The Book

October, 29th, 2019.

That day I confirmed that I don't care about anything.

I called her, I was smoking on a coffee terrace, and it was around 17:00 h.

She said she felt bad, guilty. She wants to continue with her husband and wants us to be just friends again. Fuck that, I thought.

—It's ok, I said, but it's better that we stop seeing each other. I have no interest in seeing you only as a friend—.

That was the last time that I talked with Melissa. After the phone call, I finish my coffee, lit another cigarette and wrote something in my notebook:

"Yes, I'm probably depressed. I feel like plastic, floating in a sea of trash or something. Nothing matters. This is not new, I remember my last year of college, I was in a karate tournament, my team won, we were national champions in team kumite. My dad sent me like three months worth of my allowance to go out to celebrate. But I felt like I was dead inside, guilty for not being happy, I just wanted to sleep".

It has been more than five years. The book of Lowry made me browse in my old notebooks. There have not been many changes since then, I live in another city, I´m not training anymore. I keep writing and I work in a newspaper: culture section. I write mostly about movies and books, about some cultural events, and sometimes I make some articles that I call miscellaneous. This week I think I am going to write about the treasure of Lowry: The book of sand. That thing is, according to what he said, unique in his kind.

The article goes like this for now.

________________________

The unbelievable world of the doubtful Nagar. (Draft)

By August Bird.

Italo Calvino in his lecture about multiplicity talks about the contemporary novel as an encyclopedia, as a method of knowledge, and above all as a network of connections between the events, the people, and the things of the world. This is a holistic vision of literature, is the belief that a book can cover all the reality, and is a defense to the aspiration to contain the universe in paper, in words. Within the examples that he gives are found the next authors:

Carlo Emilio Gadda: who sees the world as a system of systems, as a tangled skein of yarn where the simultaneous presence of the most disparate elements converges to determine everything.

Robert Musil: for whom the knowledge is the awareness of the incompatibilities of two opposite polarities. One of these he calls exactitude or pure spirit while the other he calls soul or irrationality.

Marcel Proust: the network that links all things is composed of points in space-time occupied in succession by everyone, which brings about an infinite multiplication of space and time. The world expands until it can no longer be grasped, and the knowledge it´s attained by suffering this intangibility.

In Calvino lecture are also mentioned Goethe, Lichtenberg, Lucretius, Boccaccio, Novalis, Mallarme and Flaubert, all of them obsessed with the aspiration of an absolute book, one book about emptiness, about the void, about the universe, about the cosmos. They dream with the ultimate book, with The Empty Book of the World.

Noe Nagar tried to write this book and he called his work The Book of Sand. The edition that ended in my hands it's the English version translated by E Renzi in 1918, the original according to Renzi was written, in the legible parts, in a Spanish grammar using Hebrew and Greek characters and in the most obscure parts it was in a similar language to the Voynich Manuscript.

There seems to be no more copies of this book, neither translated or in the original. Also the existence of Noe Nagar it's in the better case doubtful. In the brief preface of the book Renzi says that Nagar was surely of Jewish descent raised in a family of rabbi's but Nagar was not a practicing of Judaism, his beliefs were heterogeneous. He used to practice a kind of syncretic religion that, according to Renzi, Nagar made up by mixing Egyptian and Greek polytheism with Semitic monotheism and oriental values.

Nagar personal god was Toth also known as Hermes Trimegisto or Mercurio. Renzi claims that The Book of Sand is the compilation that Nagar made of the forty-two books that Hermes himself wrote and that contains everything.

The The Book of Sand that is in my possession has a hard black leather cover with a silver engraving of a half-moon and an Egyptian bird standing on it. The pages are unnumbered, there are approximately a thousand. About the content of the book I have to agree with Lowry, it's fiction. There are beautiful descriptions of unbelievable deserts of red sand in which you can observe an unforgettable view when the two suns are set. There is a classification of animals and plants that cannot be anything else that magical. The only thing that seems real in that book it's the human history, though, it may be more accurate to say humanoid history.

In the world that Nagar describes, humans are equally capable of greatness, kindness, horror and suffering that in this world. In his book Nagar does not name any man, woman, or any land. There are kings, queens, servants, killers, plains, mountains, but there are no proper nouns for this. Nagar wrote like a seer that seems to know everything but does not tell the details.