When at last you have lost almost all trace of identity, and you are on the verge of achieving your heart’s desire, God, All-Loving as He is, learns of your virtual nonentity and invites you to the Library. He knows what it is like to be nobody. You say with all the passionate emptiness of your heart: Thou hast heard. God goes to the bookshelves and pulls out a great volume. You open it up and read: Call me Ishmael . . . . and there you are, with a damp, drizzly November in your soul, following funerals, and needing all your self-restraint not to step into the street and start knocking people’s hats off. You consider killing yourself right out – like Cato throwing himself upon his sword. This can’t be happening, you think to yourself, though what it is that is happening is an empty thought. Then, it is final. The lines of text become threads, a twisted umbilical cord at the end of which there is nothing it is like to be you. You take to ship, a white phantom leading you on. And there you are, abandoned, floating on a vast, milky sea of non-being.
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