from himself might have lived…

Although he had chosen not to read the book mentioned, the boy had looked once into the last few pages of the book. (He would look thus often during the next fifty and more years. Often in some or another bookshop or beside the bookshelves in the house of some or another friend, he would look into the last few pages of some or another book that had been praised by critics and reviewers or had been recommended to him by some or another friend. He did this partly in order to decide whether or not the whole book deserved to be read but partly in the hope of feeling again what he had felt often as a boy: that a book of fiction could not, by definition, come to an end; that what had been created could not be later annihilated; that the image-persons and the image-scenery brought into being whenever a certain sort of reader read what a certain sort of writer had written — that such image-realities must continue their image-existence even though another sort of writer might report long afterwards that they were no longer remembered.)

The boy mentioned remembered for long afterwards his having learned that the noise of guns sounded to a certain fictional young man during the last minutes before he died a fictional death like the noise of the waves in the bay or cove beneath steep cliffs where he had spent his summer holidays as a boy in the fictional south-west of a fictional England.

An image of a man and an image of a young woman appeared at the base of a tall image-cliff. These images appeared in the mind of a certain young man while he was sitting beside a campfire at the base of a tall cliff and trying to explain to a certain young woman what he remembered having read in certain passages of a certain book that he considered, so he told the young woman, a neglected masterpiece of English literature. Since the young man spoke as though the image-persons were actual persons, they will be thus described in the following paragraphs.

The image-cliff was not a bare rocky cliff such as might have overlooked a bay or a seacoast but a steep embankment overgrown with grass and bushes and forming one side of something that was reported in the so-called neglected masterpiece as being a dingle, which word the young man had never looked for in any dictionary, preferring not to have to call into question the images that had first appeared in his mind while he was reading a work of fiction. At the base of the cliff was mostly level grass shaded, at intervals, by clumps of bushes. Near one such clump a small tent was pitched. Perhaps ten paces away, near another clump, a second tent was pitched. About halfway between the two tents, a kettle of water hung above a campfire. One of the tents belonged to the man mentioned and the other tent to the young woman mentioned in the first sentence of the previous paragraph. Both the man and the young woman were noticeably tall, and the young woman had red hair.

The man and the young woman had lived in their respective tents since their first meeting, which had taken place several weeks before. At that meeting, the young woman had struck the man but had later made peace with him. During the weeks when the young woman and the man had lived in their tents, they had often taken their meals together or had drunk tea together at the campfire between the tents. At such times, they had debated many matters, and the young woman had sometimes threatened to strike the man. Sometimes, beside the campfire, the man had persuaded the young woman to learn certain words and phrases in the Armenian language, which the man had learned from books for no other reason than that he felt driven to learn foreign languages. At one time, beside the campfire, the man had persuaded the young woman to conjugate in several of its tenses and moods the Armenian verb siriel, I love. In the course of this lesson, the man and the young woman were obliged to speak, in the Armenian language, such sentences as ‘I have loved’, ‘Love me!’ and ‘Thou wilt love’. At a later time, beside the campfire, the man proposed to the young woman that he and she should marry at some time in the future and should then go to live in America. At a later time still, the young woman left the dingle without the man’s knowing and did not return. A few days later again, the man received from the young woman a long letter telling him, among other things, that she was setting out alone for America and that she had declined his proposal of marriage because she believed he was at the root mad.

The young man who was trying to report what he remembered from the book that he considered a masterpiece — that young man was able to remember not only the summary of events reported in the previous paragraph but words and phrases from the supposed masterpiece. Forty and more years later, the older man who had been the young man could recall only an image of a male person and a female person beside a campfire, the male uttering words in some or another foreign language and the female trying to repeat the words.

The older man was able to remember rather more details of a scene in which a young man and a young woman sat beside a campfire within sight of a tall cliff. At the base of the cliff was the entrance to a cave. The entrance was large enough for several persons to have walked through, but the farther parts of the cave were in darkness. The young woman, who had lived as a child in the district surrounding the cave, had told the young man that the Aborigines who had formerly lived in the district believed that a supernatural being lived in the cave.

The young man and the young woman had brought what they called a picnic lunch to the bank of the stream that flowed past the cliff and the cave. On the stony bank of the stream, the two persons had made a campfire in order to boil water for tea. Later, they had eaten their lunch and had drunk their tea while sitting on opposite sides of the campfire.

The young man had never proposed to the young woman that he and she should marry, but it seemed to be understood between them that they would do so during the coming year or, perhaps, the year after. The young man and the young woman lived far apart. He had spent his childhood and his youth in various suburbs of Melbourne but he was now the sole teacher at a small primary school in the district surrounding the cliff that had a cave at its base. She had spent her childhood and her youth in a small town in the district mentioned but now lived in Melbourne with an aunt and an uncle. He and she met only during every alternate weekend, sometimes in Melbourne and sometimes in the small town mentioned. They had few opportunities to be alone together anywhere but in the small motor car owned by the young man.

The young man and the young woman had long before told one another that they were interested in what they called literature. While they drank their tea on opposite sides of the campfire, the young man went on talking about the book that he had earlier called a neglected masterpiece. He told the young woman that he admired the style of the author of the book, which style had been praised by some commentators as one of the most exemplary prose styles of the nineteenth century. He, the young man, said that he sometimes observed himself falling into the style of the author mentioned while he, the young man, was writing one or another of the long letters that he wrote each week to the young woman. Above all, so the young man said to the young woman, he admired the author mentioned for having written the neglected masterpiece in such a way that no reader or commentator had been able to decide whether the work was fiction or autobiography or a blend of the two.

When the young man and the young woman had set out on their so-called picnic, the young man had supposed that the site of the picnic would be a place beneath a steep embankment overgrown with grass and bushes and that he and the young woman would make a campfire on mostly level grass shaded, at intervals, by clumps of bushes. Having thus supposed, the young man formulated a certain plan. If he could be supposed to have formulated his plan in the style of the writer that he so much admired — the writer of the so-called neglected masterpiece — then the young man could be reported as having decided to take with the young woman, on the day of the picnic, many more liberties than he had previously taken with her.

The young man had abandoned the plan mentioned soon after the young woman had led him down to the stony bank of the stream with the cave at its base. And yet, after he and the young woman had drunk tea on opposite sides of the campfire, and while they walked together along the stony bank of the stream near the opening of the cave at the base of the cliff, the young man had confided for the first time to the young woman that he had already begun to write what he hoped would be the first of a number of works of fiction that he would write. The young man and the young woman had then debated several matters.

An image of mostly level grassy countryside appeared in the mind of a man while he was trying to learn by heart a poem believed to have been written a hundred and fifteen years before his birth. In certain image-places in the middle distance or the far distance of the image-countryside, the man caused to appear areas of bare image-soil on which were strewn image-branches and image-twigs, as though a hedgerow or a copse or a spinney or even a line of trees had previously stood in each of the bare image-places but had recently been removed.

The image-countryside was intended by the man mentioned to represent a certain small district in England where the man who had written the poem mentioned had spent his first forty years before he had been confined in first one and then a second asylum for lunatics during his remaining thirty years. The man learning the poem had read more than twenty-five years before, in a book the title and the author of which he had later forgotten, the claim that the poet’s having been confined for thirty years was in large part the result of the trees’ and the hedgerows’ having been removed during his lifetime from the small district just mentioned. The person making this claim had written in an essay that the poet had been so attached to the earlier landscape that its destruction had unbalanced his mind. The poet, so the writer of the essay had claimed, had relied on the landscape and the plants and birds and animals living in it to remind him continually of where he was and even of who he was. The man trying to learn the poem had taken this claim to mean that the poet conceived of his own mind as an image-landscape comprising mostly level grassy countryside with image-hedgerows and image-copses and scattered image-trees.

The man trying to learn the poem thought of his own mind as an image-landscape and had sometimes tried to write one or another poem while he seemed to have one or another detail of that landscape in view. The man, however, had failed as a poet and had even failed somewhat as a man, or so he supposed. He had thus failed because he had never seen clearly enough the details of his image-mind. He had too often speculated about what could have been known only to the personages who lived out their lives behind the windows glinting in the late afternoon near some or another line of distant image-trees: the name of one or another flowering plant or the nesting place of one or another bird among the grass of the mostly level image-countryside.

The man trying to learn the poem was reminded of his most serious lack whenever he recalled the poet’s supposing often during his later life that he and his wife of twenty and more years had never met and that his close companion was still the girl who had been his close companion during his schooldays and his early youth. The man trying to learn the poem might himself have been accompanied by the sort of image-female who had followed the poet even into one after another lunatic asylum if only hers had not been merely an image-childhood in some or another remote image-place.

The man succeeded in learning the poem and sometimes recited one or another stanza to one or another of his friends or his drinking companions, although none of them was interested enough to ask what sort of man had composed the poem. If anyone had so asked, he would have been told that the poet’s patrons and admirers had been often affronted or distressed to learn that the author of poems expressing what he once called his love of rural objects often drank ale until he became ill or insensible. The man who sometimes recited the poem had first learned it after he had felt sympathy for the poet and after he, the man, had been annoyed that some of the poet’s readers had begrudged him his weakness.

More than thirty years after he had learned the poem, the man could remember only the following lines from the first stanza.

We’d sooner suck ale through a blanket

Than thimbles of wine from a glass.

The man remembered also the following lines from the last stanza.

And we’ll sit it in spite of the weather

Till we tumble dead drunk on the plain.

… Desperate eves,

when the wind-bitten hills turned violet

along their rims, and the earth huddled her heat

within her niggard bosom, and the dead stones

lay battle-strewn before the iron wind

…

yet in that wind a clamour of trumpets rang,

old trumpets, resolute, stark, undauntable,

singing to battle against the eternal foe,

the wronger of this world, and all his powers

in some last fight, foredoom’d disastrous,

upon the final ridges of the world …

A young man, hardly more than a boy, was whispering the quoted lines while he walked along a deserted street in a certain outer suburb of Melbourne. The young man had first read the quoted lines in an anthology of Australian poetry presented to him as a prize in his final year at secondary school and had learned the lines soon afterwards. The young man was walking from the house where he lived with his parents and his brother to his parish church. From time to time, he recalled that he had confessed to a priest on the previous day a number of so-called mortal sins, and whenever he recalled this he felt a certain satisfaction.

The sky was dark except for a pale zone in the east, where the shape of a long, low mountain was visible. The young man had never visited the mountain or wanted to visit it. During daylight, when the mountain was clearly visible from many suburbs east and south-east of Melbourne, the young man seldom looked at the mountain. While he recited the quoted lines, however, he stared at one after another place where the uppermost parts of the mountain formed a dark line against the pale sky.

While the young man went on staring and reciting, he believed that he was just then about to learn something of value. A few moments before, he had been merely staring at one after another place where the dark mountain came to an end and the pale sky began. Then he had felt a certain alertness followed by an urge to recite the lines of poetry quoted above. This, so the young man supposed, was a series of events such as had led the poet to compose the lines that he, the young man, was now reciting. The poet had seen, on a certain evening or a certain morning before the young man had been born, a certain mountain with a zone of pale sky behind it, had then felt a certain alertness, and had then begun to compose a certain poem, parts of which the young man would recite nearly thirty years after the poet had died. The young man assumed that the sight of the mountain mentioned against the pale sky mentioned included such a detail, or such a detail of a detail, as would prompt a certain sort of person to compose part of a poem. The young man went on staring while he walked and while he recited, as though he might soon learn from the sight of the dark mountain against the pale sky to the east of the suburbs of Melbourne what was the detail, or the detail of a detail, that had earlier caused him to become alert and to recite and might yet cause him to compose poetry.

The young man had heard about the poet whose words he was reciting only that he had spent most of his life in Sydney, that he had been educated by the Society of Jesus, that he had become a notorious drunkard and had lived an immoral life, but that he had been received back into the Catholic Church before his death. The young man had heard these things from a religious brother who had been one of his teachers at secondary school. (The young man had been pleased to hear that the poet had been reconciled at last to his church. Otherwise, he, the young man, might have felt anxious on behalf of the poet’s immortal soul. The young man’s teachers and also his father and his father’s brothers sometimes told him that this or that person had died screaming for a priest, which seemed to the young man the worst of all possible deaths, even though his beliefs and opinions would soon be so changed that he would often tell his friends, only two years after he had looked at the mountain mentioned above and had recited the lines quoted above, that he would like to die screaming at a priest.)

During the months before he had recited, on a certain morning, the lines quoted earlier, the young man had tried to write one or another poem but had not succeeded. A few hours after he had returned to his and his parents’ house on the morning mentioned, the young man tried again to write a poem. First, he called to mind a certain dark image-mountain and a certain pale image-sky. He then looked at the image-place where the one image met the other image, but he failed to notice there any image-detail likely to cause him to become alert. It seemed to the young man that the image-mountain and the image-sky had long ago become image-details of an image-landscape in the mind of the poet who had composed the lines quoted earlier.

More than fifty years after the young man had walked along the deserted street as mentioned above, and when the man who had been the young man was setting out to write a certain piece of fiction, it seemed to the man as though the young man need not have lacked for any image-detail of any image-sight but as though he ought to have trusted that a dark mountain, a pale sky, the violet rims of wind-bitten hills, and even a drunkard-poet and his late repentance were already image-subject-matter for a piece of image-fiction that would not fail to be written.

When the man mentioned in the previous paragraph set out to write about the image mentioned there, he had read, twenty and more years earlier, a biography of the poet who had written the lines quoted earlier, although the man recalled from that experience only his having read that a certain woman, herself married, had offered herself to the poet when he was fifty-two years of age, himself married, and her senior by more than twenty years; that the woman and the poet had lived together for a time; but that the woman had quarrelled with the poet late on a certain evening seventeen years before the man mentioned had been born, and had then set out walking while drunk along a certain road in Sydney in the early morning and had been run down and killed by a tram.

In the mind of a certain young man, an image appeared of a topographical map with a seacoast in the foreground, green and mostly level grassy countryside in the middle ground, and in the background the nearest trees of several woodlands or forests. An image-seaport appeared at the centre of the image-seacoast, and a few image-townships or image-villages appeared at intervals in the grassy countryside. The image-map was all that the young man had seen, or would ever see, of the districts in an unnamed country where were set, as it were, most of the works of fiction and the poems of a famous author who had been born in England ninety-nine years before the young man had been born. The young man would claim during the rest of his life that his having read during his twenty-first year the works of fiction mentioned had enabled him to leave off attending the church that his parents and his teachers had required him to attend and there trying to see in his mind images of the countryside of heaven and of the personages whose native landscape it was. The young man would forget during the rest of his life most of what he had seen in his mind and most of what he had felt while he had first read the works mentioned and would seldom look again into the works but would claim during the rest of his life to be content merely to know that a certain intricate image-landscape still lay out of sight in his mind and that certain image-personages still enacted there not only the image-deeds that had once engaged him but other unreported deeds of their fictional lives.

After the young man mentioned had read the books of fiction mentioned and after he had left off going to the church mentioned, he dared to do or not to do certain things that he had previously feared to do or not to do. He dared, for example, at intervals during the first five years after he had read the books mentioned, to invite to accompany him to one or another race meeting or restaurant or cinema or theatre or so-called party or barbecue each of five young women, none of whom had belonged to the church that he had left off going to.

The first of the five young women mentioned told the young man after their second outing that she could no longer accompany him anywhere because she was giving serious consideration to a proposal of marriage from a man some years older than herself who was hoping soon to acquire on generous terms of sale a property suitable for dairy farming in a coastal district in the south-west of Victoria formerly covered by forest but recently converted by the state government into mostly level grassy countryside.

The second of the five young women shared a spacious twostorey apartment with two other young women who seemed to be often absent, as a result of which the young man and the young woman in question were often alone together in the apartment for many hours after they had returned from some or another outing. During much of their time alone together, he and she lay on the couch in the lounge room while it was lit only by the glow of the ceramic columns of a gas heater. During the forty-eight years that followed the few months when he and she had had dealings with one another, the man who had been the young man supposed often that the young woman had wanted him to be much bolder with her than he had been while they had lain together in the glow mentioned. The young man had not been overly bold with the young woman because he could not forget what he had read in a certain letter that he had found protruding from the pages of a certain book of fiction on the mantelpiece of the lounge room mentioned on the morning after he and the young woman had gone on their first outing together and after they had lain together for several hours on the couch mentioned before the young woman had gone upstairs to her bedroom and the young man had slept for a few hours on the couch before returning to the bungalow where he lived in a nearby suburb. The letter mentioned had been sent to the young woman by a man whose age the young man had no way of knowing. The man had been in Sydney when he had written the letter and had been obliged to remain there for several months afterwards. He had tried to cheer the young woman by writing to her that the time would soon pass until he could return from Sydney and could again be as bold with her as he had so often been before he had left.

When he had first read the letter mentioned, the young man had not been able to decide whether the letter had lain where it lay because the young woman, the person addressed in the letter, was a slovenly person or whether she had left the letter in the book of fiction so that he would find the letter and would read it. Nor was the young man able to decide why the young woman might have wanted him to read the letter if, in fact, she had so wanted.

The third of the five young women had been the young man’s companion on only a few outings before she explained that she could not meet with him during the following two weeks but that she would willingly accompany him on one or another outing afterwards. During the second of the two weeks mentioned, the young man had been told by a girlfriend of the young woman that she and the man who had been her most recent boyfriend had spent much of the previous week arranging for her to have an illegal abortion. The young man chose at first not to believe the girlfriend, but once having believed her he chose to avoid the company of the young woman.

The fourth of the five young women was the younger sister of a drinking companion of the young man under mention, who drank beer until late on Friday evening each week in the house where the sister and the brother lived with their parents. The young woman was younger than the young man by five years and seemed always busy with her course at a primary teachers college, although she found time to chat with the young man whenever he approached her. Believing that the young woman had no boyfriend, the young man decided to ask her to accompany him on some or another outing but not until late in the year, when she would have finished her examinations and assignments. During the months after he had decided this, the young man felt more cheerful than he had felt during any of his time in the company of any of the three young women mentioned previously. Late in the year, however, when the young man asked the young woman to accompany him on a certain outing, he learned that she had had a boyfriend for two years past although she and he met only on alternate weekends because he was the sole teacher at a primary school in a mountainous district north-east of Melbourne.

The fifth of the young women accompanied the young man on many an outing for five months. The young woman worked in a bookshop where the young man bought many books of fiction, although he did not tell her that he read the books in order to learn how he might bring nearer to completion the work of fiction that he had been writing for some years. The young man felt comfortable with the young woman after she had told him during their first outing that she had not long before broken off, as she expressed it, with a man who had meant a lot to her, as she expressed it, and that she would prefer not to become serious, as she expressed it, with another man for the time being. Later, the young man had learned from the young woman that the man she had mentioned to him had been a married man. Later again, the young woman had told the young man that she believed she needed a change in her life and that she was thinking of moving to Sydney or Brisbane. Later yet again, the young man wondered whether the young woman had been surprised, or even disappointed, when he had not tried to persuade her to go on living in Melbourne and had not written to her after she had moved.

Even if the young woman had been concerned to know what was in the young man’s mind during their last outing, he would not have tried to explain to her that he saw in his mind the image-view of the topographical map mentioned earlier or that he saw, rising to view, the same image-details that had thus risen while he had read, more than five years before, the last pages of a certain book of fiction by the famous author mentioned earlier. Among those image-details were a black image-flag above a distant image-building in the image-city mentioned earlier; a young image-man and beside him a young image-woman, hardly more than an image-girl; and, barely visible on distant image-farms or in distant image-villages, or even among the image-trees of distant image-woodlands, many a young image-woman, hardly more than an image-girl, who might later be mentioned on image-page after image-page of image-fiction.

In the mind of a man aged nearly forty years, an image appeared of the front cover of a thick book of fiction. The man had bought more than a thousand books of fiction and had read more than half of them, but he had never learned the various terms used by publishers and booksellers to describe their wares. The man knew only two kinds of books: hardcover books and paperback books. The cover mentioned was at the front of a paperback book.

The man mentioned would have liked to own only hardcover books of fiction. Such books reassured him when he looked at them or touched their spines. He understood that hardcover books numbered many fewer than paperback books. He preferred to own books of fiction that were read by few other persons. He got much pleasure from owning some or another book of fiction that had supplied him with a rich pattern of connected images but was unknown to his friends.

The image of the front cover mentioned seemed always to the man mentioned a drab image. The image-cover was mostly white with black image-words appearing on its lower third. In some or another part of the upper third of the image-cover was an arrangement of blue and black and red image-discs. The man understood that the image-discs were intended to represent or to suggest glass beads of many colours. He had been given to understand this by a review of the book mentioned or, perhaps, by a paragraph on the rear cover of the book mentioned. He had been given to understand also that the book contained, among many other things, a report of a monastic community living in an isolated place at a date several hundred years later than the twentieth century and devoting much of their time to the playing of a game with many-coloured glass beads, each of which was intended to represent or to suggest one or another item or strand or theme in the history of civilisation. The author of the book was a German man who was considered by some persons a deep thinker and who had been born sixty-two years before the birth of the owner of the book.

For perhaps ten years after the man mentioned had bought the book mentioned, he had left it on one of his bookshelves without opening it, although he had sometimes handled the book and looked at its cover. The man often dealt thus with one or another book of fiction that he expected much from. During the years before he read such a book, he would foresee himself reading a book the contents of which he would not remember after he had begun to read the actual book although he would seem to remember them as having been richer than the actual contents. During the first few of the ten years mentioned, the man sometimes foresaw himself reading about an object that might have been a gigantic abacus with thousands of many-coloured glass beads strung on thousands of wires. During later years, the object in question might have been a gigantic billiard table on which rested or rolled thousands of beads of the sort mentioned. The beads mentioned in each of the two previous sentences were far from resembling the drab discs depicted on the cover of the book mentioned. They more resembled some of the thousands of glass image-marbles that the man had often looked at more than thirty years before in a coloured reproduction of a certain photograph in a certain issue of the National Geographic Magazine showing a certain part of a certain factory in a certain town in the state of West Virginia, which state the man saw in his mind during the sixty years after he had first read the issue of the magazine as a few valleys on the shaded side of a high, forested ridge of dark-blue mountains. The image-marbles mentioned were stored in a row of image-bins from which they flowed into image-bags under the supervision of a smiling, dark-haired young image-woman.

The man mentioned finally began to read the book mentioned in his fortieth year, according to the records that he kept of the books of fiction that he had bought and read. Thirty years afterwards, the man could remember nothing of his experience as a reader of the book. He knew that he had read the first hundred pages of the book because he had recorded that fact at some time during his fortieth year. He recalled, however, not one word of the text of the book, not one image that had appeared in his mind while he read the text, and not one thought or feeling that had occurred to him while he read. According to the man’s records, he had removed the book from his shelves four years after he had read the first hundred pages. He had then given the book, together with several other books by the famous German author, to a person who claimed to admire the author.

