1.
There is no one who has seen the book.
Yet there is no one who doubts its existence.
It sleeps in the depths of the distant clouds dark before dawn.
To awaken it from its sleep, which has neither form nor size,
our imagination is too poor, too weak.
What is now spread out in our lamp
is a metaphor, too negligible,
of that unimaginable book to come.
2.
Let’s try to see how effective a metaphor can be:
The number of pages of the book is much greater than
all the pages of all the books in the world added together.
The gilded top and bottom rims are farther apart than heaven and
earth in the evening glow.
Its front cover and back cover are separated from each other,
farther than the horizon of the east from the horizon of the west.
The number of characters in this book . . . but this book
can neither be written in characters nor counted by page.
3.
There is nothing that is not inscribed in this book.
All the pulses of the universe are inscribed.
Every vertical wrinkle of that rose is recorded.
The action in each second of every one of us—for example,
even each of the words I write down here,
or if I draw a line and erase my own description,
even that erasure is written in, leaving out nothing.
This description, too, is written in. So is this description.
4.
Who are we in front of this book?
If we are not allowed to read it, but on the contrary
we are read closely by it,
is the book a mirror-like eye, and are we
the spilled types transfixed by the eye?
Is the book a heavily guarded savage jail, and are we
the prisoners chained in the dark of its cells, half dead?
Is it in the end impossible to reach the blue sky engraved in the
iron bars?
5.
Let us burn this ominous book while there is time,
before it shows itself in front of us.
If this is impossible, let us feed the tongues of burning fire
with these words strung together to chronicle it.
But if the incineration of the words, even the combustion of the book
is inscribed without exception, what will become of us?
The only way left is to throw ourselves into the flames of paper,
for ourselves to burn, to be recorded in the book of flames.
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