I do not know the name of the book, nor the name of its author: I have not been able to see the title-page; and there is no running title. As for the back of the volume, it remains,—like the back of the Moon,—invisible forever.
At no time have I touched the book in any way,—not even to turn a leaf. Somebody, always viewless, holds it up and open before me in the dark; and I can read it only because it is lighted by a light that comes from nowhere. Above and beneath and on either side of the book there is darkness absolute; but the pages seem to retain the yellow glow of lamps that once illuminated them.
A queer fact is that I never see the entire text of a page at once, though I see the whole page itself plainly. The text rises, or seems to rise, to the surface of the paper as I gaze, and fades out almost immediately after having been read. By a simple effort of will, I can recall the vanished sentences to the page; but they do not come back in the same form as before: they seem to have been oddly revised during the interval. Never can I coax even one fugitive line to reproduce itself exactly as it read at first. But I can always force something to return; and this something remains sharply distinct during perusal. Then it turns faint grey, and appears to sink—as through thick milk—backward out of sight.
By regularly taking care to write down, immediately upon awakening, whatever I could remember reading in the dream-book, I found myself able last year to reproduce portions of the text. But the order in which I now present these fragments is not at all the order in which I recovered them. If they seem to have any interconnection, this is only because I tried to arrange them in what I imagined to be the rational sequence. Of their original place and relation, I know scarcely anything. And, even regarding the character of the book itself, I have been able to discover only that a great part of it consists of dialogues about the Unthinkable.
Fr. I
... Then the Wave prayed to remain a wave forever.
The Sea made answer:—
"Nay, thou must break: there is no rest in me. Billions of billions of times thou wilt rise again to break, and break to rise again."