Thirty years after the man mentioned had read the first hundred pages of the book mentioned, he remembered sometimes a certain afternoon when he had been alone in his house while his wife and their children were elsewhere. On that afternoon, the man had first caught sight of a blue disc and a black disc and a red disc on the spine of a certain book on one of his bookshelves and had regretted, as he had often previously regretted, that he had read a hundred pages of the book. The man had next caught sight of an image of part of a glass marble on the spine of another of his books. This book was a hardcover work of fiction that the man had not yet read, although he had often admired the dust jacket and had sometimes read from the dust jacket a short account of the contents, so to call them. The man had then gone to his son’s room and had fetched back to the lounge room, which contained the bookshelves previously mentioned, a jar of glass marbles. The man had then poured the marbles onto the carpet in the lounge room and had stood back from the marbles and had stared at them and had felt while he went on staring at the many-coloured mass of them something of what he had formerly hoped to feel whenever he had looked forward to reading the book of fiction by the famous German author.

According to a passage on the dust jacket of the book with an image of part of a glass marble on its spine, the chief character of the book was reported in the book as supposing that each of his many glass marbles represented a racehorse and as having sometimes pushed some of those marbles around a mat so that he could see in his mind image after image of the running of a horse-race. The man mentioned in this section of the present work of fiction stared at the glass marbles on the carpet of his lounge room as though each represented a book of fiction that he had kept on his shelves and the contents of which he had tried to foresee before he had read the book.

The man mentioned began on the certain afternoon mentioned to hear in his mind the name of one after another glass marble or of one or another book of fiction as though it was the name of one after another racehorse about to take part in a famous race. Of all the names that the man thus heard, the name that most affected him, as though the glass marble of that name was the most richly coloured, or as though the book of that name was the most memorable, was the name Das Glasperlenspiel.

An image-sky unlike any actual sky that he had seen occupied the upper two-thirds of a reproduction of a photograph of a painting that occupied two adjoining pages of a large illustrated book lying open in front of a man aged about fifty years. Seated beside the man was another man of the same age who had been his friend since the two had been boys at primary school. The man with the book in front of him was the owner of the book and of several hundred other large illustrated books displayed in several glass-fronted cabinets in the room where the men sat. The room, which the owner of the books called his study, was at one side of a substantial house of brick in a certain eastern suburb of Melbourne, which house the owner of the books had inherited from his father, who had been a wealthy bookmaker. The side of the room opposite the cabinets mentioned consisted mostly of tall windows overlooking fish ponds set among beds of ferns. The strangeness of the image-sky, so the owner of the book mentioned was explaining to the man beside him, consisted in its seeming to be lit not by a single source of image-light but by several such sources or by its being uniformly suffused with an image-light from no discoverable image-source. How else, so the owner of the book argued — how else to explain the appearance beneath one after another opening in the image-clouds of one after another zone of equally bright image-light on the imagelandscape occupying the lower third of the reproduction, which imagelandscape was an almost level grassland reaching back to a distant and dark-blue image-blur that might have been a line of image-trees or the nearest margin of an image-forest or, perhaps, an image-haze above still further image-grasslands.

The explanation for the strangeness of the image-sky and of the whole image-landscape, according to the owner of the book mentioned, was that sky and landscape were images not of any sight seen by persons in the place called the real world but of visions, so to speak, appearing, so to speak, to the inhabitants, whoever they might be, of the place sometimes called the next world. How else, so the owner of the book argued — how else to explain the appearance in each of the zones of bright image-light in the image-landscape of an image-racehorse with an imagejockey up, so to speak, each racehorse and each jockey having flourished, so to speak, at some or another different period during the past two hundred and more years?

The title of the painting that had been reproduced in the book mentioned was Immortals of the Turf, so the owner of the book told the man beside him while the two men sat and stared at one after another image-racehorse in one after another zone of image-light on the image-grassland mentioned. The name of the painter, according to the owner of the book, meant nothing to him, although he assumed that she was a living Englishwoman, given that the painting had been done only ten years before, that each image-horse had the name of an actual horse that had been bred and had raced in England, and that the foreground of the image-landscape might have seemed to some persons to resemble part of the actual landscape known as Newmarket Heath.

The two men mentioned met often at one or another race meeting in one or another suburb of Melbourne, although they rarely visited each other. During his rare visits to the substantial home with the glass-fronted cabinets, the visiting man spent much time looking into the collection of large illustrated books kept in the cabinets, all of which books were about horse-racing. The visiting man owned perhaps five hundred mostly paperback books of fiction, which books stood on shelves that he had fitted to a wall in the lounge room of the house where he lived with his wife and their children in a certain outer suburb of Melbourne. He and his wife had agreed soon after their marriage that he would buy one paperback book of fiction each fortnight. It was understood between them that he needed to read much fiction so that he himself could write the work of fiction that he hoped to write and to have published. Twenty years later, the man still bought and read books of fiction although he had not yet written the work that he had hoped to write.

The owner of the books about horse-racing had never married, although he had spent much time for many years in the company of a divorced woman who lived in a house even more substantial than his own in a suburb adjoining his own suburb. Seven months before the day when the two men looked at the painting mentioned earlier, the divorced woman had learned that she would soon die from cancer. One week before the day mentioned, the woman had died. On the Saturday following the death of the woman, the man who had spent much time in her company reported to the other man, when they met at a certain race-meeting, that he, the owner of the substantial house and of the glass-fronted cabinets full of books, had been since his childhood a convinced atheist but that he had never considered himself a materialist and that he and the woman who had recently died had agreed some months previously that if some or another part of her remained alive after the event that other persons would call her death, then she would arrange for one of the racehorses that he backed on the Saturday following that event to win at odds of about twenty to one. Several hours after the convinced atheist, as he called himself, had reported these matters, one of the horses that he had backed won a race at odds of a little more than twenty to one, and soon after he had collected his winnings he invited the other man to visit him for a few hours after the race-meeting.

The other man had never been able to decide what he believed or did not believe in any field of human enquiry. While he was enjoying the snack and the expensive whisky that his host served him during his visit to the substantial house, he did no more than watch and listen while his host opened one after another large illustrated book from the glass-fronted cabinets, declaring repeatedly that he, the host, could never be a materialist while ever racehorses such as those illustrated with jockeys such as those illustrated contested races such as those illustrated on racecourses such as those illustrated, thereby convincing persons such as himself of the existence of as yet invisible racecourses on as yet invisible grasslands under as yet invisible skies where competed the immortals of the turf.

In the mind of a young man aged about thirty years, an image appeared of a large farmhouse surrounded on three sides by groves of image-trees and groups of image-outbuildings. In front of the image-farmhouse was a wide view of far-reaching image-grasslands beneath a far-reaching image-sky filled with banks of image-clouds between which, at distant intervals, one or another shaft of image-sunlight fell onto one or another zone of image-grassland. In each of these zones stood an image-farmhouse surrounded on three sides as the earlier-mentioned image-farmhouse had been surrounded and having at its front the same wide view.

More than once during each of the forty years after the first appearance of the images mentioned, the same images appeared again in the mind of the man mentioned. Sometimes the images appeared unexpectedly, but often the man caused the images to appear.

During the first few of the forty years mentioned, the man mentioned was sometimes uneasy because the image-farmhouses mentioned resembled some or other farmhouses that he had seen in the distance in a certain district where he had sometimes travelled during his childhood, whereas the words that had first caused the images to appear were part of a work of fiction written about forty years before the man’s birth by a man who had become famous as a writer of fiction after having worked until he was about thirty years of age in the merchant marine, and whereas the work of fiction was set, so to speak, in fictional places resembling places in South America.

During the few years mentioned, the young man was sometimes uneasy also because the image-farmhouses and the image-landscape comprised many image-details whereas the only words that he could afterwards recall from the work of fiction mentioned were the words slumbrous and estancia.

During the few years mentioned, the young man was sometimes uneasy also because the work of fiction mentioned had been one of the texts that he was required to study during the second of the three years during which he had studied English at the University of Melbourne. During those three years, he had never understood how his teachers and his fellow students had been able to read the texts as they seemed able to read them or afterwards to talk and to write about the texts as they talked and wrote. His lecturers and tutors spoke as though he and his fellow students were practising literary criticism of the sort practised by the greatest of all literary critics, a man from some or another famous university in England; a man whose name the young man pretended to have forgotten as soon as he had completed his university degree although he could never forget the name or the one image that he had seen of the man: a reproduction of a photograph showing the famous critic wearing a jacket and an open-necked white sports shirt, as though his being a famous literary critic exempted him from having to wear the collar and tie worn by most university teachers of his time. The image-scenery mentioned in the previous paragraphs had first appeared in the mind of the young man while he was sitting in a tutorial, while the tutor was talking as a literary critic might have talked about the book of fiction mentioned earlier, and while he, the young man, had first tried to understand the words of the tutor but had then fixed his attention on the image-scenery and on the question whether or not such scenery might be supposed never to come to an end in any image-direction.

After the passing of the first few of the forty years mentioned earlier, the man who had been the young man no longer felt uneasy on account of the image-scenery mentioned or of any other imagery that appeared in his mind. If the man happened during later years to recall his earlier uneasiness, he felt sympathy towards the young man who had supposed that the image-scenery appearing in his mind while he read must have appeared as a result of his having read some or other words or sentences. The man regretted the young man’s having once supposed that he ought to read fiction for some purpose other than to wait during the hours or the days after his reading for the appearance in his mind of images never previously read about or written about.

An image of a lounge room appeared in the mind of a man who had spent nearly five hundred days in the room forty-five years before. The image-room was large and the image-furniture in the room was comfortable.

The man mentioned remembered the room and the rooms adjoining it as the most comfortable of the many places where he had lived as a young man before he had married. After he had moved into the rooms, which had been advertised as a spacious partly furnished flat in the outer south-east of Melbourne, the young man had made only two changes. First, he had moved an armchair away from a wall in order to make way for his bookshelves. He hoped to become in the future the owner of books enough to cover the walls of the room where he would spend his evenings, but when he moved into the rooms mentioned he owned no more than a hundred books. The second change that the young man made was to take down from the walls the few pictures hanging there and to attach to one of the bare walls the first few of the many sheets of paper that he hoped to attach to every wall of the room.

All but one of the few sheets mentioned was covered with large, neat handwriting done by the young man with a black felt-tipped pen. The one sheet not so covered was a page from an essay submitted by the young man for assessment during the previous year, when he had attended evening classes as a part-time student at the University of Melbourne. No reader of the sheet mentioned could have learned what the subject of the essay had been, but many a reader might have learned that the subject had to do with a certain book of fiction by an author who had spent much of his early life in the merchant marine. In the left-hand margin of the sheet mentioned were several sentences in handwriting different from that of the essay writer. One such sentence had been underlined with a red felt-tipped pen. The sentence read: You seem not to understand how morality works in literature. Beneath the sentence, another sentence had been written with a black felt-tipped pen in the handwriting of the essay writer: Worse, I do not understand what is morality or even what is literature.

The young man who moved into the spacious flat, so to call it, had been trying for several years to write a certain long work of fiction. He had hoped to complete during his evenings and weekends in the flat the work that he had previously failed to complete in one or another rooming house or backyard bungalow. Soon after he had moved into the flat, however, the young man had begun to spend much time during evenings or at weekends in looking through his books of fiction for passages worthy to be copied onto sheets of paper and then attached to the walls of his lounge room or in copying such passages and attaching them to one or another wall.

The man remembering the flat where he had lived forty-five years before remembered not one sentence from the many passages that had been copied onto sheets of paper and attached to walls. The man remembered, however, that a certain book on his shelves had provided more passages than had any other book. The book had been on the young man’s shelves for only a few weeks before he had begun to copy passages from it. The young man had bought the book in a bookshop in the central business district of Melbourne only a few hours after he had read a review of the book in a newspaper.

The man remembering the book that he had read forty-five years before saw in his mind several adjoining image-rooms in which the image-walls were covered with image-books on image-shelves. The image-rooms were part of an image-flat in an image-city in image-Europe.

If ever the remembering man had set out to report in writing the further images that he connected with the book mentioned, then he might have written that the man who lived among the several rooms filled with books had no wife or child and was so devoted to the books that he later lost his reason and afterwards left the rooms filled with books and lived among criminals and outcasts. The remembering man might have written further that the owner of the rooms filled with books had a brother in a distant city. The brother was a medical doctor with a special interest in persons who had lost their reason. The brother kept under observation in a locked wing of his house a man who had not only lost his reason but followed a way of life opposed to reason. The man under observation used a language of his own devising, one principle of which seemed to be that an object could be denoted by any of a number of words depending on the mood of the person perceiving the object. The remembering man remembered that the young man had attached to many a prominent place on the walls of his lounge room one or another sheet of paper on which was transcribed one or another passage reporting the way of life of the man under observation.

The remembering man remembered that the young man had had no visitors to his spacious flat. The young man had a few friends in distant suburbs, and they sometimes offered to visit him, but he persuaded them against it. He wanted no one to step into his spacious flat before he had covered every wall with sheets of handwriting. The young man wanted to demonstrate to any visitor that he, the young man, preferred to the visible world a space enclosed by words denoting a world more real by far.

The remembering man remembered that the young man had written a long letter to one of his friends when he, the young man, foresaw that he might soon finish his task of covering the walls of his lounge room with handwritten sheets. In the letter, the young man claimed to have begun writing a work of fiction in which the chief character was suspected by his friends of having lost his reason because he believed that fiction was superior to what was commonly called reality and because he lived in accordance with this belief. The man slept on a bed of pages removed from books of fiction. His bedsheets and blankets were inscribed with passages of fiction. He attached pages of fiction to his skin beneath his underclothes. When he masturbated, he caught his seed on an outspread double-page of fiction.

The remembering man had never been able to remember more than a few of the events that had followed the young man’s sending the long letter mentioned. Nor had the remembering man been able to remember from the work of fiction from which the young man had transcribed so many passages any more than a few of the fictional events that had taken place after the chief character of the work had sent to his brother in a distant city a telegram with the message: AM COMPLETELY CRACKERS.

In the mind of a man aged more than sixty years, an image appeared of a young woman seated on a swing and rising high into the air against a background of dense foliage. Before the image had appeared, the man had been hoping to recall one or more of the images that had appeared in his mind more than twenty years before, while he was reading a book that he seemed afterwards to have almost forgotten. He seemed almost to have forgotten the book, and yet he was hoping to recall and then to report in writing some or another image connected with his having read the book.

The book mentioned was described by its publisher as a frank and revealing autobiography. The author was an Englishman and a contemporary of the man who had read at least part of the book but had later seemed to forget it. Before the book had been published, its author had become famous as the author of many books of the sort known as science fiction. The title of the autobiography was a play on words, one of its two possible meanings being that the author as a boy and as a young man had been an habitual masturbator.

The man seeing the mental image of the young woman on the swing could hardly believe that such an image-person or such an image-swing had been mentioned in the autobiography. The young image-woman had the image-clothes and the image-hair-style of an upper-class young woman of the eighteenth century, and even the dense image-foliage behind her was such as the man had seen only in illustrations of paintings from long before his own time.

From his reading of the autobiography the man retained only two memories. He remembered that he had left off reading towards the end of the book and had never afterwards resumed. He remembered also an image that had surely appeared to him during his reading: an image of a girl or a young woman seated in a shabby armchair in a small house in a working-class suburb of a provincial city in England: near the girl or the young woman were two boys or boy-men.

The man supposed that the image of the young woman on the swing was derived from some or another illustration that he had seen at the time when he was reading part of the autobiography mentioned. The man himself knew little about the so-called visual arts, but he remembered that his wife had bought each week for their children, more than twenty years before, one after another illustrated segment of a series with the title GREAT ARTISTS. Having remembered this, the man visited the home of the son of his who was presently the custodian of the series mentioned.

In his son’s house, the man saw, on the cover of a certain segment of the series mentioned, an illustration of a painting of a young woman seated on a swing and rising high into the air. The man learned from an inspection of the illustration that the painting included two other image-persons apart from the young image-woman. These two were an image-man who was pushing the young image-woman from behind and an image-man who was lying beneath the image-swing and was gazing upwards at the exposed image-thighs of the young image-woman. The man later learned from the passages of text accompanying the illustration that the young image-woman was the wife of the image-man who was pushing her from behind and was the mistress of the image-man who was gazing at her image-thighs. The man understood from what he read that the painting of the young woman and of the two men was considered a masterpiece.

The man who is the subject of this passage of fiction often found himself living in his mind the image-life of some or another image-person who had taken his interest in some or another work of fiction that he was reading. The man sometimes found himself living in his mind, if only for a few moments, the image-life of some or another image-person who had taken his interest in some or another illustration that he was looking at. While the man stared at the illustration of the painting that was reported to be a masterpiece, he was not at all interested in living in his mind, even for a few moments, the image-life of the image-man standing behind the young image-woman or of the image-man lying among the image-foliage beneath her. He felt no wish to be, even for a few moments, the husband or the lover of the young image-woman in the purported masterpiece. Even though he remembered having left off reading the autobiography mentioned earlier, the man would have preferred to live the image-life of one of the image-boys or image-boy-men in the shabby image-house in the provincial image-city mentioned earlier: to have stood, whenever the need arose, with his imagebrother in front of their image-sister; to have masturbated promptly; and afterwards to have gone back to his task of trying to write fiction.

In the mind of a young man of about twenty-five years, an image appeared of a young woman, hardly more than a girl, who sat on an image-plank suspended by image-ropes from an image-branch and who moved herself backwards and forwards by pushing a bare foot against the soil beneath her. In the mind of the same young man were also image-sounds, as though the young image-woman sang part of an image-song while she moved backwards and forwards or as though an image-radio, out of sight in the image-background, broadcast the image-words In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia set to an image-tune that he, the young man, would never afterwards succeed in remembering.

The young man mentioned made no attempt to draw nearer in his mind to the young image-woman mentioned but went on watching her from the distance that seemed to have been fixed between them. He suspected that his trying to approach might cause her image to retreat into the image-background, which seemed to consist at first of fold after fold of dark-blue imagemountains in the upper right-hand corner of a topographical image-map of the United States of America and later of the grey-blue image-haze that was the farthest image-sight in all image-landscapes. Rather than try to approach the young image-woman, the young man tried to fix her in his mind. He had not yet learned that it was not in his power to fix any sort of image in his mind; that he had no need so to fix any image; that every image in his mind was already fixed there and would remain there, even though he might seem at times unable to recall one or another such image. Nor had the young man yet learned that he might have been himself watched from a distance by some or another entity whose image he had once watched from a distance and had tried to fix in his mind but had afterwards lost sight of.

The young man had listened, as a boy of ten years, to part of a certain program broadcast by radio. Not having heard the earlier part of the program, the boy did not know what had caused the two chief personages to become separated from one another as young persons so that they had to spend their later lives searching for one another in one after another landscape or city of the United States of America. Towards the end of the program, the boy’s mother had turned off the radio, as a result of which the boy had not learned until nearly fifteen years later, when he read as a young man the long poem from which the radio program had been adapted, that the two separated personages had finally met up with one another when the male personage was on his deathbed. Sometimes during the fifteen years mentioned, he who had been the boy mentioned had heard in his mind the voices of a male and a female personage calling to one another as two such voices had once called during part of the radio program mentioned. Sometimes, during those fifteen years, he who had been the boy mentioned had supposed that the personages were separated because the female of the two had died and because her spirit had not then gone to heaven or to any such afterworld but had travelled through the United States of America in search of the male personage. On one after another prairie or beside one after another wide river or among one after another range of mountains, the spirit personage was perhaps able to look out for and finally, even, to see the living personage, but the living personage could never look out for or see the spirit personage. If the two were to meet up at last, they could hope for no more than that the spirit personage, the female of the two, might become a presence fixed in the mind of the living personage, the male of the two.

The young male person who was aware of what is reported in the previous paragraph knew about the landscapes of the United States of America only what he had learned from a few films and from a few copies of the National Geographic Magazine. Knowing only this, and not knowing that the separated personages mentioned were reported in the text of a poem as having met up at last when the male of the two was dying in a city in the north-east of the country, the young male person, whenever he hoped that the separated personages would meet up at last, chose to suppose that they met up at last in a landscape such as he had studied in a certain illustration in one of the first issues that he had ever seen of the National Geographic Magazine, which illustration was of fold after fold of dark-blue mountains near the border of the state of West Virginia.

The first image mentioned in this section of this work of fiction is an image in the mind of a young man of a young woman, hardly more than a girl. That image first appeared in the mind of the young man while he was reading one of the many works of fiction that he read in the hope of learning how to write a work of fiction that he had planned for a long time to write but had not yet begun to write. The young man had read the work mentioned because he had read previously that the work was an outstanding example of a so-called school of so-called realist writing that had flourished in the United States of America between the two World Wars. The young man had begun to read the work of fiction mentioned first in order to learn how he himself ought to write if he should choose to become a realist writer; second to learn how a certain fictional young man had thought and felt in a fictional suburb of a fictional Chicago twenty years before the young man had been born; and third to surmise how some or another actual young man might actually have thought and felt at the time mentioned.

The young man mentioned was an undiscerning reader who believed that any book published in the United States of America must have been at least as meritorious as any book published in his own country. Even so, the young man had begun to be uneasy while he was reading the work of fiction mentioned. He had hoped, when he had begun reading, to see in his mind image after image of young persons living out their lives in an image-Chicago. He had seen, at first, a number of such images, but had then begun to see in his mind an image of an author with close-cropped hair and horn-rimmed spectacles who sat in front of a typewriter by means of which he put onto paper word after word and sentence after sentence intended to bring to the mind of reader after reader seeming-image after seeming-image of seeming-reality.

An image of a room lit by afternoon sunlight appeared in the mind of a man aged about forty years. The man was reading a book in which were published interviews with well-known American or European writers of fiction and of poetry. The image-room was filled with image-furniture such as would have been fashionable thirty years before the birth of the reading man. The most noticeable piece of image-furniture was a glass-fronted image-bookcase from which the man had taken down or had looked into or had read one after another book during several summer holidays in his boyhood. The image-book that he remembered most clearly had been illustrated with reproductions of famous paintings, one of which was a painting of a group of naked young women.

The man aged about forty years was reading the book mentioned in the hope of becoming more skilled at writing fiction. During many of the previous twenty years, the man had written several short works of fiction and had tried to have them published. Two years before he had begun to read the book mentioned, the man had seen first one and then a second of his short works published, each in a different literary magazine. During the previous two years, however, the man’s first novel, which he had worked at intermittently for fifteen years, had been rejected by three publishers. After the third of these rejections, the man had applied for entry as a mature age student to a course in the arts faculty of a so-called college of advanced education in a distant suburb of the city where he lived. The course mentioned included several units in fiction writing taught by a writer whose novels had won prestigious literary awards. One of the writer’s novels, the theme of which, so to speak, had been the confrontation between Indigenous people and pastoralists, had been turned into the script for a successful film. While the man was waiting to learn whether or not he had been accepted into the course mentioned, he had bought the book mentioned much earlier and had begun to read it. When the image of the sunlit room had appeared in the man’s mind, as was mentioned earlier, he had been reading a report of an interview with a famous author of fiction in the French language.

