Having sailed for many days and many nights, I realized that the West has no end, but moves along with us, we can follow it as long as we like without ever reaching it. Such is the unknown sea beyond the Pillars, endless and always the same, and it is from that sea, like the thin backbone of an extinct colossus, that these small island crests rise up, knots of rock lost in the blue.
Seen from the sea, the first island you come to is a green expanse amidst which fruit gleams like gems, though sometimes what you may be seeing are strange birds with purple plumage. The coastline is impervious, black rock-faces inhabited by marauding sea birds which wail as twilight falls, flapping restlessly with an air of sinister torment. Rains are heavy and the sun pitiless: and because of this climate together with the island’s rich black soil, the trees are extremely tall, the woods luxuriant and flowers abound, great blue and pink flowers, fleshy as fruit, such as I have never seen anywhere else. The other islands are rockier, though always rich in flowers and fruit, and the inhabitants get much of their food from the woods, and then the rest from the sea, since the water is warm and teeming with fish.
The men have light complexions and astonished eyes, as if the wonder at a sight once seen but now forgotten still played across their faces. They are silent and solitary but not sad and they will frequently laugh over nothing, like children. The women are handsome and proud, with prominent cheekbones and high foreheads. They walk with waterjugs on their heads, and descending the steep flights of steps that lead to the water their bodies don’t sway at all, so that they look like statues on which some god has bestowed the gift of movement. These people have no king, they know nothing of class or caste. There are no warriors because they have no need to wage war, having no neighbors. They do have priests, though of a special kind which I will tell you about later on. And anybody can become one, even the humblest peasant or beggar. Their Pantheon is not made up of gods like ours who preside over the sky, the earth, the sea, the underworld, the woods, the harvest, war and peace and the affairs of mankind. Instead they are gods of the spirit, of sentiments and passions. The principal deities are nine in number, like the islands in the archipelago, and each has his temple on a different island.
The god of Regret and Nostalgia is a child with an old man’s face. His temple stands on the remotest of the islands in a valley protected by impenetrable mountains, near a lake, in a desolate, wild stretch of country. The valley is forever covered by a light mist, like a veil; there are tall beech trees which whisper in the breeze; a place of intense melancholy. To reach the temple you have to follow a path cut into the rock like the bed of a dried stream. And as you walk you come across strange skeletons of enormous unknown animals, fish perhaps, or maybe birds; and seashells, and stones the pink of mother-of-pearl. I called it a temple, but I ought to have said a shack: for the god of Regret and Nostalgia could hardly live in a palace or luxurious villa; instead he has but a hovel, poor as wept tears, something that stands amidst the things of this world with that same sense of shame as some secret sorrow lurking in our hearts. For this god is not only the god of Regret and Nostalgia; his deity extends to an area of the mind that includes remorse, and the sorrow for that which once was and which no longer causes sorrow but only the memory of sorrow, and the sorrow for that which never was but should have been, which is the most consuming sorrow of all. Men go to visit him dressed in wretched sackcloth, women cover themselves with dark cloaks; and they all stand in silence and sometimes you hear weeping, in the night, as the moon casts its silver light over the valley and over the pilgrims stretched out on the grass nursing their lifetime’s regrets.
The god of Hatred is a little yellow dog with an emaciated look, and his temple stands on a tiny cone-shaped island: it takes many days and nights of travelling to get there and only real hatred, the hatred that swells the heart unbearably, spawned on envy and jealousy, could prompt the unhappy sufferer to undertake such an arduous voyage. Then there are the gods of Madness and of Pity, the god of Generosity and the god of Selfishness: but I never went to visit these gods and have heard only vague and fanciful stories in their regard.
As for their most important god, who would seem to be father of all the other gods and likewise of the earth and sky, the accounts I heard of him varied greatly, and I wasn’t able to see his temple nor to approach his island. Not because foreigners aren’t allowed there, but because even the citizens of this republic can go there only after attaining a spiritual state, which is but rarely achieved – and once there they do not come back. On this god’s island stands a temple for which the inhabitants of the archipelago have a name I could perhaps translate as “The Marvelous Dwellings.” It consists of a city which is entirely suppositional – in the sense that the buildings themselves don’t exist; only their plans have been traced out on the ground. This city has the shape of a circular chessboard and stretches away for miles and miles: and every day, using simple pieces of chalk, the pilgrims move the buildings where they choose, as if they were chess pieces; so that the city is mobile and mutable and its physiognomy is constantly changing. From the centre of the chessboard rises a tower on the top of which rests an enormous golden sphere which vaguely recalls the fruit so abundant in the gardens of these islands. And this sphere is the god. I haven’t been able to find out who exactly this god might be: the definitions offered me to date have been imprecise and tentative, not easily comprehensible to the foreigner perhaps. I presume that he has something to do with the idea of completeness, of plentitude, of perfection: a highly abstract idea, not easily comprehensible to the human intellect. Which is why I did think this might be the god of Happiness: but the happiness of those who have understood the sense of life so fully that death no longer has any importance for them; and that is why the chosen few who go to honor the god never return. The task of watching over this god has been given to an idiot with a doltish face and garbled speech who is perhaps in touch with divinity in mysterious ways unknown to reason. When I expressed my desire to pay this god homage, people smiled at me and with an air of profound affection, which perhaps contained a hint of compassion, kissed me on both cheeks.
But I did pay homage along with others to the god of Love, whose temple stands on an island with white curving beaches on the bright sand washed by the sea. And the image of this god isn’t an idol, nor anything visible, but a sound, the pure sound of sea water drawn into the temple through a channel carved from the rock and then breaking in a secret pool: and because of the shape of the walls and the size of the building, the sound from the pool reproduces itself in an endless echo, ravishing whoever hears it and inducing a sort of intoxication, or daze. And those who worship this god expose themselves to many and strange effects, since his is the principle which commands life, though it is a bizarre and capricious principle; and while it may be true that he is the soul and harmony of the elements, he can also produce illusions, ravings, visions. And on this island I witnessed spectacles that disturbed me in their innocent truth: so much so that I began to doubt whether they weren’t rather the ghosts of my own feelings leaving my body to take shape and apparent reality in the air as a result of my exposing myself to the bewitching sound of the god. It was with such thoughts in my mind that I set out along a path that leads to the highest point of the island, whence you can see the sea on every side. At which I became aware that the island was deserted, that there was no temple on the beach and that the figures and faces of love I had seen like tableaux vivants and which included numerous gradations of the spirit, such as friendship, tenderness, gratitude, pride and vanity, all these aspects of love I thought I had seen in human form, were just mirages prompted by I don’t know what enchantment. And thus I arrived right at the top of the promontory and as, observing the endless sea, I was already abandoning myself to the dejection that comes with disillusion, a blue cloud descended on me and carried me off in a dream: and I dreamed that I was writing you this letter, and that I was not the Greek who set sail to find the West and never came back, but was only dreaming of him.