A Most Literary Entry

"In a small town in Scotland they sell books with one blank page hidden someplace in the volume. If the reader opens to that page and it's three o'clock in the afternoon, he dies."

-Julio Cortazar, "The Instruction Manual"

What is the most frightening part of this quotation? The small town in Scotland.


"It's a mistake
to believe that anything's 'solid': really matter
--us, a pebble, a Happy Meal toy, a stadium--is emptiness
in emptiness, a field of unthinkable quark existence."

-Albert Goldbarth, ". . . a museum, of sorts, for errors."

Here? The quotation marks around solid. They give it away--put the lie to the lie of emptiness, for if you can imagine that a word can be ironized or emphasized, it means that you value something more than something else: some emptiness is more meaningful than another emptiness. And that's a no-no for nihilists. It's always location, location, location: the oxygen around me is important, more important than the oxygen around you. Call it the proximity factor. The town in Scotland--it doesn't matter which town--is somewhere, a location, a place, and at the very moment I am opening up that book around 3 o'clock in the afternoon, someone else is walking by, in a hurry, to meet someone else, not noticing the stark surprise of my collapse. I used to be frightened of "human kind / Cannot bear very much reality": but that's not right. There's always too much reality, in this place, now.