If a certain man aged more than sixty years had set out to report every appearance in the minds of certain younger men of an image of a certain sunlit room, then the man aged more than sixty years would have reported that the image of the sunlit room had first appeared in the mind of a young man aged about twenty-five years while he was reading a book of fiction given to him by a young woman who had previously been his girlfriend. The young man had persuaded the young woman to be his girlfriend after he had been for several years without a girlfriend and soon after he had decided not to approach any young woman in the future unless she had been, or was still, a member of the church that he had formerly belonged to. The young woman was a member of the church mentioned and had spent her first seventeen years in a small town in a mountainous district north-east of Melbourne. The young man often saw her image in his mind against a background of fold after fold of dark-blue image-hills reaching back from the suburbs of his native city towards mountainous districts that he had never visited. The young woman had been the girlfriend of the young man for several months before she told him that they should no longer see each other. At their last meeting, the young woman had given the young man as a present an English translation of a book by a famous writer of fiction in the French language. The young man had read the book with care, hoping to learn from it some or another message from the young woman. Fifteen years later, when he was reading the book of interviews mentioned earlier, and when he and the young woman had been married for thirteen years, the man who had been the young man supposed that he had been given the book only because the famous writer had remained throughout his life a member of the church mentioned earlier and that the young woman had admired him for this. When the man was aged about forty years, he recalled from his having read the book mentioned only an image of a man aged perhaps sixty years who was writing at an image-table near an image-bookcase in an image-room filled with image-afternoon-sunlight. The image-man was writing to his image-wife. He and she had lived for many years in separate image-suites of the same image-house and had communicated only by means of image-pages of image-handwriting.

The man who is the subject of these paragraphs never afterwards considered that he had become a more capable writer of fiction as a result of his having read, at about the age of forty years, the published report of the interview with the famous writer in the French language. Even so, the man still remembered, more than twenty years after he had read the report, an image that had appeared to him while he read. The image was of a room filled with afternoon sunlight. Noticeable in the image-room were a glass-fronted image-bookcase and an image-table where a famous image-man, aged perhaps sixty years and more, sat writing. The remembering man could remember, at the age of sixty and more years, hardly any of the words in the report of the interview mentioned but he remembered still a statement to the effect that all the fiction written by the famous writer was part of his effort to rediscover the faraway world of his Jansenist, provincial childhood.

In the mind of a man aged somewhat more than sixty years, an image appeared of an image of rays of sunlight appearing in the mind of a young man of somewhat more than twenty years. When the image had appeared in the mind of the younger man, he was reading a work of fiction by a much-praised author aged somewhat more than thirty years who lived in the United States of America. When the image of rays had appeared in his mind, the young man was sitting in the lounge room of a spacious flat that he rented in an outer suburb of Melbourne. The time of day was late afternoon, and rays of sunlight shone through the large windows of the spacious flat and onto some of the many illustrations that the young man had cut from magazines or from dust jackets and had fastened to the walls of the lounge room. Each illustration was of a writer of fiction or of poetry, and one of the writers was the much-praised author mentioned above. The author wore a shirt with stripes of many colours and had a cigar in his mouth.

When the young man had fastened to his wall the photographic portrait of the much-praised author, he, the young man, had been trying for several years to write one or another poem or short story worthy of being published in one or another literary magazine. Afterwards, whenever he looked at the image-shirt or the image-cigar in the portrait, the young man envied the much-praised author his being able to wear such a shirt and to hold such a cigar in his mouth as though the colours of the shirt and the bulk of the cigar were signs of the contents of the author’s mind — contents so rich and various and distinctive that he had been able first to write nearly a hundred thousand words of fiction, then to have the fiction published in New York City as a hardcover first novel, and then to announce that he was close to having finished his second work of fiction.

Something else that caused the young man to envy the published author was his having been born and spent his childhood and youth in Virginia, which existed for the young man as a desirable image-landscape in his mind: a landscape of mostly level green countryside with fold after fold of dark-blue hills in the background. The mostly level green countryside was variegated with dark stripes and patches that were plantations or clumps of trees. Somewhere in the level countryside was the image-racecourse that had appeared in the first coloured feature film that the young man had watched. He had been no more than five or six years at the time and had understood nothing of the narrative. The only images that he later recalled were of perhaps twenty racehorses jumping one after another quickset fence during a famous steeplechase. The jockey astride each horse wore a jacket of various colours variously arranged. All of the jockeys appeared to be men, although one jockey was actually a young woman, hardly more than a girl. The young man seemed sometimes to remember a series of images connected with this young woman, although he supposed few of the images would have appeared in the film. The series included images of the disguised young woman’s falling from her mount at one of the fences, of the disguised young woman’s lying injured or unconscious on the grass, of her lying afterwards on a bed or a stretcher, of a pair of hands unfastening button after button at the front of a richly coloured jacket, thereby exposing a singlet or undergarment faintly rounded at either side by a female breast.

The man aged somewhat more than sixty years was hardly surprised at his failing to recall even one word or phrase from the work of fiction by the much-praised author that the young man of somewhat more than twenty years had read. The young man had read the work of fiction during the first week of the long summer holidays of the first year when he had been a teacher in a state primary school. He had worked for five years as a state public servant after he had left school but then he had completed a course lasting one year for mature-age persons wanting to train as primary teachers in state schools. As a public servant, the young man had tried to devote evenings and Sundays to writing fiction and poetry but had written little. As a primary teacher, he was on holiday for nine weeks of each year. He had hoped to devote these weeks to writing fiction and poetry. During the first- and second-term holidays, he had written little but he still hoped to write much during the summer holidays. He hoped to write for most of each day and then to read during the late afternoon and the evening.

The young man had spent most of the first two days of the summer holidays reading the work of fiction by the much-praised author mentioned above. In the afternoon of each of those days, the young man began to drink beer while he read. Often, he held his glass of beer so that the afternoon sunlight passed through the beer and onto the page that he was then reading. The young man had, as yet, only a vague understanding of what took place in his mind while he was reading one or another work of fiction, and so he supposed that his enjoyment of the book by the much-praised author was caused by the rich imagery of the book, and whenever he had reached a state of mild drunkenness he would celebrate what he thought of as the richness of the imagery by causing a yellow glow to fall on one or another page of text.

The image-rays of sunlight mentioned in the first sentence of this section of the present work of fiction seemed to the man remembering them to have been more richly coloured by far than the sunlight mentioned in the previous paragraph. The man recalling the image-rays forty and more years after they had first appeared in the mind of the young reader of fiction — that man saw the image-rays as falling through one or another upper window of a house of two storeys in the countryside of Virginia. The house belonged to the parents of one or another of the two young persons who were asleep on a double bed in one or another room on the upper storey of the house, but the parents were in Europe for the time being and the house had been empty until the two young persons, a young man and a young woman, had arrived there a few hours before the image-rays mentioned had fallen through the upper window mentioned and onto the bed where the young persons had first discussed several matters and had then copulated and had afterwards fallen asleep.

The man aged more than sixty years seemed to remember also another sort of image-ray as having fallen in the mind of the younger man. The much-praised author of the book of fiction mentioned had seemingly tried to report to his readers some of the images that had appeared in the mind of the young female person while she slept. The older man could hardly believe that the younger man had been impressed by the attempted report but he, the older man, remembered that the younger man had wished that he might one day write in some or another work of fiction a passage half so impressive as the passage reporting the appearance of pale image-rays in the dark image-water where the young image-woman lay in her mind while she dreamed after she had first discussed several matters and had then copulated and had afterwards fallen asleep.

In the mind of a man aged forty and more years, image after image appeared of glass after glass containing one or another golden-brown alcoholic drink. One of the image-drinks the man recognised as beer. Others of the image-drinks he supposed were whisky or rye or bourbon. The man himself had sometimes drunk whisky, but the other two drinks he had only read about in works of fiction by authors from the United States of America, where he had never been. The image-glasses were only a few of those that were reported as having been drunk on most days by the narrator of a certain book that the man had finished reading a few days previously.

The book mentioned had been praised as a work of fiction and had been awarded a prize that was awarded only to works of fiction, but the man mentioned believed many of the reports in the book to be accurate reports of events from the life of the author of the book.

As the man aged forty and more years chose to understand the matter, the author of the book mentioned had stayed at home alone on day after day during one period of his life while his wife was at work. The author and his wife had agreed that she would work for a year and more so that he would be free to write at last the work of fiction that he had wanted for many years to write. On most of the days when his wife had gone to work, the author had tried for a few hours but had failed to write what he had hoped to write. He had then typed a thousand and more words from the English translation of one or another of the many volumes of a famous work of fiction in the French language. He had then added the typed pages to the stack of similar pages that he kept in a folder in his desk. He had then visited one or another bar in his neighbourhood and had drunk there until an hour before his wife was expected to return home.

The man aged forty and more years had read the book mentioned late on night after night while he sat in a building with glass walls beside one of the gates of a certain university in a certain outer suburb of Melbourne. The man was employed as a security guard, and for much of his time he sat in the building with glass walls and ensured that none but so-called authorised motor vehicles passed through the nearby boom gates into the grounds of the university. During the last hours of each evening, before the man locked the boom gates and then set out on a motor scooter to patrol the grounds of the university, few cars approached the boom gates, so that the man was mostly free to read. He would have been free to write also, if he had so wished.

When the man had begun to work in the building with glass walls, he had assured his wife that he would use his free time in the late evenings for writing fiction. More than two years before the man had begun to work in the building with the glass walls, he had agreed with his wife that he would stay at home each day for two years while she went to work. Each day, he would do an agreed amount of housework and would supervise their two children when they were not at school. During the remainder of the day, the man would write the long work of fiction that he had wanted for many years to write. Before the first of the two years had ended, however, the man understood that he would not be able to write the long work of fiction. During each day of his first months alone at home, the man had written several hundred words of the long work. In later months, he had spent much of his time doing crossword puzzles or having his left hand play against his right hand at Scrabble or simply reading one or another of the many works of fiction that he owned. During the last hour before his wife arrived home, the man would type an adaptation of four hundred words from a work of fiction that had been published in London forty-eight years before his birth. The chief character of the work was a man who earned barely enough to support himself and his wife and children by writing four thousand words of fiction on every working day. While he wrote the adaptation mentioned, the man would change all the proper nouns and some of the common nouns in the original work and would sometimes insert a variant word or phrase and would then draw a line through it. On many an afternoon, the man would sip from a flask of vodka while he wrote the adaptation, although he would always hide the flask before his wife arrived home. He sipped so that he would show no sign of agitation if his wife later asked him, as she sometimes asked, how much writing he had done during the day and if he then lifted out of his filing cabinet and held open in front of her the folder where he stored the few pages that he himself had composed on top of the many pages that he had adapted from the work in which the chief character had written four thousand words on every working day. Towards the end of the second year that the man had spent at home, he told his wife that he had finished the first draft of his work of fiction but that he would have to write a further draft before he submitted the work to any publisher. Even if his wife had not insisted that he should become employed again, the man would not have wanted to spend any more time alone in his house doing crossword puzzles or playing Scrabble or adapting passages from the book whose chief character wrote four thousand words each day, just as the author of the book was reported to have done.

During the first weeks after he had begun to work in the building with glass walls, the man mentioned spent the last hours of each evening in reading one or another biography of one or another writer of fiction. The first such book was a biography, published not long before in London, of the author of the book of fiction that the man had adapted during his two years at home. The man learned from the biography that the author, its subject, had lived for much of his life in circumstances very like those of the chief character in the adapted work of fiction, who had written four thousand words of fiction on every working day even though he was often in debt and even though his wife was shrewish and addicted to alcohol. The man learned also from the biography that the author, its subject, had sold for publication during the twenty-six years before he had died during his forty-seventh year twenty-seven books, many of them comprising three volumes. The second book that the man read in the building with glass walls was the book mentioned earlier, which had been awarded a prize for fiction but which the man believed to be mostly autobiography.

Late on some of the first evenings while he sat reading in the building with glass walls, the man had thought of how easily he might complete the writing of a book that would appear to be fiction but would be hardly more than a report. But then he had thought of the lives of the two men he had read about during the evenings mentioned. The subject of the first book had been married first to a woman who had died from the effects of alcohol and then to a woman who was later committed to a so-called infirmary for the insane. The subject of the second book had been later divorced from the woman in whose apartment he had pretended to be writing fiction. He had been taken to hospital at least once as a result of his drinking and had several times been admitted to what he called in his book an insane asylum. The life of the man in the building with glass walls seemed, by comparison, uneventful. Unless the unthinkable should happen — unless he or his wife should lose control of their drinking or become mentally ill, then the chief events of his life and therefore, so he supposed, the only possible subject for any seeming-autobiography that he might succeed in writing, was the books that he had read.

A man of more than sixty years still saw often in his mind a series of images that he had first seen more than thirty years before while he was reading a work of fiction that had originally comprised three volumes, the first of which had been first published twenty-two years before his birth and the third of which had been published ten years before his birth. In the following report of the series mentioned, each noun or pronoun refers to an image-person or an image-place or an image-thing; each verb refers to an image-action; and each modifier refers to an image-quality or an image-condition.

Two women, strangers to one another, were returning home by horse-drawn coach from Melbourne to separate districts in the south-west of Victoria. One woman, who was shabbily dressed, had gone to Melbourne in connection with the recent death there of her husband. The other woman, who was respectably dressed, had gone to Melbourne to arrange for her husband to be returned home, even though he had been certified as insane and confined in a lunatic asylum. The shabbily dressed woman would have been obliged to travel on the outside of the coach if the other woman had not shamed one of the men inside so that he gave up his seat. By way of thanks, the shabbily dressed woman gave her surname and her address to the fashionably dressed woman and promised to help her if asked in the future. The address of the shabbily dressed woman consisted only of two words denoting some or another township or district unknown to the respectably dressed woman.

Later in the series of images, the wife of the insane man waited among a group of strangers on a jetty or pier in the south-west of Victoria for the arrival from a distant anchored ship of a small boat in which a number of male figures were discernible. The group on the jetty or pier was watching one particular male figure who was struggling against several of the others. A man on the jetty or pier announced with evident excitement to the wife that a lunatic was being brought ashore. The struggling man went on struggling while the boat was being moored and then while the other men were trying to get him onto the jetty, but ceased to struggle when his wife approached and put a hand to him.

Later again, the wife found herself unable to care for her insane husband in the cottage attached to the post office in the small town where she was postmistress. The wife wrote for help to the woman that she herself had previously helped on the coach. The wife sent the message by post to the address that consisted of two words only. A few days later, the shabbily dressed woman arrived by coach and set about keeping house for the wife of the certified lunatic.

The man of more than sixty years, if he had looked into the matter, might well have concluded that he had called to mind the above-mentioned image-events more often than he had called to mind any other images deriving from any other text. If the man had not thus concluded, then he would certainly have concluded that his remembering the above-mentioned image-events caused him to become more alert to what he called the feel of things than did any other memory of image-events.

Some or another reader of this work of fiction may be surprised by the remainder of this paragraph, but I assure that reader that the man of more than sixty years valued above all other passages in the several thousand works of fiction that he had read those passages that made him alert to what he called the feel of things. Whenever the man had begun to read some or another work of fiction, he had hoped to become, at some time during his reading, at least as alert to the feel of things as he had been as a child whenever he had watched, towards the end of some or another film, some or another scene in which an unlikely character, or a character previously belittled or despised, had brought about the events that delivered freedom to a captive character or joy to a grieving character or peace of mind to a troubled character. Or, the man had hoped to become, at some time during his reading, at least as alert to the feel of things as he had been whenever he watched a sporting event in which some or another person or animal succeeded against all odds, as a journalist or a commentator might have reported the matter.

The man aged more than sixty years often supposed that he was more affected by image-persons and image-events than by actual persons and events, as though he possessed an image-self whose image-thoughts and image-feelings were more powerful than their actual counterparts. The man often wished that he could have read, if not a published report, then at least a typewritten or even a handwritten report of certain image-events that had appeared in the mind of a man aged fifty and more years while he sat alone on many an evening and tried to write some or another work of fiction that he would never complete. Some of those image-events are reported in the following paragraphs as though they are fictional events in this work of fiction.

A man aged forty years and more stood beside his wife late at night in a cubicle in the emergency department of a public hospital in a suburb of Melbourne. The man’s wife, who was fastened by straps to a wheeled stretcher, cried out continually. The curtains had been drawn around the cubicle, but the man understood that his wife’s cries could be heard by the many patients and visitors and nurses and doctors in the emergency department. The man’s wife cried out that her husband wrongly considered her insane or that he had plotted for some time past with persons from her place of work to have her dismissed for incompetence and later confined to a locked ward in a hospital. The man knew better than to try to dissuade his wife from crying out, or to try to stifle her cries with a hand. His wife had cried out in this way from time to time during the past five years. In earlier years, she had cried out only occasionally, but in recent years she had cried out often, especially during the night. On many nights during the past year, she had woken her husband with her cries and had then kept him awake during the night with her reports of the plots against her at her place of work. Whenever, for the sake of peace, her husband had agreed that her reports seemed persuasive, she had demanded that he accompany her next day to her place of work and there confront the plotters. Whenever her husband had disputed her reports, she had cried out loudly enough to be heard in the neighbouring houses or she had struck him. Sometimes her husband had struck her in return.

During the year before the man stood beside his wife in the cubicle mentioned, he had worked during many a night in a building with glass walls. Sometimes his wife had telephoned him in the building and had cried out to him that she would swallow all her supply of medicines if he did not come home at once and listen to her reports of the plots against her. The man was usually able to persuade his wife to wait until he had finished his work, after which he would return home at once. Once, the man had ended a telephone call while his wife was crying out to him and had declined to pick up the receiver when the telephone had sounded again soon afterwards. Later, his wife had arrived in a taxi at the building with glass walls and had cried out to him through the walls.

During the last months before the man stood beside his wife in the cubicle mentioned, she had been absent for so long from her place of work that she no longer received salary payments. She no longer dressed or did housework or shopped but kept mostly to her room, sometimes crying out and often smoking cigarettes. After she had ceased to consult her doctors, her husband had himself consulted them and had sometimes telephoned them, but neither doctor would agree to visit his wife in her home. One evening, however, after the man had told one of the doctors by telephone that his wife had already swallowed some of her supply of medicines and was threatening to swallow the remainder, the doctor had advised the man to call an ambulance and to have his wife taken to the emergency department of the nearest public hospital.

The man standing beside his wife in the cubicle mentioned had expected to go on standing beside her for at least an hour, but his wife’s crying out had seemed to persuade the doctors to deal with her promptly. After his wife had cried out for no more than ten minutes, the man became aware that a young female doctor was standing beside him.

The man could never afterwards recall the appearance of the young female doctor mentioned, although he recalled that she had seemed to him good-looking. The man recalled afterwards only the surname of the young doctor and her way of looking at him while he explained to her, even while his wife continued to cry out against him, what had brought him and his wife to the hospital. The surname of the young doctor had told the man that her parents had been born in one or another country beside the Baltic Sea. The young doctor’s way of looking at him had told the man that she was alert to the feel of things while she listened to him and then while she signed the page or pages that caused some or another employee of the hospital to arrange by telephone for a police van to arrive at the emergency department and for the two policemen in the van to remove his wife from the cubicle and to confine her, still crying out, in the van and then to take her, still crying out, to a nearby hospital for the so-called mentally ill where she was interviewed, still crying out, by a doctor and afterwards taken, still crying out, to a room that her husband supposed, after he had later seen, through the small window in the door of the room, the upholstered walls and floor of the room, was a padded cell.

The man aged sixty and more years had never read any sort of report of the fictional events reported in the previous five paragraphs of this work of fiction. Nor did he expect ever to read any sort of report of the fictional events reported in the following paragraph.

Four husbands and their wives, all of them aged fifty years and more, travelled every year from their homes in various suburbs of Melbourne to a certain city in the south-west of Victoria to attend a so-called three-day racing carnival, on the third day of which was run a famous steeplechase. On one or another evening during their stay in the city mentioned, the husbands and their wives travelled about forty kilometres from the city to a nearby town where they dined and drank in a fashionable hotel overlooking a pier or jetty and a view of the ocean. Each year, while one of the husbands and his wife travelled from the city mentioned to the town mentioned, the husband preferred not to mention to his wife that a certain overgrown cemetery, set far back from the road between the city and the coastal town, contained the grave of a certain man whose wife had been, more than a hundred years before, the postmistress at a certain township a short distance inland and whose daughter had written, long after the death of her parents, a novel comprising three volumes and containing a passage in which a woman trying to care for an insane husband was reported as writing for help to a woman known only by a surname and a place name.

The seven paragraphs following this paragraph comprise a summary of a portion of a certain unpublished work of fiction. The man who was the author of the unpublished work supposed from time to time after his fortieth year that he remembered the portion summarised below. In fact, the man remembered only certain words and phrases from the work, although he saw clearly in his mind from time to time a series of events or image-events such as had surely occurred to him while he was writing the work.

A boy aged ten years walked with a dog in an easterly direction across a paddock of mostly level grass during the first hour of daylight on a morning of thick frost during one of the first years after the Second World War. The boy was walking towards a line of trees that reached along one side of the paddock, which was part of a dairy farm where his father was employed as a sharefarmer. The dairy farm was one of many such farms in the district around, which was a district of mostly level grassy countryside with a line of trees on its eastern boundary. The trees were the nearest trees of a forest, much of which had already been cleared of trees and almost all of which would be cleared before the boy had reached his thirtieth year.

Most of the dairy farms in the district mentioned had been so thoroughly cleared that no tree remained in any of the mostly level grassy paddocks. However, the paddock where the boy was walking had along its eastern boundary a thick stand of the timber and undergrowth that had formerly covered the whole district. The boy thought of this timber as an outlying island of the forest-continent far to the east.

While the boy walked towards the stand of timber mentioned, he looked sometimes at a thin column of smoke above the place where the trees and the undergrowth were most dense. The boy had never been to that part of the farm, but he knew that the smoke came from a hut in a clearing there. The hut was the home of the owner of the farm, who was a bachelor aged about forty years. The boy’s father had told him that the owner of the farm had chosen to spend all his adult life in the hut and to allow his sharefarmer to live in the house where the owner’s parents had lived until their death and where the owner had lived as a boy.

The boy had often seen the owner of the farm, who arrived at the farmhouse on horseback nearly every day in order to confer with the boy’s father. The boy saw nothing in the appearance or the behaviour of the owner that might have explained why he lived as a bachelor in a hut in an island of forest, but he, the boy, often arrived at his own explanation.

The boy himself liked to be alone among stands of trees or even on mostly level grassy countryside. Whenever he was alone in such places, he felt as though he had been joined by some or another invisible female companion of about his own age who understood his interest in solitary places and in many other matters without his needing to explain himself. The boy sometimes supposed that the owner of the farm was sometimes visited in his hut among the trees and the undergrowth by a sympathetic but invisible female companion.

The boy hoped that he might one day meet up with an actual female person not unlike the invisible female companion mentioned above. And although he had learned from his father that the owner of the farm lived mostly a hermit’s life and was not known to have travelled out of the district where he had been born and brought up, this did not prevent the boy from supposing that he, the owner, still waited for some or another female person to learn of his existence and to find her way to the stand of timber and the undergrowth and then to the hut in the clearing.

The reader should remember that the boy mentioned is the chief character of an unpublished work of fiction mentioned in a recent paragraph of this work of fiction. If the author of the unpublished work had read a certain celebrated work of fiction in the French language, he might have recalled, while he wrote about the matters summarised in the previous two paragraphs, a certain passage reporting some or another personage’s having placed one day on a certain windowsill a certain rare orchid in the hope that the flower on the rare plant might be pollinated if only some other person in the same quarter of the same city had put that day on some or another windowsill a plant of the same rare kind and then a nearby passage reporting the unlikely meeting on the same day of two male characters whose sexual needs, so to call them, were so unusual that they had been hardly ever satisfied but which needs were well satisfied soon after the unlikely meeting.

