Mystery

            Good evening there, dear reader, sweet reader. I hope the daylight has been kind to you, the wind gentle, the rain soft and the clouds bright. Reader, I think you must know that the clouds trouble me… I look up, day after day, and they are never the same. Sometimes they hang, still and mute as a pair of trousers set out to dry; on days like these, the silence in the heavens puts a chill in my spine and the coldness of the blue sky sets my teeth chattering. But at other times the clouds seem to weave together in the most baroque and fathomless designs, twisting together and apart with all the multivalent yet terrifyingly unifying inevitability of an enigma. These days are ciphers, open to interpretation and yet closed from unequivocal understanding. When these days arrive, as they cannot fail to do, our minds are set racing and we find ourselves wishing that we could pluck our eyes out in exchange for an undeniable sign, a pointer that says “Do this,” or “Be this.” Memory reels, and even the past itself seems to change sometimes.

            On days like these, you get the feeling that your mind is a radio that’s getting very poor reception while you’re trying to listen to a song in a language you don’t know very well. Cracks begin to appear along the lineaments of the world, and a light begins to shine through, a light unlike anything that your eyes have ever shown you. It’s something you’ve begun to suspect, yet the sudden exposure to it is both exhilarating and horrifying—surely the world doesn’t allow for things like this! You tell yourself this, you tell yourself it’s just your imagination… and perhaps you’re right. But then it happens again, and again, with greater frequency. With time, life without this—this, well, let’s call it this music of the spheres—becomes quite unthinkable, quite literally unimaginable. You steadily realize that, without ever precisely intending it, you’ve stumbled into something you’ve almost consciously kept just out of your field of vision all your life, something like a headlong leap into an immense ocean, like a blind desperate swim to a hidden island.

            The world has always presented itself to you as a puzzle, a riddle, or better yet a mystery. You always desired, far over and above anything else, knowledge, certainty, comprehension. Where others saw only blithe certainties you were assailed by incredible doubts, by a gnawing, wrenching, crushing hankering for knowledge. What is this world? What is the meaning of this world? Your search has been one of restless, ceaseless interrogation. Just like so many detectives in so many stories, you’ve been warned time and again that too many questions can lead to uncomfortable, even dangerous answers. There’s no accident in the fact that some of the most profound thinkers this world has produced have been writers of detective stories.

            And yet you press on, working puzzle after puzzle, peeling layer after layer… surely, surely an answer to this question will finally complete the system! You dig and dig without ceasing, every day with less and less of hope, less of sunlight. You dig until you can no longer remember why you started digging in the first place… and then, there in the darkness, clank! You’ve found something. And you get the feeling that your mind is a radio that’s getting very poor reception while you’re trying to listen to a song in a language you don’t know very well.

            I think it was one of those writers of detective stories who once wrote that there are two ways of getting home… and the first is never to leave. Some of us can’t help ourselves: we like to stretch our legs first. I hope you get home safely, reader.