Imagine certain figures standing. Perfectly still. Spaced at intervals. Encircling the city. Like sentinels. There might be twelve of them, or eleven, or thirteen. So distant that you cannot discern whether they face toward the city or away from it. Only this impression remains: in the darkness, certain motionless forms stand, and their very stillness is the sole proof of their presence.
Of course, they may not be people at all. They could be posts, stones, stumps of dead trees, or perhaps nothing whatsoever. Darkness is a cunning illusionist; gaze long enough and it knows how to deceive the eye. Yet the feeling persists. They are there. Sentinels. Standing upon the plain. Arranged in a circle. Surrounding the city. Perhaps surrounding you as well. But whether they see you or the city remains unknown. It seems they are looking at something else—something you cannot see from this hillside. Whatever lies at the center of that circle, perhaps it is toward that their faces turn, or perhaps they have turned their faces away from it.
And what is at the center? Suppose a small hut. Low, obscure, nearly swallowed by darkness. Perhaps a dim light flickers in one of its windows.
And in that hut, someone exists. Not you. Not the man with the stick. Not the girl at the counter. Someone else. Suppose an old woman, as solitary as you, sitting in a chair by the window. Looking outward. Toward the sentinels. Or not looking, yet seeing nonetheless—the way so many things are seen without direct gaze. The sentinels seem to look, yet perhaps they too see nothing at all.
From this distance on the hill, this much alone is captured. Seeing in darkness, somehow; conjecturing, somehow; rendering it into language, somehow. The old woman in the hut, the sentinels on the plain, that circle beyond the city—all of it half-seen, half-told. Exactly as much as words can hold.
In the end, everything is like this: half-seen, half-told. The eye cannot fully hold what it sees; it is like trying to keep water in closed hands. And words cannot fully carry what they name. The name grows small; the thing remains large.
You see the hut, yet you see only its outline. You see smoke, but not the smoke itself—only its faint shadow. You see the old woman, but not the woman—only the shape of her hunching. At the door, the window, or that place you believe to be fire, there is no certainty; you cannot even be sure it is truly fire.
Yet you attempt to speak. And speech always falls short—always has, always will. The distance between seeing and speaking—that is the old distance: between word and thing, between you and the world. A gap exists here too, on this hillside, in this darkness. Between what is and what you can bring back from sight into language, this gap holds still. Almost nothing reaches your hands; and yet this meager thing is all your wealth.
As the sea cannot be held all at once, as the sea slips through the gaps between words, slides away like water through the spaces between your fingers, so too does what is half-seen remain somehow in the gaps of what is half-told. It does not come whole; it does not reveal itself wholly. That which went unsaid waits in the gap.
There will be seeing again, incompletely. There will be speech again, incompletely. By the ordinary law. By that ancient law of half-seeing and half-telling. As if this alone is humanity's portion: never whole, always half. The seeing half, the telling half, the receiving half.
# Eternity
If you truly look, the stars blaze like pinpricks through the torn curtain of clouds. It seems something burns on the other side. How do you tell if they live or are dead? Perhaps many of them no longer exist at all. Only their light remains. They have died, their bodies extinguished, yet their light still travels the paths. Crossing darkness, year after year, perhaps millennia, perhaps epochs, at last it arrives here.
On this mountain. In these eyes. Eyes that seem slightly wet, though you never wished it, had no need of it. And yet the eyes do what they do—they receive what comes. Whether wished for or not, whether needed or not.
You become then a receiver of such light, coming from places that perhaps no longer exist at all. That light set out before your birth, before cities were built, before mountains stood in this form. And now, tardily, that light falls upon you. Upon you; sitting in the grass, on the mountain, in darkness, simply because your eyes are open, receiving the light of a dead star.
Perhaps this is your work, if it can be called work. You are the address of dead light. The final stop of a long journey. A journey that began before you, before all things, and comes to end in your eyes. These eyes too will one day close. You too will die.