The boy and the dog were searching for a cow that was named Stockings for her three white legs on a red-brown body. The cow was known to have calved recently. Cows on the many treeless dairy farms in that district were obliged to calve in mostly level grassy paddocks, but when a cow was about to calve on the farm owned by the bachelor she was free to follow her instincts and to go in among the trees and undergrowth as though to protect her calf from predatory animals. While he approached the nearest of the trees, the boy saw in his mind image after image that had appeared in his mind while he had read, a few months before, a certain book of fiction that had been first published in Sydney eight years before his birth. The chief character of that book was referred to always as the red heifer or the red cow. Towards the end of that book, the narrator reported that the district where the chief character lived with other members of a herd of wild cattle was being cleared of its trees and undergrowth. The boy had hoped while he read that the chief character and the calf that she had recently given birth to might be reported as having found one last stand of trees and undergrowth where she and her calf could survive and where she might even meet up, in the future, with some or another male survivor from the wild herd.

The matters reported in the previous paragraphs were earlier reported in a long work of fiction that was read by one literary agent and four publishers but was never published. While the long work was being read by one or another of the persons mentioned, the author of the work completed a work of fiction different in many ways from the long work. This work of fiction was published first as a hardcover book and then as a paperback book. A number of reviewers praised the book. Some months after the book had been published, the author of the book was invited to lunch in a fashionable restaurant by the editor of what was often described as a leading literary quarterly. During the lunch, the editor told the author that he was being widely talked about as a rising star among authors of fiction, although the author felt sure that the editor had not read the recently published book. The editor then asked the author if he had anything suitable for publication in his, the editor’s, literary quarterly, as though the author might have had always on hand a variety of works of fiction ready for sending to any editor who might request some or another work. (The author had worked intermittently for nine years on the unpublished work and for four years on the published work.) The author later sent to the editor an edited version of certain passages from the work that had been rejected by four publishers. The passages reported, among other matters, some of the matters reported in earlier paragraphs of this section of this work of fiction. The editor later published the passages mentioned in what was often described as a leading literary quarterly.

In the mind of a man aged nearly seventy years, a few details appeared of a young woman with dark hair and a faintly olive complexion. The man waited, but no further image-details appeared to him. He then went on packing the travelling bag that he was going to take with him on a journey that he was obliged to make by railway train to a distant city.

The image of the young woman had appeared to the man while he was putting into his travelling bag a certain book that he had first read more than twenty years before but had not since read. In earlier years, the man had bought some thousands of books and had read many of them. In more recent years, the man had bought hardly any books and had mostly read books that he had first read many years before. Most of the books that the man had bought and had read were books of fiction.

The book that the man put into his travelling bag was not a book of fiction but a report by a man who had spent a year and more during the Second World War in a telegraph station recently built by the Royal Navy on the island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean. The book contained perhaps twenty illustrations: small reproductions of black-and-white photographs. Some of the illustrations were of persons who lived permanently on Tristan da Cunha at the time when the author was stationed there, but no illustration was of a young woman with dark hair and a faintly olive complexion.

The man about to travel had wanted, many years before, to write a long work of fiction with the title Masthead of the World, which phrase he had found in a long poem the title of which was ‘Tristan da Cunha’. The long poem had been written by a man who had been born nearly forty years before the birth of the man who was about to travel. The poet had spent his early years in South Africa but had almost certainly never seen the island that was the subject of his long poem, according to his most recent biographer. According to this biographer, the poet knew the island of Tristan da Cunha only from photographs or from reproductions of photographs. The man about to travel supposed that one at least of those photographs must have shown the island as it had appeared in the first illustration that he himself had seen of Tristan da Cunha: as a distant conical mountain with its upper parts concealed by clouds. The man about to travel supposed also that the poet must have heard or must have read an account of the roaring noise made almost continually by the ocean against the cliffs beneath the meadows where the houses of the inhabitants were clustered.

The long work of fiction mentioned above had never been written. The work had been intended to comprise entries from the diary of a man who had lived during all of his life in one or another suburb of Melbourne but who reported the events of his life as though he had lived always on Tristan da Cunha. The man who intended to write the work had made notes for only one section before he abandoned the work. That section would have reported the experiences of the chief character after he had begun to court a certain young woman in the way that the young women were courted by the young men on Tristan da Cunha. Every Friday evening, the young man visited his best friend, a young man who lived with an older brother, a younger sister, and their parents in a house of many rooms in a certain eastern suburb of Melbourne. During his first hours in the house, the visiting young man would take part with the father of the family and his two sons in tournaments of ping-pong, darts and carpet bowls. Later, the visiting young man would excuse himself and would sit for an hour and more in the darkened living room, where his friend’s younger sister and their mother sat from seven every evening until midnight watching television programs. The men of the house seldom watched television programs, and so the young visitor was almost always alone with the mother and her daughter during his hour and more in the darkened room. The daughter mostly ignored the young visitor, but he was encouraged by the mother’s sometimes talking to him while some or another advertisement was showing. On Tristan da Cunha, the mother’s engaging him in conversation would have told him that she acknowledged him to be courting her daughter.

The man about to travel might have said that he remembered a few scenes from the book that he was packing among his luggage. The book, of course, contained no scenes; it consisted of nothing but words arranged in sentences. The few scenes that the man might have mentioned had appeared in his mind while he read and were all set, as it were, in an image-space intended to represent the interior of a certain house on Tristan da Cunha, which interior was not represented by any of the illustrations mentioned earlier.

Every item mentioned in the following three paragraphs is to be understood as being an image-item.

A young man who worked by day in a telegraph station on a remote island visited on many an evening a certain house on the island. During most of his time in the house, the young man sat beside a certain young woman on one of the beds in the house, which comprised a large living area and a smaller sleeping area with a curtain between. While the young man and the young woman sat together, the curtain mentioned was drawn back, so that he and she remained in full view of the persons in the living area, who were the parents and the siblings of the young woman along with one other person. This other person was a young man who had spent all his life on the remote island and who visited on many an evening the certain house mentioned, there to sit silently a little way in from the door in order to signal to the people of the house that he was courting the young woman who lived there.

During much of his time in the house, the man from the telegraph station helped the young woman to read more fluently. For some years past, the remote island had been without a school, and many of the young persons on the island were hardly able to read or to write. Recently, the chaplain attached to the telegraph station had set up a school and had distributed reading books to young adults wishing to read more fluently. The young woman mentioned above was of all the young adults on the remote island the most eager to read more fluently. On every night when the young man from the telegraph station visited her house, he brought for the young woman one or more reading books and sat beside her while she read them. During most of the time while the young woman read, she and the young man leaned against one another, and their nearer hands were clasped out of sight beneath the bed coverings.

Sometimes the young woman mentioned, having read to the end of one or another reading book, turned to the wall beside her and tried to read from one or another of the pages fastened there. (On the remote island, the inner walls of many houses were decorated with pages from illustrated magazines or even from newspapers. The remote island had no regular mail service, but ships called from time to time and the men from the island went aboard in order to exchange goods or foodstuffs from the island for anything of use to the islanders — even illustrated magazines for lining the walls of their houses.) The young woman tried to read the captions under the illustrations around her and the subheadings in the columns of text around her but she seldom succeeded. Sometimes the young woman became angry after she had failed to read one or another caption or subheading. Sometimes, in her anger, she rebuked or insulted the young man who had been sitting silently a little way in from the door for as long as he had been in the house.

The man filling his travelling bag would not have claimed to remember anything that was reported to have happened between the young woman who was eager to read and the young man her teacher while he was preparing to leave Tristan da Cunha at the end of his term of duty. The man seemed to remember, however, that he had read, in the last pages of the book that he had packed in his travelling bag, a report by the author, who had never returned to Tristan da Cunha after his term of duty there, of his having seen certain images of some or other islanders in some or another illustrated magazine published after the Second World War in England, or it may have been South Africa. The author had been sorry to learn from an article in the magazine that a commercial company had set up a plant on Tristan da Cunha for processing fish caught by the islanders and that currency was by then in use among the islanders, many of whom bought clothing and foods from abroad. However, before the man had learned these things from the text of the article he had searched among the images of female persons in the nearby illustrations for an image of dark hair and of a face with a faintly olive complexion. After he had found these images, he had learned from a nearby caption that the young woman whom he had taught to read had since become the wife of a young man other than the young man who had sat silently during evening after evening a little way in from the door of her parents’ house.

After his thirty-seventh year, a certain man would sometimes catch sight of a certain few volumes on one of his bookshelves or would see in some or another book review or literary essay the name of a certain writer in the German language and would then remember one or another moment from the many hours that he had spent in reading one or another volume of a certain unfinished work of fiction by the writer.

Of the several hundreds of thousands of words in the English translation of the work of fiction mentioned, the man had forgotten, soon after he had read them, all but nine. The man remembered, however, his state of mind on many an occasion while he had been reading the work or while he had paused in his reading.

The man mentioned could have said that the long work mentioned was the most difficult work of fiction that he had tried to read. The man could have said that he had had to read many a passage and even many a sentence twice and more before he seemed to understand it. During the few moments after he had seemed to understand such a passage or such a sentence, the man felt entitled to consider himself an intellectual. And yet, whenever he had tried afterwards to report in his own words what he had understood he had been unable to do so.

Of the nine that were the only words remembered by the man soon after he had read the long work mentioned, four comprised the title of a chapter or a section far into the work while the other five were part of a sentence in that chapter or section. Often, while the man struggled to understand the earlier parts of the work, he looked at the words The lunatics hail Clarisse and felt relieved. He expected that he would readily understand the chapter or the section that bore this title. He even looked forward to finding one or more humorous passages in that chapter or section. The man found the character of Clarisse impossible to comprehend, let alone to like or to admire. The passages reporting her fictional thoughts and feelings were among the densest in the long work of fiction. It seemed to the man that the fictional character Clarisse was concerned mostly with abstractions or with states of mind impossible to describe or even to suggest in plain words, and he hoped that her being hailed by an assembly of fictional lunatics would give rise to a passage of less exacting prose.

How Clarisse came to meet up with the lunatics the man mentioned never afterwards remembered, although he seemed to recall that she had sometimes expressed a desire to study the extremes of human experience and that she had sometimes discussed certain lunatics with a doctor who worked in a certain asylum. Surely Clarisse would have been reported in the long work of fiction as having met up with a number of lunatics during what would surely have been a conducted tour of some or another asylum, and surely the word hail would have denoted a variety of behaviour. Nevertheless, the man who had once read the fictional report of the visit by the character Clarisse to some or another fictional asylum could remember soon afterwards only that one of the male fictional lunatics, when Clarisse had approached him, had set about masturbating like a caged monkey.

A certain man who was aged nearly seventy years was making notes for a work of fiction that he expected never to write. The man had made notes for many works of fiction during many of the previous fifty years. Some of those works he had gone on to write, and some of the works that he had written had later been published. During the previous ten years, however, on the few occasions when the man had felt urged to write fiction he had relieved his urge by making notes for one or another work that he expected never to write.

In one of the published works of fiction by the man mentioned was a report of a fictional man’s having read a certain book: a translation into the English language of a book written in the Hungarian language and first published in Hungary three years before the birth of the man mentioned. Even though the man’s published book was fiction, any reader might have learned that the existence of the book mentioned in the fictional narrative was a fact and that the book itself purported to be a book of non-fiction. (Why did I write just then the expression a book of non-fiction? Why is the expression a factual book so seldom used? Is this our way of acknowledging that most seeming-facts are, in fact, fiction? And, if books of fiction are not called non-factual books, is this because we understand that most matters reported in books of fiction have a factual existence?)

Although it was never reported in the published work of fiction mentioned in the previous paragraph, the chief character of the work mentioned wished often that some of the purported facts in the translated book mentioned had not been facts: that certain events reported as having happened in the world where he had sat while he read the translated book had not in fact happened. In particular, the chief character wished that a certain young woman, the daughter of farm servants on a large estate in Tolna County, in the Kingdom of Hungary, had not been compelled, on a certain frosty evening in the first decade of the twentieth century, to visit the quarters of the assistant bailiff of the estate; or, if the young woman had been thus compelled, that she had not decided, at some time during her visit, to run from the bedroom of the assistant bailiff without even pulling on her boots; or, if the young woman had decided so to run, that she had run towards the long thatched building where she lived with her parents and her siblings in one of the many cramped apartments and not towards the well that stood among the out-buildings of the estate; or, if the young woman had run towards the well, that she had not vaulted over the low wall and had not fallen into the freezing water, afterwards to have her corpse hauled out at first light by cowherds and laid on the nearby grass, there to be observed later in the morning by a party of children on their way to school, one of which children, thirty years later, would include his report of what he had seen in a book that would be translated, during his lifetime, into twenty languages, one of them English, but had stared into the water, in which reflection of stars had appeared as pale rays on a dark background that included, perhaps, an image of the face and the upper body of a young woman.

The man who was aged nearly seventy years was making notes for a work of fiction in the belief that the power of fiction was sometimes able to resist, if not to overcome, the power of fact. The man understood that a fact could never be other than a fact, even though it might be reported in a work of fiction, but he believed that any fictional event or any fictional character might be said to have acquired a factual existence as soon as the event or the character had been reported in a published text.

The man mentioned had to accept as a fact that a certain young woman had drowned in a certain well in a certain foreign country thirty and more years before he had been born, but he was able to accept as an image-fact that a certain young image-woman stared into an image-well where pale image-rays appeared on a dark image-background in the mind of a man who was making notes for a work of fiction that he expected never to write.

The man who was aged nearly seventy years left off making notes and felt as he had sometimes felt during the past fifty years whenever he had left off writing some or another work of fiction or even some or other notes. The man felt as though writing fiction was too easy. It seemed to the man the easiest of tasks to report image-deeds done by image-persons in image-scenery or even to report the image-thoughts of the image-persons. It had been too easy, for example, for him to report many years before in a certain work of fiction that a certain image-man had read a report of a certain young woman’s having drowned in a certain well. It had been too easy for him to report the image-details in his mind as though they were no more than actual details in some or another actual scenery that surrounded him continually. A more demanding and a more worthy task would have been for him to write as though the report he had read had been part of a work of fiction: as though the young woman who had drowned was a fictional young woman, one of those entities likely to become an image-entity in his mind and whose image-fate it would be useless for him to wish changed.

An image of a stern-faced man, aged about forty years, appeared in the mind of a man of about the same age who was writing the last paragraph of a long work of fiction. The words that this man was writing were the same words that comprised the last paragraph of the work of fiction in which the chief male character was a stern-faced man. This work had been first published ninety-two years before the birth of the man who was writing, and the author of the work had died a year later. The man who was writing was therefore under no obligation to seek permission to include the last paragraph of the work in his own work. In fact, the provenance of its final paragraph was not mentioned anywhere in the text of the man’s work or in the preliminary pages of any edition of the published work, although the text of the man’s work included, in separate passages, the title of the earlier book, the name of its author, and a summary of part of its contents.

The man’s book was reviewed and noticed in various publications and was even the subject of a few essays and so-called scholarly articles. Some reviewers and commentators approved of the man’s book and some did not, but none mentioned that the man had used for the ending of his book the ending of a famous book from the previous century. Perhaps the reviewers and commentators considered that the man’s having appropriated the ending of the famous book was so obvious as to need no comment. The man suspected, however, that the reviewers and commentators, even though they wrote fluently and at length about what they called the subject matter or the themes or the meaning of book after book, were like himself in that they were unable to remember any more than a few words or phrases from the text of any book that they had read.

The man in whose mind was an image of a stern-faced man had been hardly more than a boy when he had first read the famous book mentioned above. He had read the famous book twice more during his adult years. If anything, the later readings lessened rather than increased the sum of his recollections of the book, which is to say the words and sentences of the text. At the same time, the later readings seemed to give rise in his mind to numerous images, a few of them attributable to passages in the text but most seemingly arising from the man’s need to have in his mind images of undulating treeless countryside and of some or another young female person who chose often to frequent such countryside and even to consent to being accompanied there by a certain young male person.

The stern-faced image-man mentioned in the first sentence of this section of the present work of fiction kept mostly to an image-room at one side of an image-house built of image-stone. Perhaps he wanted to avoid the image-company of the other image-persons in the image-house, or perhaps he preferred his image-room because an image-window there overlooked a wide image-view of undulating treeless image-countryside where he had spent much image-time during his image-childhood in the company of a certain young female image-person.

The writer of a book the last paragraph of which had been taken from a certain famous book was nearly seventy years of age before he understood that a single image-person might owe his or her image-existence to more than one passage from one or another book or even from more than one book. The writer came to understand this after he had begun to observe that the image of the stern-faced man mentioned earlier appeared less often before an image-window and more often at an image-desk. The writer could only suppose that the image-man was writing at the image-desk and could only suppose that what he was writing was an image-work of image-fiction. The writer could only suppose that the image-fiction was such as he himself would have written if he himself had been at the image-desk near the image-window overlooking the treeless image-countryside. What he would have written would have seemed to him a report of scenes and events in a country adjoining a country named Gondal which country the author of the famous book mentioned earlier had written about throughout her lifetime, although none of what she wrote had been published as any sort of book, and which country was the native country of the female entity, so to call her, who later became, as it were, a famous female character in a famous work of fiction.

The goddesses had left the dining room, and the gods were about to sip their brandy and to puff on their cigars. Before the conversation had begun to grow raucous, a few of those seated at the far end of the room heard the same faint sound that a few of the others had claimed to have heard on the previous evening: perhaps the same sound that some of the goddesses had claimed during dinner to have heard while they were reclining naked beside their bathing pool during the quiet hours of the afternoon.

The residents of heaven were, by definition, unable to be troubled or irritated, but they were able to be piqued by curiosity, and even a distant knocking, until its source was discovered, might well have seemed to the more sensitive deities to gainsay their reputation for omniscience.

An archangel from the household staff was ordered to investigate. He reported that he himself had seemed to hear what their lordships and ladyships had seemed to hear. He was well aware, so he said, that he and his employers were residents of a realm where nothing could be said to be impossible; even so, their having heard a knocking sound was hardly to be believed. What he and they had seemed to hear seemed to have sounded from the far side of the outer wall of the building. He begged their lordships and their ladyships to recall that they were dining for the time being in the farthest west wing of the farthest west of the many mansions in that part of the universe, and as he and they well knew, the farthest west mansion adjoined on its farther side the country known to many of its inhabitants as Earth, between which and their own country there had been no communication since the universe in its present form had come into existence.

In short, reader, the gods and goddesses, or as many as took an interest in such matters, were obliged to address a disquieting possibility. The fabric of the universe as they knew it might not have been seamless. Some less than immortal being from a much less than heavenly zone of the universe was claiming their attention or, at the very least, was signalling to them that he or she had learned their address.

Even so disconcerting a development could not keep the divinities from their usual pleasures. While the would-be intruder, presumably, went on knocking throughout the next day, the gods, and many of the goddesses, attended race-meetings, rode to hounds, and took part in or watched as spectators a variety of sports and contests. Those who preferred to stay indoors played one or another of a variety of board games or card games praised by their admirers, with laborious humour, as being fiendishly or diabolically complicated.

The reader may have expected to read that the divine personages spent their days in vast art galleries contemplating magnificent paintings and sculpture, in concert halls listening to sublime music, or in libraries reading profound literature. In the heaven described here, no art galleries or concert halls or libraries existed. No one painted or sculpted or composed music or wrote literature because no one was urged to find so-called meaning behind so-called appearances. Where the everyday was the ultimate, there was nothing to do but play.

I have to correct an earlier statement. A small reference library existed in a comparatively modest mansion in an out-of-the-way district of heaven. The contents of most of the books there might have seemed to you and me, reader, a sort of astronomy except that they lacked the speculation that characterises the subject as we know it. The other books were dry reading indeed, being a sort of annal or chronicle except that each volume reported the events of an aeon rather than a year.

In this library, a few days after the knocking had been first heard, an angelic personage who considered himself or herself or itself a capable amateur historian unearthed, as he/she/it put it with clumsy humour, the explanation for the unusual event. It was recounted in a certain chronicle that a certain god much given to caprice and whimsy had long before set a small door in the farthest west wall mentioned previously. (For the sake of this narrative, it must be supposed that the door was well concealed on both sides and that the god concerned had later forgotten about it.)

The gods and goddesses knew little and cared less about Earth, but once the existence of the door had become widely known, their fondness for competing and speculating and betting caused them for several evenings to outlay large sums of heavenly currency on the answer to the question: what was the field of endeavour of the person knocking? (They were too ignorant of earthly matters to bet on the identity of the knocker.)

The meagre information available in their library caused a majority of the divinities to bet that the person knocking was some or another prophet or the founder of some or another religion. A sizeable minority staked their money on the person’s being a composer of music or a painter or sculptor. The smallest minority bet that the person at the concealed door was some or another writer of poetry or plays or even of prose fiction.

The gods and goddesses would have had no opportunity for speculating or wagering if their library had included the sort of book that filled the library of the writer of these paragraphs and if even one god or goddess had read the last pages of a certain one of those books, which pages the writer had read often. The book, which was first published in 1958, was a translation from the French language into the English language of a biography of a certain writer of prose fiction who was reported by his biographer as having seen that final door at last fly open at which, before him, no one had ever knocked.

The divine ones, however, knew nothing about the biography mentioned or about its subject and were able to enjoy much suspense and much anticipation of profit from betting while one of their number went one evening at last to the place where the knocking had sounded for day and night after day and night and found there the concealed door and opened it, and greeted the person standing on its further side and got from the person an account of himself or herself and afterwards politely dismissed the person and then closed the door or, perhaps, left the person standing at the open door while he or she, the god or goddess, hurried back to the crowded dining room and there blurted out that the person at the door claimed to be the author of an enormous work of prose fiction although he seemed no more than an asthmatic little poofter from a place called Paris.

In the mind of a man who was barefoot and wearing only shorts and a singlet and was drinking beer in a room where the drapes were drawn against the sunlight, an image appeared of a man who was wearing what the first-mentioned man was wearing and who was drinking what the first-mentioned man was drinking in a room such as the first-mentioned man was in.

If an image of a man can be said to be of a certain age, then the image-man mentioned and the man mentioned were of the same age: forty-seven years and two hundred and twenty-two days. The man did not know it on the day mentioned, but he was to live for at least a further twenty-two years from that day. If an image-man can be supposed to suspect such things, then the image-man surely suspected that he had not long to live although he may not have suspected that he would die on the following day, which was, in fact, the day when he died.

To express the matter otherwise: the first-mentioned man was drinking beer in his shorts and singlet on the day when he became as old as the image-man had been when he had died, seventeen years before, as a result of a haemorrhage in some or another digestive organ. His death, as one of his biographers wrote, was a typical alcoholic’s death.

The first-mentioned man had sometimes supposed that he himself would die a typical alcoholic’s death, although he drank mostly beer whereas the image-man, so to call him, had drunk mostly stronger drinks. The first-mentioned man had even supposed at one time that he would live the sort of life lived by the image-man. The man had first supposed this after he had read during his twentieth year a work of fiction by the man who later became the image-man. Nearly fifty years after he had read the work of fiction, the man could recall in detail many of the feelings that he had felt while reading, although he recalled from the text of the book only the words you drive all day and you’re still in Texas.

