I try to imagine the world without books like this one. For decades now, people have stopped reading; even university students no longer read. This development is the result of tweets and texts and short videos. What will a world be like with hardly any spoken languages, which are becoming extinct in their profusion and variety? What will a world be like without a profound language of pictures, where my profession no longer exists? The end is coming. I picture a radical turning away from thought, argument, and image, not just an approaching darkness in which certain objects can still be felt, but a condition where they no longer exist at all, a darkness filled with fear, with imaginary monsters. I think of a passage in the Florentine Codex written as though its speakers, amid the destruction of their culture and horizons, were still trying to find their way to their language: “A cave is terrifying, a place of terror, a place of death. It will be called a place of death, because people will die here. It is a place of darkness, dark, always dark. It stands there with mouth gaping open.” How could one depict the absence of images? Not just their removal, the final irrevocable turning away from images, but their nonexistence? I imagine two mirrors set up in exact opposition reflecting nothing but each other into infinity. But with nothing for them to mirror. If the mirrors were one-way mirrors, like the kind the detectives use for interrogations, then you would see a void reflected in the mirror opposite. No criminal confessing, no table, no chair, no lamp, just space containing nothing that is reflected over and over again. Nothing else, no living, no breathing. No Frenchman eating his bicycle. No second Frenchman switching into reverse and driving his ancient car backward through the Sahara. No truth, no lie. No river called the river of lies, Yuyapichis, the deceiving river that pretends to be the much larger Pichis River. No Japanese marriage agency ordering a bucketful of sand to be emptied out of a satellite so the bride can be astonished by a shower of meteorites. No more twins living in separate bodies but thinking and speaking in unison. No parrots from Alexander von Humboldt’s 1802 journey up the Orinoco, where he came to a village, all of whose inhabitants had been killed off by a plague. Their language had died with them, but the neighboring village had for the past forty years continued to look after their parrot. This parrot still spoke sixty distinct words of the inhabitants of the dead village, their dead language. Humboldt copied them down in his notebook. What if we taught those words to two parrots, and the two could converse in them? What if we project ourselves far into the future and imagine things that we’ve created, that still exist, not forever but for two hundred thousand years, let’s say. A time when humanity will almost certainly have died out but certain of our monuments might still exist, indestructible. The dam in the Vajont gorge that withstood the vast landslide of 250 million cubic meters of rocks and earth and gravel. At its foot, this dam is twenty-eight meters thick and poured from specially hardened concrete. This lower part would still almost certainly be there, standing majestically without relaying any message, no message for anyone. There at the foot of the smooth concrete wall there would be a crystal clear trickle of water from the rocks to the side; it would be sought out by herds of deer, as though