An image of a stern-faced man, aged about forty years, appeared in the mind of a man of about the same age who was writing the last paragraph of a long work of fiction. The words that this man was writing were the same words that comprised the last paragraph of the work of fiction in which the chief male character was a stern-faced man. This work had been first published ninety-two years before the birth of the man who was writing, and the author of the work had died a year later. The man who was writing was therefore under no obligation to seek permission to include the last paragraph of the work in his own work. In fact, the provenance of its final paragraph was not mentioned anywhere in the text of the man’s work or in the preliminary pages of any edition of the published work, although the text of the man’s work included, in separate passages, the title of the earlier book, the name of its author, and a summary of part of its contents.
The man’s book was reviewed and noticed in various publications and was even the subject of a few essays and so-called scholarly articles. Some reviewers and commentators approved of the man’s book and some did not, but none mentioned that the man had used for the ending of his book the ending of a famous book from the previous century. Perhaps the reviewers and commentators considered that the man’s having appropriated the ending of the famous book was so obvious as to need no comment. The man suspected, however, that the reviewers and commentators, even though they wrote fluently and at length about what they called the subject matter or the themes or the meaning of book after book, were like himself in that they were unable to remember any more than a few words or phrases from the text of any book that they had read.
The man in whose mind was an image of a stern-faced man had been hardly more than a boy when he had first read the famous book mentioned above. He had read the famous book twice more during his adult years. If anything, the later readings lessened rather than increased the sum of his recollections of the book, which is to say the words and sentences of the text. At the same time, the later readings seemed to give rise in his mind to numerous images, a few of them attributable to passages in the text but most seemingly arising from the man’s need to have in his mind images of undulating treeless countryside and of some or another young female person who chose often to frequent such countryside and even to consent to being accompanied there by a certain young male person.
The stern-faced image-man mentioned in the first sentence of this section of the present work of fiction kept mostly to an image-room at one side of an image-house built of image-stone. Perhaps he wanted to avoid the image-company of the other image-persons in the image-house, or perhaps he preferred his image-room because an image-window there overlooked a wide image-view of undulating treeless image-countryside where he had spent much image-time during his image-childhood in the company of a certain young female image-person.
The writer of a book the last paragraph of which had been taken from a certain famous book was nearly seventy years of age before he understood that a single image-person might owe his or her image-existence to more than one passage from one or another book or even from more than one book. The writer came to understand this after he had begun to observe that the image of the stern-faced man mentioned earlier appeared less often before an image-window and more often at an image-desk. The writer could only suppose that the image-man was writing at the image-desk and could only suppose that what he was writing was an image-work of image-fiction. The writer could only suppose that the image-fiction was such as he himself would have written if he himself had been at the image-desk near the image-window overlooking the treeless image-countryside. What he would have written would have seemed to him a report of scenes and events in a country adjoining a country named Gondal which country the author of the famous book mentioned earlier had written about throughout her lifetime, although none of what she wrote had been published as any sort of book, and which country was the native country of the female entity, so to call her, who later became, as it were, a famous female character in a famous work of fiction.
The goddesses had left the dining room, and the gods were about to sip their brandy and to puff on their cigars. Before the conversation had begun to grow raucous, a few of those seated at the far end of the room heard the same faint sound that a few of the others had claimed to have heard on the previous evening: perhaps the same sound that some of the goddesses had claimed during dinner to have heard while they were reclining naked beside their bathing pool during the quiet hours of the afternoon.
The residents of heaven were, by definition, unable to be troubled or irritated, but they were able to be piqued by curiosity, and even a distant knocking, until its source was discovered, might well have seemed to the more sensitive deities to gainsay their reputation for omniscience.
An archangel from the household staff was ordered to investigate. He reported that he himself had seemed to hear what their lordships and ladyships had seemed to hear. He was well aware, so he said, that he and his employers were residents of a realm where nothing could be said to be impossible; even so, their having heard a knocking sound was hardly to be believed. What he and they had seemed to hear seemed to have sounded from the far side of the outer wall of the building. He begged their lordships and their ladyships to recall that they were dining for the time being in the farthest west wing of the farthest west of the many mansions in that part of the universe, and as he and they well knew, the farthest west mansion adjoined on its farther side the country known to many of its inhabitants as Earth, between which and their own country there had been no communication since the universe in its present form had come into existence.
In short, reader, the gods and goddesses, or as many as took an interest in such matters, were obliged to address a disquieting possibility. The fabric of the universe as they knew it might not have been seamless. Some less than immortal being from a much less than heavenly zone of the universe was claiming their attention or, at the very least, was signalling to them that he or she had learned their address.
Even so disconcerting a development could not keep the divinities from their usual pleasures. While the would-be intruder, presumably, went on knocking throughout the next day, the gods, and many of the goddesses, attended race-meetings, rode to hounds, and took part in or watched as spectators a variety of sports and contests. Those who preferred to stay indoors played one or another of a variety of board games or card games praised by their admirers, with laborious humour, as being fiendishly or diabolically complicated.
The reader may have expected to read that the divine personages spent their days in vast art galleries contemplating magnificent paintings and sculpture, in concert halls listening to sublime music, or in libraries reading profound literature. In the heaven described here, no art galleries or concert halls or libraries existed. No one painted or sculpted or composed music or wrote literature because no one was urged to find so-called meaning behind so-called appearances. Where the everyday was the ultimate, there was nothing to do but play.