When the man supposed that he might live as the image-man had lived, he was not so foolish as to have been influenced by any so-called movements said to have arisen as a result of the image-man’s writings or opinions. The man understood that the image-man had begun to follow his own way of life and to write his own sort of writing as long ago as the 1940s and many years before words such as beatnik and hippie would be made popular by certain journalists. The man supposed that the image-man’s way of life was too much his own to be summarised or defined. The image-man, who was often supposed to have preached against the conventions of society, so to call them, included in one or another of his books of fiction a passage in which the first-person narrator wanted no more than to be in his middle age a railway worker drinking beer in the late afternoon on his front veranda and talking to his best friend, who lived in the house next door.

The man who had once supposed that he might live as the image-man had lived — that man had lived for many years in a modest house in a suburb that might have been called lower middle class. The man worked in a government department, in what was sometimes called a middle-level position. He had been married for many years to a woman whom he had first met when they worked in the same building. He and the woman had two children. Only on some evenings and at weekends did the man try to follow the example of the image-man by drinking beer and by trying to write fiction.

Soon after the image-man had died, one after another biography was published. The man bought and read most of the biographies and learned from them, among many other matters, that the image-man had spent much time during his last years drinking beer and trying to write fiction. He was married by then to a wife who had been one of his childhood friends. During his last years, his wife would hide his shoes to prevent him from going to some or another bar and drinking whisky and other drinks.

The man, who had never felt drawn towards any political party and had never signed any petition or any document protesting against any war or any seeming-injustice — the man read with interest in one or another of the biographies mentioned a report of the image-man’s having been visited late in his life by two young persons whose shirts were printed with slogans protesting against a certain war being waged by the United State of America. The biographer supposed that the young persons had expected the image-man to welcome them and to sympathise with their political views, but he had stood at his front door with a can of beer in his hand and had told them that he would not utter a word against his country and had then driven the young persons away.

This, the twenty-eighth section of this work of fiction, comprises four paragraphs. All except the first paragraph comprise extracts from a work of two volumes: an autobiography written in the Hungarian language and published in Hungary five years before the birth of the man of nearly seventy years who is the writer of this paragraph. When the autobiography was published, its author was aged in his mid-thirties. He had been born in a region of Hungary that was later declared by the Treaty of Trianon to be a part of Czechoslovakia. He later lived in Hungary but chose to leave in 1948 for political reasons. He died by his own hand in the United States of America when he was aged more than eighty years and after he had refused all offers to have his books of fiction published in Hungary. The following paragraphs have been translated from the Hungarian language by the author of this paragraph.

I never understood those writers who claimed to find in a moment of inspiration their immortal subject matter. The work finds us, not we the work, and the most we can do is not to turn and flee from it. Sometimes, it seemed to me that all the lines I had written were only puttings-off, postponements, thousands of little writings, a series of books all hiding from the subject I had undertaken to write about; but a time came when it was no longer possible to flee from the meeting, no longer possible to write another book as though to beg for a postponement of my payment of my writer’s fees — a time came when I was dragged in front of my task, when I had to stand there or else fail to come out with the words that I alone could write…Every bit of writing that I began was a sort of escape, a sort of faithlessness, as though I was pleading with my daemon ‘Let me off just this once; the time has not yet come; let me first talk about other things; this is still my preparation, my finger exercises; I still don’t hear clearly my true voice; I am still full of strange melodies; I have to forget first all that I’ve heard or felt, to forget the penetrating literary rhythms that reverberate around me…Truly, I’ll write this first, and afterwards that, and afterwards, yes afterwards, I’ll devote myself to my true task. So, I wrote books, like someone trying to buy off his fate, to appease with small sacrifices his relentless deity. But I was always painfully aware that I could not escape so cheaply…

‘What will you write about?’ they asked. Sometimes I was amazed to discover that a writer’s fate is to be less able to turn away from certain tasks than from certain people or from certain responsibilities in the area of feelings and emotions. In despair, I saw that I might ask that question for years, perhaps for my whole life: what will I write about? Sometimes in conversation I mentioned ideas for books that I might like to write in the future; then, one day in the future, I would be astonished to find that I was now writing precisely that book which I had speculated about or talked idly about years before.

It might have been good to have run away from these conjectured books; to have ignored the lot of them; to have rested myself and stretched my limbs, gathered my strength, perhaps for other sorts of enterprises. But no; I could not have run away from a single letter. Obviously, every line belonged to that same task: the superfluous, the faulty, the shamefully hurried, the lazy…I know that I was never preparing for that certain ‘great book’ in which I would declare everything; the writer knows that he can never declare ‘everything’, and only the amateur or the expert lounging around the boundaries of literature — only such a one can write a great book. Rather, I believed that among all those slight occasional works…there would be one line or one paragraph in which I would say in my own style what no one but me could say. I thought it unlikely that what I had to say would be especially clever, strikingly original, dazzlingly intellectual; it might be that I would explain myself, when the right time and the right situation occurred, in commonplaces, since in life and in literature the decisive statement — the word or the opinion — which wholly explains the person is usually simple indeed. Sometimes I imagined that everything I was writing was a foreword, an excuse or pretence: in truth, there was only one character I would have liked to write about, to describe, and I was surprised to learn that this character was alive, that I knew her name, that I was acquainted with her, that I spoke often to her; I believed she was an older woman who stood at the centre of her social circle, who was not especially clever or good but who simply knew something that was perhaps the secret, so to speak, of life, although she was unable to express this with complete certainty in words; she was a perfectly balanced person; more than this I did not know… This woman’s secret, the secret of this unknown woman who was nearer to me than any real woman, I would have loved to discover while I wrote. Could this be called a writerly program? Of course not. And sometimes I was amazed at how wasteful was my search for her, how many memory-islands I had to wander across in my effort to reach her. Everything that I know about life or would like to know — she is the basis of it all; and yet I don’t know who this woman is, whether or not she lived near me once, whether or not I once met up with her. She is perhaps the Mother, the Other, the Eternal and Unknowable whom I yearn to meet up with; I do not know. But I do know that with every line I have written, with every book, and with every sort of literary work, I search for her, hoping she might answer me. Years would pass, filled with work and compromises and experiments, and during those years I would see the face of that female personage less and less clearly; I could not even hear her voice from the shadows. Then, for a moment, in some foreign country, I would catch sight of her. It is as though my work is nothing but a pretence: I write so that I can meet with her, if only once.

A man aged almost forty years was reading for the first time the last few pages of the English translation of a long work of fiction that had been first published in the Icelandic language in Reykjavik in the year before the man had been born.

The man and some of his friends often discussed the books of fiction that they had read recently. During their discussions, the man and his friends spoke as though they clearly remembered each book, referring to persons and events as though they were among the contents of the book and forgetting that the book consisted only of words arranged in sentences and that the persons and events so often discussed were image-persons and image-events from their own minds. The man and his friends liked to seek out and to read little-known books of fiction, especially books translated from foreign languages, and then to announce to one another that he or she had discovered a neglected masterpiece, one of the two or three greatest books of fiction that he or she had read.

While the man mentioned above was reading the book mentioned there, he hoped that he could later declare honestly to his friends that the book was the greatest work of fiction that he had read. He looked forward to reporting, for example, that he still seemed to hear the roaring of the waves in the small bay mentioned in the early pages of the book, the same bay that the chief character of the book would later append to his surname as though he was one of a notable landowning family rather than a foundling whose mother, as he so often complained during his later life, had sent him away, soon after his birth, in a sack. The man looked forward to reporting his feelings of shock and distress while he had read passages describing, so he intended to say, the squalor and the wretchedness of the poorer characters and their brutality towards one another. He looked forward to reporting his feelings of sympathy and his grudging admiration for the chief character of the book, who tried throughout his life to write poetry in the tradition of the sagas but who wrote mostly doggerel.

While he was reading the last few pages of the book, the man hoped that he would be able later to report to his friends not only the matters mentioned above but also that the ending of the book had been profound or magnificent or sublime. (These three adjectives were used often by the man and his friends when they discussed books of fiction.) The man hoped thus, but he was sometimes afraid that his hope would not be fulfilled.

Whenever he was reading some or another book of fiction, the man was especially alert to what he called, at that period of his life, the setting of the book: the landscapes or the scenery in which the characters lived their lives, as he would have said. A book of fiction would most impress the man if he seemed to see, while he was reading the book, a setting likely to become later a part of his own mind. It was not necessary that the setting should be of the sort called dramatic or picturesque, so long as it was spacious and lacking precise boundaries. The man was more than satisfied if, when he had left off reading a book of fiction, he seemed to see in his mind an expanse of mostly level grassy countryside or a range of forested hills or even street after street of suburban houses. Such scenery, so the man supposed, would provide space enough for any personage who had formerly been a character in a work of fiction to begin his or her existence as a presence in the mind of the man.

While the man was reading the book mentioned above, he sometimes doubted that the author of the book could find among the coastal bays or the meadows above the cliffs or the treeless stony uplands or the glaciers often mentioned in the book scenery fit for the ending of a work of fiction that was profound or magnificent or sublime. The man then read to the end of the book.

Thirty years afterwards, the same man prepared to write a short passage about his experience as a reader of the last pages of the book mentioned or, rather, about his memories of that experience. The man intended to report that the words ice and sky, together with the words white and blue, had appeared often on the last pages; that the chief character had been reported as approaching the zone where the white and the blue seemed to meet or even to merge. Much else, of course, had been reported in the last pages, but the man remembered nothing of it.

For thirty years, the man preparing to write the short passage mentioned had wanted to write a work of fiction the ending of which would alert at least one reader to the feel of things in the way that he, the man, had been alerted by the ending of the book mentioned often above. If the man could not have written the work that he had wanted to write, then he would have been satisfied to write a work of fiction for which the only apt ending would have been a report of the effect on the man of his having read, thirty years before, that the chief character in a certain work of fiction had seemed to pass from sight in a place where the white seemed to meet, or even to merge, with the blue; where the land seemed to meet, or even to merge, with the sky, the visible with the invisible, the writer even with the reader, and whatever had been written with whatever had been read.

As It Were a Letter

On the day before I began to write this piece of fiction, I received in the post two items from a man who was born when I was already eleven years of age. That man, whose name is not part of this piece of fiction, has the same urge that Vladimir Nabokov attributed to himself in the early pages of his book Speak, Memory: the urge to learn more and more about the years just before his conception and birth. The man often questions me about what I remember from the eleven years when I was alive and he was not. The man claims that what I tell him adds to the sum of what he knows about himself.

The first of the two items sent by the man was a clipping from a recent edition of a Melbourne newspaper that I do not read. The clipping consisted of a feature article and a reproduction of a photograph. The author of the feature article was, I supposed, a reader of the newspaper who had written the article and offered it for publication to make known the forthcoming celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding, in the year when I became eleven years of age and the sender of the clipping was born, of a communal settlement in a remote district of south-eastern Victoria by a group of Catholic persons who wanted to live self-sufficiently and to bring up their children far from what they, the Catholic persons, considered a corrupt civilisation. The photograph reproduced as an illustration for the article showed about forty persons of all ages and both sexes. The persons seemed to be part of an audience in a hall and to be waiting eagerly to be addressed by someone who had inspired them in the past and was about to do so again.

The second of the two items sent by the man was a note from him to me. In the note, the man told me that he still recalled from time to time a certain few pages in an early book of fiction of mine. In those pages, the chief character of the fiction was reported as having visited, at some time in the early 1950s, a place called Mary’s Mount in the Otway Ranges, in southwestern Victoria. The place was a communal settlement founded by a group of Catholic persons, and the chief character found everything about the place inspiring. The man told me further that he had sometimes wondered whether or not this passage of fiction had been based of an actual experience of mine. Now, the man told me, he believed he had discovered the original, as he called it, of the place in the Otway Ranges of my fiction. He had been struck, wrote the man, by the similarity between the name of the place in my fiction and the name of the place in the feature article. He concluded, so the man wrote, that I had varied the name slightly and had moved the place, as he put it, to the opposite side of the state of Victoria.

Within an hour after I had read what the man had written, I had begun to make notes and to write the first draft of this piece of fiction. Then, although I understood that the man who had sent me the newspaper clipping might be only a minor character in this piece of fiction, I found myself making notes about him for including in the fiction.

Since the previous sentence is part of a piece of fiction, the reader will hardly need to be reminded that the man mentioned in that sentence and in earlier sentences is a character in a work of fiction and that the newspaper clipping and the note mentioned in some of those sentences are likewise items in a piece of fiction.

While I made the notes mentioned above, I first noted that the man is himself the author of published pieces of fiction. I noted this in order to remind myself of the only conversation that the man and I had had about the writing of fiction. During that conversation, the man and I had agreed that the chief benefit to be got from the writing of a piece of fiction was that the writer of the fiction discovered at least once during the writing of the fiction a connection between two or more images that had been for long in his mind but had never seemed in any way connected.

I noted further, in my notes for my piece of fiction, that the man in question had at one time begun but had soon afterwards given up a course for the degree of Bachelor of Laws in a university and had often afterwards made remarks that caused me to suppose he held in contempt the persons who are sometimes called collectively the legal profession.

I noted further in the notes that later became part of this piece of fiction that the man who is now a character in this piece of fiction had become, when he was a young man, the owner of a guitar and that he had played his guitar often since then. The man owned many books of music for the guitar and many books about famous players of the guitar and many recordings of guitar music. The man had sometimes played his guitar in my hearing, although I had told him politely when I had first seen his guitar that I consider myself a musical person but that I have never been inspired by any sound of strings being plucked or otherwise handled.

I noted further in my notes that the man had at one time taken a course of lessons in the Spanish language and had told me at the time that he found the sound of the language inspiring. When I was making that note, I recalled for the first time in many years that I had spent more than a few hours at the age of eleven in looking through a newspaper printed in the Spanish language.

Towards the end of my notes, I noted that I had sometimes admired the subject of the notes as a result of my suspecting that he had been connected sexually with many more women than I had been, even though I had been alive for eleven more years than he had been.

I noted finally in my notes that the man had been for many years the owner of forty-five hectares of virgin bushland in the Otway Ranges and that he had sometimes told me that if only he could have found what he called the right sort of woman, he would have built on his bushland property a simple but comfortable house and would have moved there with the woman and afterwards lived what he called his ideal life.

I did not note as part of my final note, but I note here that I have never visited the Otway Ranges or wanted to visit them. I once wrote a passage of fiction the setting of which was a place in the Otway Ranges, but I have written many pieces of fiction the settings of which are places where I have never been.

After I had finished the notes mentioned above, I looked into the illustration of the persons who seemed to be waiting in a hall for the person who inspired them from time to time. I was looking for what I looked for whenever I looked into one or another photograph or reproduction of a photograph of persons who had been alive during the first twenty-five years of my own life and who might have lived during those twenty-five years in places such that I might have met up with one or another of the persons while I was living at one or another of the twenty-five and more addresses that I lived at during those twenty-five years and before I decided to live for the remainder of my life at the one address. I was looking for the face of a female person who might have met up with me, or might merely have come to my notice, and whose words or deeds, or whose face observed merely from a distance, might have inspired me to become one of the many persons I might have become and to live for the remainder of my life in one of the many places where I might have lived.

In the illustration that I looked at, the female faces seemed to be those of married women or very young children. (I took no interest in the faces of the two nuns in the front row.) I supposed that the early settlers at the settlement had been families with small children. And then I read the text of the feature article beside the illustration. I found the text sentimental and dishonest, but in order to explain this finding of mine I would have to report certain facts that are not part of this piece of fiction.

After I had done all the things so far reported I made notes for, and later wrote, the following pages, which themselves make up a complete piece of fiction within the whole of this piece of fiction.

I was eleven years of age when I first heard of the settlement that I shall call hereafter Outlands. The settlement was in neither the south-east nor the south-west of Victoria but in the far north-east of the state, and it had already been established for several years before I first heard of it.

When I first heard of Outlands, one month short of fifty years ago, I was already living at a place that had been until recently a sort of settlement founded and managed by a small group of Catholic laypersons who were, in their own way, inspired. This place, which I shall call hereafter the Farm, was in a northern suburb of Melbourne. From the front gate of the Farm I could see, only a short walking distance away, a tram terminus; and yet the suburbs of Melbourne reached in those days so little distance from the city that I could look out from the rear gate of the Farm across a paddock where a few dairy cows had been kept until recently. On either side of this gate were sheds where tools and cattle feed had been stored, and one shed that had been the dairy. Between the sheds and the house was a neglected orchard overgrown with long grass. Where the orchard adjoined the kitchen garden of the house was a small bluestone building that had been the chapel.

I was living at the Farm as a poor relation of the family whose home it then was. That family consisted of an elderly husband and wife, their only son, who was a widower in early middle age, and his only son, who was five years younger than myself. My own family — my parents and my sister — were scattered among relatives and friends because we had no house of our own. A few months before, my parents had had to sell the house they partly owned in a suburb not far from the Farm. They had needed the money to settle my father’s debts. He had incurred these debts as a part-time trainer of racehorses and as a punter. When my parents had put up the house for sale, they had believed they could move after the sale to a partly built house in an outer south-eastern suburb. Not all of my father’s racing friends were luckless gamblers. One friend was what was called in those days a speculative builder. He was going to let my family live in one of his partly built houses while my father tried to arrange a loan from a building society. But something had delayed this plan, and we found ourselves for the time being homeless. My mother and my sister went to stay with one of my mother’s sisters. My father boarded with friends of his. I went to the Farm.

I remember no feelings of misery or even discontent. The Farm was a haven of order and neatness after the latest of the many crises that my father’s gambling had caused. I was especially pleased not to have to attend school. I was tired of going to one after another school and being always someone newly arrived or soon to leave while everyone else seemed settled. I arrived at the Farm in the first week of November, and it was decided that I could do without school for the last months of the year. In the main room at the Farm was a tall cupboard full of books. I promised my father when he left me at the Farm that I would read every day, even though he seemed too concerned about his own problems to care how I might spend my time.

I was a relation of the people at the Farm because the widower’s dead wife had been one of my father’s sisters. I shall call the widower hereafter Nunkie. The name suits my memory of him as being always cheerful and helpful towards his nephew, myself. Nunkie might have been a scholar on the staff of a university if he had been born in a later decade, but he had been obliged during the Great Depression to train as a primary teacher for the Education Department of Victoria. He had met his future wife when he was teaching at the small school near the farm where my father and his sisters grew up. The school had a residence beside it for a married teacher, but Nunkie lived in the residence with his parents. Nunkie’s parents had come with their son to the far south-west of Victoria for the time being because the father could no longer get work as a musician in picture theatres after the silent films had been replaced by talkies, and because he had been a reckless gambler on racehorses for as long as he had lived in Melbourne. I shall call this man hereafter the Reformed Gambler, because his years away from Melbourne had apparently reformed him. I never saw him looking at a form guide or listening to a race broadcast while I was at the Farm, and every Saturday he went off to umpire one or another local cricket match.

Nunkie and his mother always seemed united against the Reformed Gambler. The son and the mother mostly ignored him, or, if he tried to break into one of their many long discussions, put him off with short answers.

Every evening the people at the Farm, together with their many visitors, recited the rosary and a portion of the divine office for the day. The Reformed Gambler was obliged to take part in these prayers, although I could see that they bored him. He was a gentle, likeable man whose religious observance consisted of Sunday mass and an occasional confession and communion. One evening, after twenty or thirty minutes of prayer during which the word ‘Israel’ had occurred a number of times (Remember, O Israel…I have judged thee, O Israel…and the like), the Reformed Gambler looked in the direction of his wife and son and asked innocently who was this Israel, anyway: this chap who was always turning up in our prayers.

Much of what I know about the family at the Farm I learned at one or another later time from my father. According to him, the father at the Farm was the salt of the earth, the mother looked down her nose at the world, and the son meant well but had been turned by his mother into an old woman himself. On the evening when the Reformed Gambler had asked who Israel was, I actually saw his wife look down her nose. There is no better form of words to suggest the pose that she struck. Her son, Nunkie, tried to relieve the tension by saying, not directly to his father but into the air, that Israel was not a man but a people, and not even a people but a symbolic people…

The Reformed Gambler has no further part in this piece of fiction, but I would like to report here that he lived a long life and that he spent much of his time in later life far from his wife and son and in the company of congenial relatives of his.

The person who looked down her nose sometimes I shall call hereafter the Holy Foundress. I call her this not only because she had founded the Farm, but because I believe she would have been, in many an earlier period of history, the foundress of a religious order dedicated to one or another special task within the Church; would have written without help from any advisor the compendious Rule and Constitution of the Order; would have travelled to Rome under trying conditions; would have gained at last official approval for her new order; and would have died long afterwards in what was called in earlier times the odour of sanctity.

My father had warned me before he left me there that I must not ask questions about what he called past goings-on at the Farm. I asked no questions, but I saw much evidence that the Farm had been, until recently, a small farm with a few dairy cows. I guessed that the cows had been milked and other farming tasks performed by the five of six male persons who had slept in the wing of the house which was obviously a later addition and which Nunkie sometimes called absently the boys wing. I guessed that the boys, whoever they had been, had attended daily mass every morning in the bluestone chapel that was always locked whenever I tried the door but which Nunkie unlocked for me one afternoon, after I had questioned him about the chapel yet again, so that I was able to look at the empty seats and the bare altar and the cupboard where the priest’s vestments had been stored and at the windows of orange-gold frosted glass that made a mystery of each view of trees or sky outside the place.

At the age of eleven, I never doubted that I would live for the rest of my life as a faithful Catholic, but I found it tedious to sit each Sunday in a parish church crowded with parents and their squirming clusters of children; to hear the priest preaching that the parish school needed money for an extra classroom; to read in the Catholic newspaper that the archbishop had made a speech attacking communist-controlled unions after he had blessed and opened a new church school building in a faraway outer suburb where the streets were dust in summer and mud in winter. From here and there in my reading, I had put together a collection of expressions that inspired in me what I supposed were pious feelings: private oratory; private chaplain; gothic chasuble; jewelled chalice; secluded monastery; strict observance. I seem to have been dreaming of a private place where I could enjoy my religion with a few like-minded persons. At the centre of the place was, of course, the oratory or chapel, but I was also concerned that the place should be surrounded by an appropriate landscape.

After I had been at the Farm for a few days, I heard for the first time about Outlands. The day was a Sunday, and a visitor from Outlands had arrived for the midday meal. The visitor was a young man perhaps not yet thirty years of age. He was pale and rather plump, and I was surprised when I learned that he came from a settlement of farmers but very interested when I saw that the newspaper he carried with his luggage was in a foreign language. Before I could learn much about the man or about Outlands, my father arrived to take me for a walk and to tell me news of our family.

While I walked with my father, I tried to learn what he might have known already about the Farm and about Outlands. My father would tell me only that Nunkie and his parents had been very kind to take me in but that I must not let them turn me into a religious maniac. My father, who could well be called for the purposes of this piece of fiction the Unreformed Gambler, was a Catholic in the same way that the Reformed Gambler was a Catholic. My father went to mass every Sunday and to confession and communion once each month and seemed to suspect the motives of any Catholic who did any more than this.