Then the light will pass beyond you. It will enter that darkness behind you, where no eye remains, where nothing is received, where there is nothing at all—only darkness. There it will be lost. As all light is lost one day. As all things are. No one can save anyone in the end.
By the ordinary law. By the law of being lost.
## 7
Behind the eyes there seems to be a country. You cannot say with certainty whether to call it a dream. There you are neither king nor subject, only a wanderer. That country has no map, no laws; the familiar becomes suddenly strange, and the world’s ordinary rules no longer hold. No gravity, no courtesy, no death.
Do you remember that observer, the one whose eyes never close? If ever those eyes grow weary, if ever they close, perhaps then man arrives precisely there, what we call a dream. Or you could say: when the body sleeps, when the mind stills, when will lies motionless like one wishing a long coma, then that single consciousness which remains awake sees this country. When all else departs, what can no longer sleep stays alone awake and sees what is to be seen.
There, first comes a corridor. Long, endless, its far end invisible. There is light, but where it comes from is unclear. It seems the walls themselves glow faintly from within. Light, or the memory of light. No lamp, no sun; the air itself seems to burn, the way a firefly glows without knowing anything of its own radiance.
You walk within that light. Or perhaps the corridor itself walks you forward. The direction is unclear. You move, yet nothing changes. The walls remain the same, the floor the same, the expanse around you unchanged. Your footsteps strike the walls and return like echoes. Emptiness ahead, emptiness behind.
You could turn to look, if you wished, but the decision to turn comes from will, and you left will far behind long ago. The waking world seems to exist somewhere, but in which direction—that can no longer be said.
Because in this corridor there is no up, no down, no front, no back. What is ahead is also behind; what is behind is also ahead.
There is no time here either. You might feel you’ve been walking for hours upon hours, and yet there is no such thing as “hours” in this place. There is only walking, and that walking is enough.
This walking has its own form, its own weight, its own character—something absent from the walking of waking life. In the waking world, beneath your steps lies stone, pavement, concrete. But here there is seemingly nothing beneath your feet, only a strange trust, as though the air itself were temporarily doing the work of earth.
And strangest of all: the ground does not exist beforehand. Your walking creates it. Just before your foot falls, at precisely the right moment, earth appears beneath your sole; and when your foot lifts, that earth behind you dissolves again. Never, at any moment, is more than one footstep’s worth of ground prepared for you. Only the ground beneath the foot you stand on exists; before it is void, behind it is void.
Perhaps this is the corridor’s deepest teaching, if teaching it can be called. Earth is born from walking; walking is not born from earth. You construct the path as you walk. To set down your foot is to give birth. Your forward movement gives existence to your world.
Stop, and even the footprint erases. Void again. As it was before, as it will be after. As it was before you came, as it will be after you go. Before the walking, before the foot, before you.
Then the corridor vanishes. Where it goes, you cannot say. Suddenly you find yourself in a room. It is not yours. Immense. Almost empty. There are no windows, no chairs, no tables, no cups; only floor, walls, ceiling. All white. So clean that it seems no one has ever lived here. The light is so brilliant that you think the very air has perhaps become luminous.
And in the exact center of the room lies something. From a distance you cannot make it out. As you approach, you see it is no particular thing. Like a shape, like a body, like an object, and yet exactly none of these. It shifts strangely as you draw near. From far away it seemed like stone. Gray, smooth, surely cold to the touch, like a stone from a riverbed. Closer still, and it seems like some creature curled and lying down. Closer yet, and you see: it is a hand.
An open hand. Palm upward. Fingers slightly bent, as if holding something, or just now releasing it, or about to grasp it. A hand that is at once everything and nothing. How these two opposite truths can exist together cannot be understood. Yet you feel you have searched for this your whole life, though you never knew you were searching. All the grayness, all the stillness, all the sitting seems to gather at this center point: this hand. The hand is giving. What is it giving? Nothing. Everything. And perhaps, in the end, these are the same.