While we walked on the Sunday, my father told me that he knew about Outlands only that it was doomed to fail, just as the Farm had failed. Such places always failed, my father said, because their founders were too fond of giving orders and not prepared to listen to advice. He then told me that the Farm had been intended by its founder, the person called in this fiction the Holy Foundress, to be a place where a few men who had recently completed long terms of imprisonment could live and work and pray while they prepared themselves to find homes and jobs in the world at large. The Farm, my father reminded me, was only a few tram stops away from the large prison where he himself had been a warder when I was born and where he had learned, as all the other warders, his mates, had learned, that almost every person who had been imprisoned for a long term was by nature the sort of person who would be later imprisoned again.

My father had ceased to be a prison warder in one of the first years after I was born, but he had remained friends with many warders. He told me on our Sunday walk, in the streets of the suburb where the Farm was at the end of the tramline that passed the front gate of the large prison, that all the warders who had heard of the founding of the Farm had predicted that the Farm would fail and that the warders’ predictions had been fulfilled. The Farm had failed, my father said, because most of the men who had gone from the prison to the Farm had not been reformed but had gone on planning — and even committing — further crimes while they lived at the Farm.

My father told me the story of the Farm with seeming relish, but I tried while he talked to compose in my mind arguments in defence of the Farm. I had lived at the Farm for only a few days, but each morning I had gone with Nunkie and his son, my cousin, and the Holy Foundress to early mass in the semi-public chapel of a nearby convent; each evening I had prayed with the others at dusk in the room where the big bookcase stood; each day I had walked between the fruit trees for ten minutes, imitating the even paces of one or another priest I had once seen walking on the paths around his presbytery while he read the divine office for that day. Perhaps I was discovering the power of ordered behaviour, of ritual. Perhaps I was merely devising for myself one more of the imagined worlds I had devised throughout my childhood. Although I was hardly fond of the Holy Foundress, I admired her for having tried to set up what I thought of as a world of her own, a world apart from or concealed within the drab world that most people inhabited, a small farm almost surrounded by suburbs.

My own imagined worlds before then had been located each on an island of the same shape as Tasmania, which was the only suitable island I knew of. The people of those worlds had been devoted to cricket or to Australian Football or to horse-racing. I had drawn elaborate maps showing where the sportsgrounds or racecourses were situated. I filled pages with coloured illustrations of the football jumpers of the many teams or of the coloured caps of the cricket teams or of the racing silks of the racing stables. I had spent so much time in preparing these preliminary details for each of my imagined worlds that I had seldom got as far as to work out results of imagined football or cricket matches or of imagined horse-races.

I had destroyed or lost all the pages showing the details mentioned above, but sometimes during the year before I arrived at the Farm I had felt a peculiar longing and had wanted my adult life to be so uneventful and my future home to be so quiet and so seldom visited that I could spend most of my life recording the details of an imaginary world a hundred times more complicated than any I had so far imagined.

The people at the Farm seemed not to read newspapers, although I feel sure today that Nunkie and the Reformed Gambler must have looked through the results and reports of cricket matches during the summer. Perhaps they kept the newspaper out of sight of the children, or cut out the sporting pages and burned the rest. When I asked Nunkie, on my first day at the Farm, where the newspaper was, he told me that the people of the Farm were not especially curious about events in the secular world. Nunkie’s expression, ‘the secular world’, gave me even then, on my first day, the pleasant sensation that I was inside a world inside what others considered to be the only world.

After Nunkie had answered my request for a newspaper, he had taken me to the bookshelves in the main room at the Farm. He told me I was welcome to read any book from what he called the library, provided that I first sought his approval of my chosen book. I saw names of authors such as Charles Dickens and William Thackeray on some of the nearest books, and I asked Nunkie whether the library contained any modern books. He pointed to a shelf containing many of the works of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

On the day after Nunkie had shown me the library, I looked more closely at the books. When he arrived home that afternoon from the state school where he taught, I asked him whether I could read a book from an upper shelf: a book the spine of which I had looked at often during that day. The title of the book was Fifty-two Meditations for the Liturgical Year.

As soon as I had seen the title mentioned above, I had done, probably for the first time, two things that I have done many times since then: I first imagined the contents of a book of which the title was the only detail known to me; and I then derived from my imagining much more than I later derived from my looking into the text of the book.

I have to remind the reader that this piece of fiction is set in the year 1950. In that year, and for many years afterwards, the word meditation denoted only a little of what it has since come to denote. In the year in which I wanted to read the book mentioned above, there were no doubt a few scholars or eccentrics in the city of Melbourne who knew something about meditation as it was practised in so-called eastern religions, but neither Nunkie nor I knew of the existence of those scholars or eccentrics. The only sort of meditation that he or I was aware of was an exercise such as Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, had devised: an attempt by the person meditating to bring to mind as clearly as possible one or another of the events reported in one or another of the four Gospels and then to ponder on the behaviour and the words of Jesus of Nazareth as reported in connection with that event and then to feel certain feelings as a result of the pondering and finally to make certain resolutions for the future as a result of the feelings.

Thirteen years after I had asked to be allowed to read the book mentioned above, I was anxious to have as my girlfriend a certain young woman who worked in a certain second-hand bookshop in the central business district of Melbourne. While I was thus anxious, I used to visit the bookshop every Saturday morning and to spend an hour and more looking around the shelves before buying one or another book and then trying to begin with the young woman while she sold me the book such a conversation as would persuade her that I was a young man who dressed and behaved unexceptionally but who saw inwardly private sights the descriptions of which would become in the near future the texts of one after another of the works of fiction that would make him famous. Whether or not I can claim that the young woman became my girlfriend, I can state that she and I went out together, as the saying used to go, for a few weeks during which time she sometimes described to me what she had seen inwardly as a result of her having read one or another book while I described often to her what I foresaw as the contents of one after another of the works of fiction of mine that would later be published, one of which works, so I promised the young woman, would include a character inspired by her. At the end of the few weeks mentioned in the previous sentence, the young woman went to live in another city, and she and I have never met up with one another or written to one another since then. However, I have learned from newspapers that the young woman later became a famous author, although not an author of fiction. The young woman later became a much more famous author than I became, and during the year before I began to write this piece of fiction, her autobiography was published. I have been told by a person who has read the autobiography that no passage in it refers to myself. Even so, the publication of the autobiography of the famous woman who had once been the young woman in the second-hand bookshop reminded me that I had still not kept the above-mentioned promise that I made. I am able to introduce the young woman into this paragraph, and so to keep my promise to her, for the reason that one of the books that I bought in the shop where she worked was a copy of the same book that I had wanted Nunkie’s permission to read, as was reported above. I had bought the book, and had given the young woman in the shop to understand that I would look into the book, because she was still a faithful Catholic and I wanted her to suppose that I had not lost all interest in religion and even that she might win me back to a certain degree of belief in the Catholic faith if she became my girlfriend. The paragraph that ends with this sentence is, of course, part of a work of fiction.

After I had asked Nunkie whether I might read the book mentioned earlier, he had smiled and had told me that meditations were not for boys. He had then reminded me that it was time for our daily cricket match. This was played every evening between Nunkie and his son on the one side and the Reformed Gambler and myself on the other. We bowled underarm with a tennis ball on a paved area near the former dairy, and we observed complicated local rules as to how many runs were scored if the ball was hit into this or that area of the long grass in the orchard.

Even though I knew nothing about non-Christian sorts of meditation, I had already, at the age of eleven, heard or read enough about certain great saints of the Church to know that those persons saw more in their minds while they prayed or meditated than mere illustrations of the gospel story. I had heard or read that certain great saints had sometimes gone into trances or been transported. No priest or religious brother or nun had ever, in my experience, suggested that his or her congregation or pupils should do more while praying than talk to one or another of the Persons of the Holy Trinity or the Blessed Virgin Mary, or one or another of the saints. I sensed as a child that my priests and teachers were uncomfortable when questioned about anything to do with visions or with unusual religious experiences. Those same priests and teachers were never reluctant to talk about hell or purgatory and the punishments meted out to the residents of those places, but they were reluctant to speculate about the joys of heaven. A child who asked for details about the celebrated happiness of the residents of heaven might well be told that the souls in heaven were content for ever to contemplate the Beatific Vision. This was the term used by theologians, so I learned as a child, for the sight that one saw when one saw Almighty God.

For all that I was most curious to know what the souls in heaven enjoyed and what the great saints sometimes saw while they prayed or meditated, I was in no way curious to see God Himself. I write this in all seriousness. I had never wanted to meet God or to have with Him any more dealings than were absolutely necessary. I believed in Him; I was pleased to belong to the organisation that I believed to be His One, True Church; but I had no wish to meet Him and to have to make conversation with Him. I was much more interested in the place where God lived than in the Deity Himself.

For most of my childhood, I could only dare to hope that I might one day see the landscapes of heaven. I was rather more confident that I would one day glimpse some of those landscapes while I prayed with intensity or while I meditated. And, of course, I was able to imagine beforehand something of what I hoped to glimpse in the future. The landscapes of heaven were lit by a light that emanated from God Himself. Near its source, this divine light was of an almost unbearable fierceness, but in the distant zones of heaven where I was most at home, it shone serenely, although by no means unwaveringly, so that the sky above the landscapes seemed sometimes like a sky at early morning in summer in the world where these details were being imagined, and sometimes like a sky at mid-afternoon in late autumn in that same world. The details of the landscapes themselves were by no means elaborate. I was content to compose my heavenly vistas by extending further and further into the background the simple green hills, some of them with a few stylised, tufted trees on top, that I had enjoyed staring at in pictures in the earliest of my picture books; by having a pale-blue stream wind between some of the hills; by situating on this or that hillside a farmhouse or a few cattle or horses, and behind just one of the furthest hills the church steeple or the clock tower of a peaceful village.

The person who imagined the landscapes described above could hardly have been satisfied to contemplate mere details designed for infants, nor was he. My looking at the landscapes of the outer zones of heaven was always accompanied by the reassuring knowledge that heaven extended endlessly. My looking over a vista of green hills was only an introduction to the place that contained all places, even all unimaginable places. Soon, the simple green countryside would give way to unknown landscapes. And even more encouraging than the knowledge just described was a certain feeling that I often felt during my surveys of the little I had so far imagined.

The feeling mentioned above was a feeling of being accompanied by and watched over by not so much a person as a presence. This presence was unquestionably a female presence. Sometimes I imagined that the presence and I were no more than children who had agreed to be girlfriend and boyfriend. Sometimes I imagined, though I was still a child myself, that the presence and I were adults and were wife and husband. Sometimes I imagined the face of the presence, sometimes even the clothes that the presence wore or the few words that the presence spoke to me. Mostly, I was content to feel the presence of the presence: to feel as though she and I were sharers in a pact or understanding that bound us together intimately but could not have been expressed in words. Although I would never during my childhood have asked such a question of myself, it occurs to me now to ask of the fictional child who is the chief character of this part of this piece of fiction the question what seemed to him the most desirable of the likely pleasures that he might enjoy in his imagined heaven. It is, of course, easy to ask a question of a fictional character but unheard of to receive an answer from such a character. Even so, I believe I should report here my belief that if the chief character mentioned above could be imagined as being able to answer the question mentioned above, then he could be imagined as answering that he most desired to discover, in a remote district of the landscapes mentioned previously, a place in which he and the presence that accompanied him always could settle.

If this piece of fiction were a more conventional narrative, the reader might be told at this point that the parenthetical passage that began in the fifteenth paragraph before this paragraph has now come to an end and that I, the narrator, am about to continue narrating the events of the Sunday when the chief character of this piece of fiction was walking with his father after having seen an hour beforehand at the Farm a pale and plumpish young man who was the first of the settlers at Outlands that the chief character had seen. Instead, the reader is hereby assured that nothing of significance took place during the rest of the Sunday just mentioned, and the same reader is further assured that the next paragraph and many subsequent paragraphs will contain not a narrative of certain events but a summary of the significance of those events and of much more.

I asked few questions about the settlement of Outlands while I was at the Farm, but I listened whenever a resident of the Farm or a visitor from Outlands said anything about the settlement in the far north-east of the state. Even years later, I was still able to learn details from one or another of my father’s relatives.

The writer of the feature article mentioned much earlier seemed to have believed that the settlement in south-eastern Victoria was the oldest or even the only such settlement of its kind. That settlement was founded in the year when I was staying at the Farm, by which time Outlands had been in existence for at least one year. I have heard of another such settlement that was founded in the late 1940s. These settlements were hardly rivals, but I suspect that the settlers in the south-east, many of whose faces I had seen images of in the illustration mentioned earlier, might have been called mostly working-class persons, whereas the Outlanders might have been called mostly middleclass persons. I suspect further that the Outlanders would have wanted to be called a group of Catholic intellectuals. My father called them long-hairs, in accordance with his belief that men who had been to university wore their hair longer than did other men, had less common sense, and were less able with their hands.

On the day after I had first met an Outlander and had learned something about the settlement of Outlands, I walked far out into the long grass between the neglected fruit trees at the Farm and founded a settlement of my own. I thought of my settlement as having the same name as the settlement that had inspired me, but for the sake of convenience I shall call my own settlement hereafter Grasslands.

The founder of the settlement of Grasslands had never met any other child or adult who was less skilled than he was at representing things by drawing or painting or modelling. Other children had often laughed, and even teachers had smiled, at the distorted pictures and lumpish objects that the future founder of Grasslands had produced in art and craft classes. The same children and teachers praised the essays and stories that the future founder wrote in English composition classes. On the day when he prepared to found his settlement, the founder might have been expected to call on his skills as a writer and so to write a detailed description of the settlement and the settlers. But the founder knew he had much more to fear if his writing were discovered by one of the adults at the Farm than if one of those adults stumbled on his model in the grass. The founder knew that his writing would report what the settlers saw inwardly as they lived their lives at the settlement and so, by implication, what he, the writer, had seen inwardly while he wrote.

And so the settlement of Grasslands was founded not as the subject of a piece of writing but as a model or toy. And because the founder was so little skilled with his hands, he was unable to make from the excellent clay of the northern suburbs of Melbourne any sort of building other than a rough cube or trapezoid that later cracked apart in the sun. The animals in the paddocks at the settlement were pebbles. The settlers themselves were forked twigs found among the branches of the orchard trees.

I never learned how many persons had settled at Outlands. While I stayed at the Farm I saw two young men and three young women who might have been newly recruited to Outlands or, perhaps, returning briefly to Melbourne to settle some private business or who might even have been on their way back to the secular world after having decided to leave Outlands. The young men seemed thoughtful; the young women seemed more ready to smile or joke, but I noted that they were all what my father called plain Janes. All of these young persons were unattached. I never heard of any married couples at Outlands, although I cannot believe couples would have been prevented from joining the settlement.

I never met any of the leading settlers from Outlands. There seemed to have been two men prominent in the founding of the settlement: one a medical practitioner and the other a barrister and solicitor. Of these two, the legal man was much more often talked about at the Farm, and always with reverence. His surname ended with the fifteenth letter of the English alphabet. So, too, did the surname of the Reformed Gambler. (And, so too, of course, did Nunkie’s surname.) I understood that the Reformed Gambler had come to Australia from Italy as a young man. I concluded from all this — wrongly, as I shall explain later — that the surname of the admired legal man was an Italian surname.

The founder of Grasslands would have said at the time that he had founded his settlement as a place where he and his like-minded followers could live prayerful lives far from the dangers of the modern world. Or, he might have said that Grasslands was intended as a place from which heaven would be more readily visible.

If the founder of Grasslands had been asked at the time what were the chief dangers of the modern world, he would have described in detail two images that were often in his mind. The first image was of a map he had seen a year or so previously in a Melbourne newspaper as an illustration to a feature article about the damage that would be caused if an Unfriendly Power were to drop an atomic bomb on the central business district of Melbourne. Certain black-and-white markings in the diagram made it clear that all persons and buildings in the city and the nearest suburbs would be turned to ash or rubble. Certain other markings made it clear that most persons in the outer suburbs and the nearer country districts would later die or suffer serious illness. And other markings again made it clear that even persons in country districts rather distant from Melbourne might become ill or die if the wind happened to blow in their direction. Only the persons in remote country districts would be safe.

The second of the two images mentioned above was an image that often occurred in the mind of the founder of Grasslands although it was not a copy of any image he had seen in the place he called the real world. This image was of one or another suburb of Melbourne on a dark evening. At the centre of the dark suburb was a row of bright lights from the shop windows and illuminated signs of the main shopping street of the suburb. Among the brightest of these lights were those of the one or more picture theatres in the main street. Details of the image became magnified so that the viewer of the image saw first the brightly lit picture theatre with a crowd milling in the foyer before the beginning of one or another film and next the posters on the wall of the foyer advertising the film about to be shown and after that the woman who was the female star of the film and finally the neckline of the low-cut dress worn by that woman. This image was sometimes able to be multiplied many times in the mind of the viewer, who would then see images of darkened suburb after darkened suburb and in those suburbs picture theatre after picture theatre with poster after poster of woman after woman with dress after dress resting low down on breasts after breasts.

If the founder of Grasslands had been asked at the time why he had founded his settlement, and if he had been able to describe in detail to his questioner the images mentioned above, he would have assumed that the questioner would not need to question him further and would understand that he, the founder of Grasslands, wanted to live in a place where he need no longer fear the bombs of an Unfriendly Power and need no longer try to imagine the details concealed by low-cut necklines of dresses of female film stars.

One of the young men who called at the Farm from Outlands wore a beard. Until I met him, I had never seen a beard on any but an aged man. I watched the bearded man while he worked with rolled-up sleeves to load some timber from a disused Farm building onto a truck that was going to Outlands. The bearded man joked and said such things as gave me to understand that he read often from the New Testament and the Fathers of the Church and Saint Thomas Aquinas. I thought of the bearded man as resembling a man from medieval times, and I supposed Outlands more resembled medieval Europe than modern Australia.

The newspaper carried by the pale and plumpish young man mentioned much earlier in this piece of fiction was in the Spanish language. Even before I stayed at the Farm, I had come to understand that Spain was the most admirable of all European countries, even though it was the most reviled by the secular press. It was the most admirable, so one of my father’s sisters had once told me, because it was the only country in Europe where Communism had been fought to a standstill, and it was the most reviled because many journalists secretly sympathised with Communism.

Many years after both Outlands and Grasslands had ceased to exist, I read a statement by a man who had been a commentator on current affairs in various Catholic newspapers and on a Catholic radio program from the 1930s to the 1950s. The man had stated that he had taken many unpopular positions during his career as a commentator and had received many angry letters as a result but that the most numerous and the angriest letters by far had been those that reached him after he had written and had broadcast his opinion that the government of General Franco better suited the interests of Spain than any government that might have been installed if the Civil War had ended differently.

The founder of Grasslands knew nothing of the causes or results of the Spanish Civil War, but he sensed that in this connection, as in so many others, the sort of Catholic who wore a beard and chose to live on a remote settlement possessed an inner, private knowledge of moral issues which was almost the opposite of what passed for knowledge with other persons. The founder hung about the pale and plumpish young man while he read parts of his newspaper. He, the founder, asked to have the dialogue in the Felix the Cat cartoon translated for him and laughed at the humour of it and learned from it the only five Spanish words he was ever to learn. The same founder was not at all troubled when the same pale and plumpish young man returned to the Farm two weeks later for another short visit and took out the same edition of the same newspaper (the founder identified it from the Felix cartoon) and began to read parts of it.

When the liturgical season of Advent was about to begin in the world where the settlement of Grasslands appeared as a few rows of cracked mud blocks and its settlers as a dozen and more forked twigs, the uncle of the founder of Grasslands, in whose eyes the settlement was a thriving village whose residents sometimes angered their neighbours by speaking the Spanish language instead of the English, took his nephew and the nephew’s cousin into the garden of the Farm in order to choose leaves for the weaving of an Advent wreath, which was a custom, so the uncle said, that European Catholics had kept up since the Middle Ages and earlier. They chose fig leaves for the wreath, wove the wreath, and hung it in the main room of the Farm. For a few days, the wreath looked well: a mass of green leaves hanging like a halo above the dining table. On each of those days, the residents of the Farm had gathered at evening and had prayed beneath the wreath and had sung an Advent hymn some of the words of which can be found in a book of fiction that I wrote nearly twenty years ago.

Ten minutes ago, I took down from the bookshelves in this room a copy of the book of fiction mentioned in the previous sentence. I had not looked into that book for several years, although I see in my mind every day one or another of the images that caused me to begin to write the book, the title of which is Inland. I learned from my looking into the book Inland just now that the narrator of the book did not report that a certain wreath of fig leaves mentioned in the book had become brown and withered soon after the wreath had been hung in the living room of a certain house. I learned also just now that the narrator of Inland, which is a book of fiction in the same way that this piece is a piece of fiction, had reported in the book that a certain utopian settlement founded by certain characters in the fiction was situated between two rivers the names of which are identical to the names of two rivers on the maps of Victoria in the collection of maps in this room.

The wreath of fig leaves that is part of this piece of fiction became brown and withered after a few days. Afterwards, the leaves seemed so brittle whenever I looked up at them that I was often afraid some of them might crumble and fall as a result of the vibrations from our hymn singing of an evening. I was afraid that this would oblige Nunkie to have to explain to his son and to me that European people were able to make Advent wreaths that stayed green for much longer than ours had stayed, which was something that I might have found hard to believe, although I would never have said so.

All the settlers at Grasslands were unmarried. The founder of the settlement might have been only dimly aware of the power of sexual attraction between men and women, but he himself had for some years past felt a strong attraction towards one or another female person, which attraction he thought of as a falling in love, even though the female person was sometimes of a different age than his. Accordingly, the founder had designed the settlement so that females and males lived at opposite ends of the place, with the chapel, the library, and all the farm buildings between. They mostly worked at separate tasks, but they met for meals and for prayers of the divine office, which they recited during their several visits to the chapel each day. This chapel was so arranged that the males and females faced each other, with each sex occupying a set of stalls to the side of the building. Males and females were permitted to look freely at each other. The founder expected that many a male would feel attracted to one or another female, but he supposed that such a male would be affected as he, the founder, would have been affected in such circumstances: the male would be continually inspired by the image in his mind of the face of the female as she appeared in the chapel or in the dining room; he would work more strenuously in the paddocks in order to impress her; he would study harder in the library so that he could discuss theology and philosophy with her. In the fullness of time, every male settler would be continually aware of the face and person of a young woman who was sometimes visible on the opposite side of the chapel or the dining room and was at other times an inspiring image in his mind.

One of the explanations that I heard long afterwards for the failure of the settlement of Outlands was that the bishop of the diocese where the settlement was situated would never allow any of his priests to be stationed as chaplain in a place where the presence together of unmarried males and females might have given rise to scandal among non-Catholic neighbours. The Outlanders had tried by every possible means, so I was told long afterwards, to obtain a chaplain. They had drawn up an eloquent petition at one time, and a number of them had travelled by horse and cart — their only available transport — from Outlands to the palace of the bishop, which palace was in a suburb of the city that was named Bassett in my first published work of fiction. The Outlanders had travelled for two weeks and had arrived tired and dishevelled at the bishop’s palace, but he had rejected their petition.

This piece of fiction is as it were a letter to a man who was mentioned earlier in the fiction. As soon as I have finished the final draft of this fiction, I will send a copy to the man just mentioned. I mentioned this now rather than at the end of the fiction so as not to lessen whatever effect the last pages might have or to suggest that the whole piece is anything but a piece of fiction. While I was writing the previous paragraph, I intended to put marks beside that paragraph in the copy that I sent to the man mentioned above so that the man would not fail to note that a party of dishevelled Outlanders must have passed close by the house where he lived in the first year of his life. I understand now, however, that my having written the previous sentence relieves me of the need to put any marks in the margin of this text.

No one at the Farm knew about the settlement of Grasslands. I was not anxious to keep the place secret, but I was mostly clearing the forest and building the buildings and keeping the twig-persons active during the daytime, while Nunkie and my cousin were away. Sometimes one of the young men or women from Outlands would be sitting with a book on the veranda or strolling up and down beside the house — praying, perhaps, or even meditating — and would ask me later what I had been doing out in the long grass. I would tell the questioner a half-truth: that I had a toy farm in the grass.

Grasslands had been already well established when a certain young woman arrived for the first time at the Farm. I shall call the certain young woman hereafter the Pretty-faced Woman. Perhaps I might not consider her so pretty if I saw her likeness today, but in the last month of 1950 she was the prettiest young woman I had seen. She was on her way to or from Outlands, busy on some secular or spiritual errand that I could never hope to know about. She bustled through the quiet rooms at the Farm, talking softly and earnestly to Nunkie or the Holy Foundress. Her noticeable breasts swung often behind her blouse. Her dark blue eyes and dark brown hair went strangely together. I stared often at the pale freckles above the high neckline of her dress.

The Pretty-faced woman was different from the other young women from Outlands not only because she was pretty and they were plain but because she seemed more curious about me. She asked me who I was, how I was connected with the persons at the Farm, where my home was, why I was living away from my family. She asked these things as though she was truly interested.

On the day after the Pretty-faced Woman had arrived at the Farm, I looked through the branches of the fruit trees at the Farm in search of a twig to represent a new settler at Grasslands. The females at Grasslands were by no means all plain Janes; some of their faces had already begun to inspire some of the male settlers. But I had taken no special care in choosing any of the twigs that represented the females. Now, I found a twig with a certain shapeliness and symmetry and with a certain smoothness when the bark had been peeled away from the paler wood beneath. I placed this twig among the other representations of female settlers and looked forward to a series of events that would soon take place at Grasslands, the first of which events would be a long exchange of looks between the twig that represented myself and the twig that represented the new arrival when the settlers were next gathered in the chapel.

I did the things mentioned above on the morning of the day mentioned above. After lunch on that day, I was only just settling myself on my knees beside the settlement of Grasslands when I heard someone walking up behind me through the long grass.

I was a child, but I did not lack guile. I went on staring ahead. I pretended not to have heard her footsteps behind me. I sat back on my thighs and stared ahead of me as though I was contemplating fold after fold of an endless landscape. She remained for a short while a female presence just out of sight behind me, and then she stepped forward and asked me what I would have expected any visitor to the Farm to ask about my dirt clearings, my lumps of cracked mud, and my forked twigs standing crookedly here and there.

I told her as much of the truth as she needed to be told: that I had founded a settlement in a remote place; that I had been inspired by the example of Outlands, even though I had only heard a little about it…

She reached down and drew her fingers through my hair and then told me she hoped to welcome me one day to Outlands, which was still hardly bigger than my own settlement in the grass but which would grow and thrive. And then she went back to the house.

After she had gone, I began to modify somewhat my original ground plan for Grasslands. Somewhere at the edge of the settlement there would have to be space for a house, and perhaps a small garden, for the first two of the settlers who were a married couple. Later, other such houses would be needed for other couples and their children. But these plans of mine were never carried out. On the next day, my father arrived without notice at the Farm. The electricity had been switched on in the partly built house on the far side of Melbourne where my parents and my sister and I were going to live happily together during the foreseeable future. (In fact, we lived there for four years, until my father, who had become for several years a reformed gambler, became again a gambler and had to sell the house in order to pay his latest debts.)

I suppose the last traces of Grasslands would have melted away several years after I had left the Farm. And yet, the settlement of Outlands did not outlast Grasslands by many years. At some time in the 1960s, I heard that the settlement no longer existed, although several of the married couples who had been among the last settlers still remained on the site. They had bought a share each of the land and had survived as farmers.

At some time in the early 1970s, after I had been married for several years and was the father of two children, I decided I had better make my Last Will and Testament with the help of a legal practitioner. While I was looking into the telephone directory at the pages where legal practitioners advertise their services, I saw a very rare surname that I had only once previously come across. I understood from what I saw that the bearer of the surname was the principal of a firm of legal practitioners in an inner eastern suburb of Melbourne, where the value of the most modest house was three times the value of my own house. After I had looked at the initial of the first given name of the principal just mentioned, I became convinced that the man I had heard of twenty and more years before as one of the founders of Outlands was now a prosperous legal practitioner in one of the best suburbs of Melbourne, so to speak.

Only a year or so after the events reported in the previous paragraph, I heard of the death of Nunkie. I had seen him only occasionally during the years since I lived briefly at the Farm, but I took steps to attend his funeral service.

I sat near the rear of Nunkie’s parish church and saw hardly anything of the chief mourners until they came down the aisle with the coffin. Among the leading mourners was a man of middle age whose appearance could only be called commanding. He was very tall, strongly built, and olive-skinned. He had a mane of silvery hair and a nose like an eagle’s bill. He looked continually about him, nodding to this person and that. He did not nod at me, but I was sure he took note of me. And while his black eyes measured me, I was aware of what a weak, ineffectual person I have always been and of how much I have needed to be guided and inspired.

At the side of the commanding man was a woman with a pretty face. She was perhaps ten years younger than the man and was herself approaching middle age, but I could readily recall how she had looked twenty and more years before. She kept her eyes down as she passed.

Behind the couple mentioned above were four young persons who were obviously their children. I estimated from the seeming age of the oldest that the parents had been married in the very early 1950s.

In one of the last years of the twentieth century, I pressed by mistake a certain button in the radio of my motor car and heard, instead of the music that I usually hear from that radio, the voices of persons taking part in what was probably called by its makers a radio documentary. I was about to correct the mistake mentioned above when I understood that the actors taking part in the program were reading the words previously spoken or written by several persons who had been among the settlers at Outlands almost fifty years before. After I had understood this, I steered into a side street and stopped my motor car and listened until the program about Outlands had come to an end. (The program was one of a short series. The following week I listened for an hour to a similar program about the place mentioned in the second paragraph of this piece of fiction.)

I learned less than I had expected to learn, except for what will be reported in the last paragraph of this piece of fiction. The details of the daily lives of the Outlanders seemed to have been hardly different from what I had imagined while I lived at the Farm. Even when the actors spoke the words of the early settlers (who would have been aged seventy and more when they were interviewed) explaining why they had left the secular world for a communal settlement, I was not surprised. The Outlanders too had felt that the world was becoming more sinful and that the cities of the world were in danger of being bombed flat. I was beginning to be disappointed while I listened. But then a number of younger female voices began to report the recollections of the earliest female settlers at Outlands while they asked themselves what had finally persuaded them to leave the world and to join the settlement in the mountains. The reports were at first rather predictable. But then a name was mentioned: the name of a man. The surname had a musical sound and ended in the fifteenth letter of the English alphabet. The reports from the young female settlers became more specific, more in agreement, more heartfelt. I shall end this piece of fiction with a paragraph reporting my own summary of what I understood the female actors to be reporting from the females who claimed still to remember their feelings of nearly fifty years before.

He was the sort of person who would be called today charismatic, truly charismatic. He had graduated in law but had declined to practise. He was a cultured European in the dull Australia of the 1940s and 1950s. He had a Spanish father, and he spoke Spanish beautifully. We had never heard such a musical language. And he played the guitar. He would sing Spanish folk songs for hours while he played the guitar. He was inspiring.

The Boy’s Name Was David

The man’s name was whatever it was. He was more than sixty years of age and he spent much of his time alone. He was never idle, but he was no longer in paid employment, and on the most recent census form he had described himself as a retired person.

He had never thought of himself as having any profession or following any career. From about his twentieth to about his sixtieth year he had written some poetry and much prose fiction, and some of the fiction had been afterwards published. During those same years, he had earned a living by several means. In his forty-first year, he had found a position as a part-time tutor in fiction writing in an insignificant so-called college of advanced education in an inner suburb of Melbourne. His first students were all adults, some older than himself. So far as he could tell, they were not impressed by his credentials or his teaching methods, and he responded by being wary with them and giving away little of himself.

He had been given to understand that he was only a stopgap; that he would keep his tutor’s position only until the college was able to appoint permanently as a lecturer one or another writer of note: someone whose reputation would lend prestige to the writing course. In the event he, whatever his name was, stayed on for sixteen years. By then, the place where he was employed had become a university and most of his students were not long out of school. How these things came about is no part of this piece of fiction.

This piece of fiction begins a few years after its chief character had ceased to be a teacher of fiction writing, and at a time when he sometimes lived through several days without remembering that he had formerly been such a teacher.

The man of this fiction had no interest in mathematics, but throughout his life he had loved arithmetic. He was fond of calculating such numbers as the approximate total of the breaths that he had drawn since the moment of his birth or of the bottles of beer that he had drunk since the well-remembered day when he had drunk the first of them. He had once arrived at a close estimate of the total length of time during which he had experienced the extremes of sexual pleasure. He daydreamed of quantifying things that had never before been measured. Whenever he was in a railway carriage or a theatre, he wished he could have been free to discover which person from among those present had the keenest sense of smell; which one had been most often frightened of another person; which one had the strongest belief in an afterlife…

Most of the man’s arithmetical enterprises resulted in estimates only, but in some matters he was able to arrive at exact totals, for he was a diligent keeper of records. Calendars, bank statements, receipts, and such things he stored in his filing cabinets at the end of every year. And in keeping with his love of recording and measuring, he kept precise and detailed accounts of his work as a teacher of fiction writing.

He was obliged to keep certain records, of course, so that he could award grades to his students at the end of each semester, but he went far beyond this. Not only for his own satisfaction, but also to avoid disputes with students over their grades, he devised and perfected during his first years as a teacher what he supposed must have been a unique means of arriving at a mark (on a scale from 1 to 100) for each piece of fiction that he assessed. His method was to record in the margins of every page of every piece of fiction every instance of his having had to pause in his reading. Whenever he was stopped by a spelling mistake or a fault of grammar; whenever he was confused by a badly shaped sentence; whenever he lost the thread of the narrative; whenever he became bored by what he was reading; at every such time, he put in the margin what he called a negative mark and, if time allowed, he wrote a note to explain why he had stopped and had made the mark. At the foot of each page he put a running tally of the number of lines of fiction that he had so far read and of the number of negative marks that he had made in the margin. At the foot of the last page he set out in full his calculation of the percentage of the fiction that had been free of fault. This percentage figure became the numerical mark for the piece of fiction.

Of course, it was not only faults in the fiction that might have caused him to stop reading. He paused often from sheer enjoyment of a shapely sentence or from admiration of a thoughtful passage or from a wish to postpone the pleasure of reading further into a passage that promised much. Whenever he paused for reasons such as these he wrote a warm message to the author of the piece, but his method of assessment would have become too complicated even for him if he had tried somehow to have the outstanding passages cancel out some of the negative marks.

He was always ready and waiting to defend his method of assessment if some querulous student had challenged him over it but no student ever did so, although not a few disputed his comments on particular passages that he had assessed as faulty. For year after year, he went on assigning to hundreds of pieces of fiction percentage marks that claimed to rank the pieces precisely.

He was not required to keep any details of his assessment after he had sent the final results for all students to the administrative officers of the place where he worked. But being the person he was, he could never think of throwing away even a single page that recorded some of the workings of his mind. At the end of each year, he put into one of his filing cabinets the folders of ruled pages on which were recorded, among other details, the title of every piece of fiction submitted to him during the year, the number of words in each piece, and the percentage mark that he had allotted to the piece. The total of the pieces of fiction was never less than two hundred and fifty, and the total words in all the pieces was never less than half a million. Before he put his records away he would turn the pages, letting his eyes take in the columns of figures showing the percentage mark for piece after piece of fiction.

As a boy, he had kept pages filled with batting and bowling averages for cricketers; he had pasted into scrapbooks pictures showing the finishing order of field after field of horses in famous races. Always during these months-long tasks, his hope had been that some surprising discovery would be his final reward; that the first columns of figures might prove to have been misleading, or that the horse that seemed likely to be beaten in a close finish had won after all. Fifty years afterwards, he was much more adept at devising games to satisfy his lifelong love of protracted contests and delayed but decisive results. He would have taken care throughout the year not to compare any of the several hundred marks that he had awarded. He knew, of course, which were the dozen or so most memorable pieces that he had read, but he had been at pains never to think of one as better than another. Now, at the end of the year, and six weeks and more after the last student had been seen on campus, he placed a crisp sheet of white paper over each page of his folder of results while he looked at the page. The paper was so placed that he saw only the first of the two numerals of the percentage mark for each piece of fiction. When he looked down any page, he knew only which pieces of fiction had earned ninety per cent or more but not which piece had earned the highest mark.

Of the half-formed images that came into the man’s mind while he scanned the titles of the pieces of fiction with ninety or more marks apiece, he was taken most by a glimpse of the highestscoring pieces of fiction as the leading horses in an impossible race. On some vast prairie or pampa, hundreds of horses were approaching a crowded grandstand and a winning post. He was fond of dwelling on this image, with its promise of something about to be decided after having been for long in doubt.

There was more to the exercise described just above than the comparatively simple experience of awaiting the outcome of a decisive event; more even than the more subtle pleasure of admiring the strong claims of each contender and marvelling or regretting that even such claims might be surpassed by the even stronger claims of another and yet another contender. There was also the question — simple for him to pose to himself but perplexing, if not impossible, to answer — what exactly was he thinking of whenever he claimed to remember each of these pieces of fiction? He saw on the page of his folder of pages a title, and sometimes he saw beyond this no more than an image that the title had given rise to. (He had always encouraged his students to choose as the title for a story a word or words connected with a central image or a recurring theme in the fiction. He discouraged them from choosing abstract nouns or phrases that related only in a general way to the fiction. Among the titles of the leading pieces, therefore, he was much more likely to see such as ‘Killing Ants’, ‘A Long Line of Trees’ or ‘Six Blind Mice’ than ‘The Request’, ‘Secrets’ or ‘The Tourist’.) Sometimes, other images would appear in his mind following on from the image connected with the title. Sometimes the succession of images was long enough for him to be able to say that he recalled the plot of the piece of fiction or the story. Sometimes he saw, in what he thought of as the background of his mind, an image of the author of the piece of fiction while one or another of the previously mentioned images remained in the foreground. Sometimes, whether or not he had seen in his mind any of the previously mentioned sorts of images, he saw an image of the classroom where he and a group of students had read the piece of fiction and had afterwards discussed it on one or another morning or afternoon of the past year. At such times, he sometimes heard in his mind particular comments from one or another reader or even the distinctive hush that always settled over a class soon after they had begun to read a piece of fiction that was far beyond the ordinary.

The sort of image that hardly ever occurred in his mind while he read the title of a piece of fiction was the very image that he most wanted to occur. This was the image in his mind of parts of the actual text of the fiction: of a sentence or a phrase, or even of disjointed words.

As a teacher, he had been fanatical in urging his students to think of their fiction, of all fiction, as consisting of sentences. A sentence was, of course, a number of words or even a number of phrases or clauses, but he preached to his students that the sentence was the unit that yielded the most amount of meaning in proportion to its extent. If a student in class claimed to admire a piece of fiction or even a short passage of fiction, he would ask that student to find the sentence that most caused the admiration to arise. Anyone claiming to be puzzled or annoyed by a passage of fiction was urged by him to find the sentence that had first brought on the puzzlement or the annoyance. Much of his own commentary during classes consisted of his pointing out sentences that he admired or sentences that he found faulty. At least once each year, he told each class an anecdote that he had remembered from a memoir of James Joyce. Someone had praised to Joyce a recent novel. Joyce had asked why the novel was so impressive. The answer came back that the style was splendid, the subject powerful…Joyce would not listen to such talk. If a book of prose fiction was impressive, the actual prose should have impressed itself on the reader’s mind so that he could afterwards quote sentence after sentence.

The teacher who set such store by sentences, whenever he visualised as the last fifty metres of a mighty horse-race his looking for the piece of fiction that had most impressed him, regretted that he heard so little in his mind. If the images mentioned in a recent paragraph were few enough, the memories of sentences or phrases were fewer by far. He would have rejoiced if he could have witnessed a contest of sentences alone: if he could have repeated aloud to himself even a short sentence from each of the leading pieces of fiction so as to have had in his mind as the race came to an end only such visual images as arose from the remembered sentences. But he seldom recalled a sentence. The blurred and overlapping visual images took over his mind.

During the first few years after the man, whatever his name was, had ceased to be a teacher of fiction writing, he remembered some of the images mentioned in the previous few paragraphs of this piece of fiction: the images that had arisen in his mind whenever he had watched the details of an impossible horse-race in his mind. In later years, the man found himself remembering many fewer images than he might have expected to remember. In one of those years, the man began to understand that his failing more and more to remember details connected with more than three thousand pieces of fiction might itself be imagined as the finish of a horse-race.

The race just mentioned would be the last of all such races to be decided in the mind of the man, whatever his name was. The finish of the race would be very different from the finishes of the races that had been run in his mind at the end of most of his sixteen years as a teacher of fiction writing. In those earlier races, a closely bunched field had approached the winning post with first one and then another likely winner appearing. The last part of this last race would more resemble the last part of a long-distance steeplechase, when all but two or three entrants had dropped far behind. The entrants in the race would be every one of the more than three thousand pieces of fiction that the man had read and assessed while he was a teacher of fiction writing. No, the entrants would be every detail that the man might conceivably have remembered in connection with any of the more than three thousand pieces of fiction that he had read during sixteen years of his life. And the finish of this last race might itself last for a year at least, which would be in keeping with the duration of the whole race, which had already been in progress for more than five years before it came to the attention of the man in whose mind it was being run.

The man could take his time over this race; could even forget about the existence of the race for days or weeks on end. The less he thought about the race, the fewer contestants might appear in his mind when he next looked out for them.

At the fictional time when this piece of fiction began, the man, whoever he was, had been aware for more than two years that this last race, this race of races, was being decided in his mind. He was especially careful not to interfere with the fair running of the race. He wanted to give no help to any of the entrants, of which a dozen or more were in his view when he first became aware that they were, in fact, entrants in the most decisive of races. Whenever he looked at the progress of the race, which was only once in every few weeks, perhaps, he merely took note of which entrants were at the front of the field and then turned his attention to other matters, which is to say that every few weeks he asked himself what details he could still call to mind from all the pieces of fiction that he had read during his sixteen years as a teacher. Having asked this question of himself, he waited during an interval of a minute or two and observed the while what occurred in his mind.

The man thought it would have been unfair of him to give any encouragement to any of the struggling leaders in the race. And so he took care to do nothing that might help to fix in his mind one or another image arising from one or another piece of fiction and might therefore help to unfix one or another image arising from some other piece of fiction. But even though he tried to do no more than observe, his many years as an observer of actual horse-races made it impossible for him not to try to predict the actual winner. He had sat in so many grandstands at so many racecourses and had foreseen the eventual winner in each of so many closely contested races that he could not keep himself from trying to predict the winner of the race in his mind.

At the time when this piece of fiction began, no more than half-a-dozen contenders were in sight, and several of these were dropping back. The man who observed from time to time the progress of these stayers towards the finish line was surprised whenever he asked himself why these few and not some of countless other images were still in his view. The man could not remember the experience of reading for the first time any of the words and sentences that had first caused any of these images to arise in his mind. This failure to remember suggested to the man that he had never expected any of the images to remain in his mind long after countless other images no longer appeared in his mind.

A young Australian man is drinking in a bar in East Africa. He finds himself staring more and more often at two young women of striking appearance, even while his African drinking mate warns him to take no notice of the Somali prostitutes.

A young woman sits in a small boat in the shallows of a lake on a summer morning. The rest of her group are on a sandbar nearby. Among the group are a man who loves the woman and a man she hates. The two men are friends. The young woman is ill from the beer that she drank on the previous night in the company of the two men. At a certain moment while she tries to recall the details of the previous night, the young woman leans over the side of the boat and vomits into the lake.

A young girl comes home from school and finds, as on most other afternoons, that her mother has spent the day in her room smoking, drinking coffee and entertaining delusions.

Late on a summer evening in the 1940s, a girl of twelve or thirteen years tries to explain herself to her mother. A few minutes before, the girl had been playing cricket in the backyard with some boys from the neighbourhood. The girl had often played cricket with the boys. She was known as a tomboy and was innocent of sexual knowledge. During the latest game, she had chased the ball into a shed. The eldest boy had followed her. He had taken out his erect penis and had tried to undo her clothes. The girl’s mother, who might well have been spying on the cricketers for some time previously, had come into the shed. Later, when the girl tried to explain herself, she had seen that her mother thought her partly to blame, even complicit.

Each of the four previous paragraphs reports details of a central image surrounded by a cluster of lesser images that had arisen from several sentences of one or another piece of fiction. In none of those paragraphs are words quoted from any piece of fiction. For as long as the man who was aware of those images was aware of them, he was unable to quote in his mind from any of the sentences that had caused those images to arise.

This continued to be a disappointment to the man, whatever his name was. In gloomy moments, he was ready to suppose that he had argued as a teacher of fiction to no purpose when he had argued that fiction was made up of sentences and sentences alone. In those gloomy moments, he was ready to suppose that he had got from the several thousand pieces of fiction he had taught his students to write only a cluster of images such as he might have got if his hundreds of students, instead of writing fiction, had met for a few weeks in his presence and had talked about their memories and imaginings.

But the man could always put an end to his gloom by looking along the far-reaching home-straight of the vast racecourse in his mind and observing a fifth contender for the Gold Cup of Remembered Fiction. As a racing commentator might have said, this contender was going strongly — as strongly as anything else in the field. The man in whose mind this fifth contender had arisen and who could not keep himself from trying to foresee the outcome of any race-in-progress, this man foresaw that the finish might be, in the language of racing commentators, desperately close, but he foresaw that the fifth contender would be the winner at last.

The fifth contender was a sentence: the opening sentence of a piece of fiction. A few vague images hung about the man’s mind whenever he heard the sentence in his mind, but they meant little to him. The man was not even sure whether the images had arisen when he had first read the fiction that followed on from the opening sentence or whether he had imagined them, so to speak, at a much later date. The man seemed to have forgotten almost all of the fiction except for the opening sentence: The boy’s name was David.

Whatever else the man might have forgotten from his experience of reading the fiction that followed on from the sentence just above, he had not forgotten the exhilaration that he had felt as he read the sentence for the first time; and he recalled the substance of the long message that he had written to the author of the fiction as part of his, the teacher’s, assessment of the piece; and he recalled the substance of the comments that he had later made to the class where the fiction was read and discussed.

The boy’s name was David. The man, whatever his name was, had known, as soon as he had read that sentence, that the boy’s name had not been David. At the same time, the man had not been fool enough to suppose that the name of the boy had been the same as the name of the author of the fiction, whatever his name had been. The man had understood that the man who had written the sentence understood that to write such a sentence was to lay claim to a level of truth that no historian and no biographer could ever lay claim to. There was never a boy named David, the writer of the fiction might as well have written, but if you, the Reader, and I, the Writer, can agree that there might have been such a boy so named, then I undertake to tell you what you could never otherwise have learned about any boy of any name.

This and much more the man, whatever his name was, had understood from his first reading of the first sentence of the piece of fiction by a man whose name he soon afterwards forgot. And in his comments on that sentence the man, so he had thought at the time and for long afterwards, had come as close as he would ever come to explaining the peculiar value of fiction and why persons such as himself devoted much of their lives to the writing and the reading of fiction.

During a lifetime of watching horse-races or televised images of horse-races and of listening to radio broadcasts of horse-races, the man mentioned often in this fiction but never named had seen a comparatively small number of a sort of finish in which the eventual winner had not been considered even a likely placegetter a short distance from the winning post. Racing commentators described such a winner as having come from nowhere or from the clouds or from out of the blue. The man liked this sort of finish above all other sorts. Even if he had lost money on one of the beaten horses in such a finish, he could later appreciate the complex interplay of feelings that the last part of the race and, at the very last, the finish of the race had caused to occur in the minds of the persons interested in the race.

Finishes such as those described just above were rare enough in races over shorter distances and almost unheard of in long-distance races. In those races, the leading few usually remained in the lead during the last phase of the race, the rest having tired and fallen far behind. But the man of this fiction had seen occasionally a group of leaders unexpectedly tire and falter near the end, and an unthought-of horse arrive ahead of them. And towards the end of the race mentioned most often in this piece of fiction, the man became aware of the arrival on the scene, as a racing commentator might have said, of a previously unthought-of contender.

Perhaps ten years before the fictional time when this piece of fiction began, the man most often mentioned in this piece had been in his office on a cold, cloudy afternoon during the mid-year break between the first and second semester. Few students were on the campus. This was one of the few periods of the year when the man could sometimes read or write fiction for several hours without interruption. Then, while he was reading or writing, the man was visited, as he was liable to be visited at any time during the year, by a person who had heard about his course and wanted to learn more about it before applying to enrol.

The person visiting was a young woman. Something about her made him feel warmly towards her at once, and what she told him made him feel even more so, but he tried to deal with her in the same calm and courteous way in which he tried to deal with all his students. He and the young woman talked for perhaps twenty minutes, after which time they farewelled each other and the young woman went away. At the time when the man supposed that an important race in his mind was approaching its end, he had never seen the young woman or had any communication with her since the cold and cloudy afternoon when she had visited him in his office, perhaps fifteen years before.

Most of what the young woman had told the man is no part of this piece of fiction. The reader needs to know only that the young woman had not long before been disowned, as she expressed it, by her parents because she would not follow some or another career or profession. She had then left her parents’ house in a northern state of Australia and had moved to Tasmania and had found employment as an assistant to the chef in a fashionable restaurant. Only recently, so she explained to the man in his office, the chef in the fashionable restaurant, together with his wife, had invited her to join them in establishing a restaurant of their own with all three of them as partners. The young woman had been flattered by this offer, so she told the man in his office, but she had not yet accepted it. She was unable to think of herself as having any career or profession. For some years past, she had wanted to devote herself to writing fiction. She had heard of the fiction-writing course conducted by the man, and she had travelled from Tasmania on that cold and cloudy afternoon to learn more about the course and to help her chances of gaining entry to the course.

The man, whatever his name was, remembered perhaps fifteen years afterwards only a summary of the advice that he had given to the young woman, whatever her name was, after she had reported to him what was summarised in the previous paragraph. The man remembered that he had told the young woman that he would never advise any person to give up the opportunity to follow some or another career or profession so that the person might write fiction; that she ought to go back to Tasmania and to become a partner in the establishing of the new restaurant; but that she ought to write during the next few months a piece of fiction. If she wrote such a piece of fiction, so the man told the young woman, and if she sent the fiction to him during the next few months, he would read it at once and would tell her soon afterwards in writing whether or not he had been impressed by the fiction. If it happened that he had been deeply impressed, so the man said, then she might with good reason apply to enrol in his writing course.

During the months following the cold and cloudy afternoon mentioned above, the man would sometimes note, while he was opening his mail in his office of a morning, that none of the envelopes seemed likely to have been sent from Tasmania and to contain the typescript of a piece of fiction. During the years following the afternoon mentioned, the man would sometimes recall one or another moment from the afternoon.

The man had never been able to recall clearly the appearance of any person. What he recalled were what he called details connected with the presence of the person. What he recalled in connection with the young woman who had visited him from Tasmania was the earnest tone of her voice and the paleness of her complexion and a wound on her wrist that he had found himself often staring at during their interview. Down the side of her pale left wrist was a long mark made, he supposed, by a knife that had slipped while she worked as a chef. A scab had formed over the wound, but a narrow zone of red remained around the scab.

During the years when he was a teacher of fiction writing, the man of this fiction had read aloud to his students and had urged them to consider many hundreds of statements by writers of fiction or anecdotes about those writers. In the years after he had ceased to be a teacher of fiction writing the man had forgotten most of those statements and anecdotes, but he sometimes remembered having told one or another class that the writer Flaubert had claimed, or was reported as having claimed, that he could hear the rhythms of his still-unwritten sentences for pages ahead. Whenever the man had told this to a class, he had hoped to cause his students to reflect on the power of the sentence over the mind of a certain sort of writer; but he, the man, had often supposed that the claim, or the reported claim, by Flaubert was much exaggerated. Then, about five years after he had ceased to be a teacher of fiction writing, and while he was watching in his mind the last part of what he sometimes called the Gold Cup of Remembered Fiction, he recognised that a previously unthought-of contender in that race was a sentence as yet unwritten.

If the man had had an ear for sentences as acute as Flaubert had had, or was supposed to have had, he, the man, might have heard in his mind the rhythm of the sentence mentioned above long before it had joined in with the other contenders in the race in his mind. But the man could hardly claim that he heard the rhythm of the unwritten sentence in his mind even while he was aware of the sentence as a late contender in the race. What the man might have claimed instead was that he was aware of what he might have called details connected with the meaning of the sentence. While the still unwritten sentence seemed about to claim the leaders, as a racing commentator might have said, the man in whose mind the race was being run was still unaware of the meaning of the unwritten sentence. But the man was aware that the meaning would be connected with the greenness of the island of Tasmania in his mind, with the white and the red of skin marked by a knife in his mind, and with a person in his mind who had not written any fiction or who had begun long ago to write a piece of fiction but had since left off writing.

Last Letter to a Niece

My Dearest Niece

With this letter, our long-standing correspondence comes to an end. The reasons for this will become clear while you read the following pages. Yes, this letter must be my last, and yet I begin it with the same message that I sent in all my earlier letters. I remind you yet again, dear niece, that you are not obliged to reply to me; and I add yet again that I almost prefer not to hear from you, since this allows me to imagine many possible replies.

This letter has been the hardest to compose. In all my earlier letters I wrote the truth, but in these pages I have to write what might be called a higher truth. First, however, I must set the scene for you, as usual.

The time is evening, and the sky is almost dark. The day was fine and calm, and the stars will all be visible shortly, but the ocean is strangely loud. The weather must be bad far away in the west, because a heavy swell is running and I can hear, every half-minute, the loud crack as some huge wave breaks against the cliffs. After each crack, I imagine I feel under my feet the same tremor that I would feel if I were standing on one of the cliffs; but of course the cliffs are nearly a kilometre away, and the old farmhouse stands rock-solid as always.

As a child and a young man, I was known as the reader of the family. While my brothers and sisters were playing cards or listening to the gramophone, I would be sitting in a corner with a book open in front of me. I was always lost in a book, so my mother used to say. She, the wife of a dairy farmer and the mother of seven children, had little opportunity to read, but that simple remark of hers stays in my thoughts as I write this last letter. What did my mother understand of body, mind, soul, that caused her to report of her eldest son, while his body and face and eyes were clearly in her sight, that he was somehow within the confines of the smallish object held in his hands and, moreover, unsure of his whereabouts?

Something else my mother said of me: I was a bookish person. After you have read this letter, niece, you may choose to understand my mother’s remark in other than its obvious sense. My mother would have meant that I read a great many books, but she was, in fact, wrong. If my hard-worked mother had cared to look closely, she might sometimes have seen that the book I held up to the kerosene lamp at the kitchen table on some evening in winter was the same that I had shielded with my hand from the sunlight on the back veranda on some Sunday morning of the previous summer.

When I write ‘book’, I mean, as you surely know, the sort of book that has characters, a setting, and a story. I have seldom troubled myself over any other sort of book.

In many a letter during past years, I named for you one or another book that had affected me. As well, I mentioned certain passages in each book and told you that I often took pains to recall my first reading of each passage. I wonder how much you divined of what I am now about to tell you in full. The truth is, dear niece, that I have been, from an early age, powerfully drawn towards certain female characters in books. I am almost reluctant, even in such a letter as this, to write in everyday language about my feelings towards these personages, but you might begin to understand my situation if you think of me as having fallen, and ever since remained, in love with the personages.

Picture me on the day when I first learned what it was that would inspire and sustain me from then onwards. I am hardly more than a child. I am sitting on the lowest of the tier of sandstone blocks that support the rainwater tank on the shady, southern side of the house. This is my favourite place for reading by day in mild weather. The bulk of the tank-stand protects me from the sea wind, and if I lean sideways I sometimes feel against my face a trailing leaf or petal from the nasturtiums that grow out of the cracks between the topmost stones and down over the cream-coloured surface behind me. I am reading a book by an Englishman who died nearly fifty years before my birth. The book was presented to me as suitable for older children, but I was to learn much later that the author intended the book for adults. The action of the book purported to have taken place nearly a thousand years before the author’s birth. Among the major characters of the book was a young woman who later became the wife of the chief character and, later again, was rejected by him. At one or another moment while I was reading from the later pages of the book a report of the circumstances of this female character, I had to stop reading. Rather than cause embarrassment to either of us, I will describe my situation at that moment by calling on one of those stock expressions that can yield surprising meaning if one ponders them word by word. I tell you, dear niece, that my feelings got the better of me for a few moments.

Do not suppose that a few moments of intense feeling of themselves revealed much to me. But after I had reflected for long on the events just described, I began to foresee the peculiar course that my life would take in the future: I would seek in books what most others sought among living persons.

I reflected as follows. My reading about the personage in the book had caused me to feel more intensely than I had previously felt for any living person…At this point, dear niece, you may be preparing to revise your previous good opinion of me. Please, at least, read on…If I had been utterly candid with you from the beginning of our correspondence, you might have broken with me long ago. To whom, then, could I have written my many hundreds of pages? To whom could I have addressed this most decisive of letters? My being able to write even these few pages today is justification a hundredfold for whatever reticence and evasion I may have practised before now.

You read and interpreted rightly just now. I declare to you freely that I felt as a child and have felt ever since more concern for certain characters in books than for my own sisters and brothers, more than for my own mother and father even, and certainly more than for any of the few friends I have had. And in answer to your urgent question: you, dear niece, stand somewhat apart from the persons just mentioned. You are, it is true, a blood relation, but our having never met and our agreement that we should never meet allows me often to suppose that we are connected through literature only and not through your father’s being my younger brother. Then again, that you are a blood relation of mine should lessen the strangeness of my revelations. You must have been from an early age not unfamiliar with aloofness and solitariness among the branches of our family. I am by no means your only unmarried uncle or aunt.

If you are still inclined to judge me harshly, dear niece, remember that I have done little harm to any living person during my bachelor’s life. I was never a brute or unfaithful to any wife; I was never a tyrant to any child. Above all, consider my claim that I never chose to live as I have lived. My own conscience has reassured me often that I have dreamed and read only in an effort to draw nearer to the people who are my true kindred; the place that is my true home. My acts and omissions have had their origins in my nature and not in my will.

And now you wonder about my religious faith. I was not deceiving you whenever I mentioned in earlier letters my weekly churchgoing, but I have to confess to you that I long ago ceased to believe in the doctrines of our religion. I have read as much as I could bring myself to read of the book from which our religion has been derived. I was able to feel for no character in that book the half of what I have felt for many a character in books scarcely mentioning God.

Do not be dismayed, niece. I have sat in church every Sunday while our correspondence has gone forward, although stolidly rather than devoutly, and more as some English labourer of the previous century sat in his village church in one or another of my most admired books. I use my time in church for my own purposes but I cause no scandal. From under my eyebrows, I look at certain young women. My only purpose is to take home to my stone farmhouse and my bleak paddocks a small store of remembered sights.

You must remind yourself, niece, that I see very few young women. I spend a few hours each week in the town of Y—, where numerous young women are to be seen in shops and offices and on the footpaths. But I have observed during my lifetime a great change in the demeanour of young women. The weatherboard church in this isolated district is perhaps the last place where I could hope to see young women dressed modestly and with eyes downcast.

But I have not explained myself. I am interested in the appearance and deportment of young women in this, the everyday visible world, for the good reason that the female personages in books, like all other such personages together with the places they inhabit, are quite invisible.

You can hardly believe me. In your mind at this very moment are characters, costumes, interiors of houses, landscapes and skies, all of them faithful images of their counterparts in descriptive passages in books you have read and remembered. Allow me to set you right, dear niece, and to make a true reader of you.

I have had no education to speak of, but a man may learn surprising things if he spends all his life in the same house and most of that life alone. With no chatter or argument in his ears, he will hear the persuasive rhythms of sentences from the books that he keeps beside his bed. With his eyes undistracted by novelty, he will see what those sentences truly denote. For long after I had first fallen in love as a result of my reading, I still supposed that the objects of my love were visible to me. Did I not see in my mind, while I read, image after image? Could I not call to mind, long after I had closed this or that book, the face, the clothing, the gestures of the personage I loved — and of others also? Whenever I think of how readily I deceived myself in this simplest of matters, I wonder in how many other matters no less simple are persons deceived who will not inspect the contents of their own minds nor look for the source of what appears there. And I beg you, dear niece, not to be prevented by the welter of sights and sounds in the great city where you live; not to be deceived by the glibness of the educated; but to accept as truths only the findings of your own introspection.

But I am preaching at you, when my own example should serve. You will believe me, niece, when I tell you that I learned, in time, that all the contents of all the books that I had read or would read were invisible. Whatever personages I had loved, or would love in the future, were for ever hidden from me. Certainly, I saw as I read. But what I saw came only from my poor stock of remembered sights. And what I saw was only a scrap of what I believed I saw. An example will serve.

Last night, I was reading yet again from a book the author of which was born before the midpoint of the previous century but lived until the year before my own birth. I had read only a few words referring to the chief female personage of the book before the appearance in my mind of the first of the images that another sort of reader would have supposed to have originated by some means in the text of the book. Being by now well skilled in such tasks, I needed only a moment of mental exertion before I recognised the source of the image just mentioned. Note first that the image was of a detail only. The text referred to a young woman. Would you not expect that any image then arising in my mind would be an image of a young woman? But I assure you that I saw only an image of a corner of a somewhat pale forehead with a strand of dark hair trailing across it. And I assure you further that this detail had its source not in any sentence of the text but in the memory of the reader of the text, myself. Some weeks before, while I sat in my usual seat in a rear corner of the church, I observed from under my eyebrows a certain young woman as she returned to her seat from the communion rail. I observed many details of her appearance, and all were of equal interest to me. Neither in the church nor at any time afterwards did I think of any of those details as being connected with any personage in any book that I had read. And yet, dear niece, the image of a strand of dark hair and a corner of a forehead are all that I can see, for the time being, of a personage who has been dear to me for longer than I have been writing my letters to you.

Much might be learned from all this, dear niece. I myself have certainly learned much from many similar discoveries. Item: if, for the sake of convenience, we call the subject matter of books a world, then that world is wholly invisible to the residents of the world where I write these words and where you read them. For I have studied the images not only of personages but of those details we suppose to be the settings of books and suppose further to have arisen from words in the text. The same book whose chief female character is visible to me presently as only a strand of hair trailing across a forehead, that same book contains hundreds of sentences describing a variety of landscapes in the south of England. I have observed myself to read all of those so-called descriptive sentences while seeing in my mind only one or another of precisely four details from the scattered coloured illustrations in a magazine that had belonged to my dead sister and still lay about this house. All of the illustrations were of landscapes in the midlands of England.

But you have read enough of arguments and demonstrations, and I have almost lost my thread. Trust me to know that the personages I have been devoted to since boyhood have been invisible to me, as have their homes, their native districts, and even the skies above those districts. At once, several questions occur to you. You assume, correctly, that I have never felt drawn towards any young woman in this, the visible world, and you want me to explain this seeming failure in me.

I have often myself considered this question, niece, and I have come to understand that I might have brought myself to approach one or another young woman from this district, or even from the town of Y— if even one of the following two conditions could have been fulfilled: before I had first seen the young woman, I would have had to read about her, if not in a book then in passages of the sort of writing such as appears in the sort of books that I read; alternatively, before I had first seen the young woman I would have had to know that the young woman had read about me as described earlier in this sentence.

You may consider these conditions overly stringent, niece, and the chance of their being fulfilled absurdly remote. Do not suspect for a moment that I devised these conditions from a wish to remain solitary. Think of me, rather, as a man who can love only the subjects of sentences in texts purporting to be other than factual.

There has been only one occasion when I felt myself drawn to treat with a young woman of this, the visible world without any bookish preliminaries. When I was still quite young, and still not reconciled altogether to my fate, I thought I might strengthen my resolve by learning about other solitaries: monkish eremites, exiles, dwellers in remote places. I happened to find in a pile of old magazines that someone had lent to one of my sisters an illustrated article about the island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic. I learned from the article that the island is the loneliest inhabited place on earth, lying far from shipping routes. The cliffs around the island allow no ship to berth. Any visiting ship must anchor at sea while the men of Tristan row out to her. These things alone were enough to excite my interest. You know the situation of this farm: a strip of land at the very southern edge of the continent, with its boundary on one side the high cliffs where I often walk alone. You should know also that the nearest bay to this farm is named after a ship that was wrecked there during the previous century. But my interest in the lonely island increased after I had learned from the magazine article about a disaster that had happened some forty years before my birth. A boat carrying all the able-bodied men of the island was lost at sea, and Tristan became a settlement of mostly women and children. For many years afterwards, so I read, the young women prayed every night for a shipwreck to bring marriageable men.

There came into my mind an image of a certain young woman of Tristan da Cunha, and whenever I looked up from my paddocks to the cliffs I thought of her as standing on the highest cliff of her island and staring out to sea. I was impelled to visit the library in the town of Y— and to consult a detailed atlas. I learned, with much excitement, that the island of Tristan da Cunha and the district where this farm is situated lie almost on the same latitude. I learned further that no land — not even the speck of an island — lies between Tristan and this coast. Now, dear niece, you must know as I know that the prevailing winds and currents in this hemisphere are from west to east, and so you can anticipate the conjectures that I made after I had studied the atlas. If the young woman on the cliff tops of the island of Tristan had written a message and had enclosed the message in a bottle and had thrown the bottle into the Atlantic Ocean from a cliff on the western side of her island, then her message might well have been carried at last to the coast of this district.

You may be inclined to smile as you read this, niece, but after I had first conjectured thus, I began the habit of walking once each week along the few beaches near this farm. While I walked, I composed in my mind various versions of the message from the young woman of Tristan. I found no bottle, which should hardly surprise you, but I was often consoled to think that a message such as I had imagined might lie during all my lifetime in some pool or crevice beneath the cliffs of my native district.

You have another matter to raise. You want to argue that each of the personages I have devoted myself to had her origins somewhere in the mind of the author of the writing that first brought her to my notice. You suggest that I might have studied the life and the pronouncements of the author in order to discover the reality, as you might call it, beneath my illusions, as you might call them. Better still, I might read a suitable work by a living author and then submit to him or her a list of questions to be answered in writing and at length.

In fact, dear niece, I tried long ago but soon abandoned the line of investigation noted above. Most of the authors concerned wrote their books during the previous century and died before my birth. (You must have observed that I learned my own style of writing from those worthies.) I read just enough about the lives of the authors of my admired books to learn that they were vain and arrogant persons and much given to pettiness. But what of the present century? A great change has occurred in books during this century. The writers of those books have tried to describe what they had better have left unreported. The writers of the present century have lost respect for the invisible. I have never troubled myself to learn about the writers themselves. (I exclude from these remarks a certain writer from a small island-republic in the North Atlantic. I learned of the existence of his books by a remarkable chance and read several in translation, but I could not bring myself afterwards to compose any message for him in his cliff-bound homeland.)

I have come to hope, dear niece, that the act of writing may be a sort of miracle as a result of which invisible entities are made aware of each other through the medium of the visible. But how can I believe that the awareness is mutual? Although I have sometimes felt one or another of my beloved personages as a presence nearby, I have had no grounds for supposing that she might even have imagined my possible existence.

On a day long ago, when I was somewhat cast down from thinking of these matters, I wrote my first letter to you, dear niece. I sought a way out of my isolation by means of the following, admittedly simplistic, proposition: if the act of writing can bring into being personages previously unimagined by either writer or reader, then I might dare to hope for some wholly unexpected outcome from my own writing, although it could never be part of any book.

How many years have passed since then you and I alone know, and this, as I have told you, is my last letter. However little I may know of it, I remain hopeful that something will come of this writing.

Something will come of this writing. I was born in Transylvania in the seventeenth century of the modern era. I became in my youth a follower of Prince Ferenc Rákóczi. When the Prince went into exile after the War of Independence, I was one of the band of followers who went with him. In the second decade of the eighteenth century, we arrived at the port of Gallipoli as invited guests of the Sultan of Turkey. Shortly afterwards, I wrote the first of my letters to my aunt, the Countess P—, in Constantinople. We followers of Prince Rákóczi had hoped that our exile might not be for long, but almost all of us remained for the rest of our lives in Turkey, and even those few who left Turkey were never allowed to return to their native land, my native land. For forty-one years, until almost the last year of my life, I wrote regularly to my aunt. I wrote to her almost a full account of my life. One of the few matters that I chose not to write openly about was my solitary state. Only a few of the exiles were women, and all of these were married. Most of us men remained solitary throughout our lives.

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Dear Reader

The following is adapted from one of the seven pages about the life and the writing of Kelemen Mikes in the Oxford History of Hungarian Literature, 1984.

The Letters from Turkey were regarded by critics for a long time only as a source for the history of the exiles. Much futile research was done in an attempt to find traces of the mysterious Countess P— who proved never to have existed. Mikes never sent his letters to any ‘aunt’ but copied them into a letter-book, which was found after his death.

Publisher’s Note

The authors of the books referred to in ‘A History of Books’ are believed to include Miguel Ángel Asturias, Giorgio di Chirico, Charles Dickens, Margaret McKenzie, Mikhail Petrovich Artzybashev, James Joyce, Frank Wedekind, R.C. Sherriff and Vernon Bartlett, George Borrow, John Clare, Christopher Brennan, Thomas Hardy, Herman Hesse, Gerald Murnane, Roger Longrigg, Joseph Conrad, Elias Canetti, Brian Aldiss, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James T. Farrell, François Mauriac, William Styron, Frederick Exley, George Gissing, Henry Handel Richardson, Frank Dalby Davison, D.M. Body, Roy Campbell, Robert Musil, Gyula Illyés, Emily Brontë, André Maurois, Jack Kerouac, Sándor Márai and Halldór Laxness.

Content

Gerald Murnane
A History of Books

A History of Books

As It Were a Letter

The Boy’s Name Was David

Last Letter to a Niece

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Publisher’s Note