(108) The Moon Child will become Don Carrot

"A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of the years and of the worlds. He consults them instinctively upon waking, and in a second reads there the place on earth that he occupies, the time that has elapsed until his awakening; but their ranks may become confused, may break apart. If toward morning, after a spell of insomnia, sleep overtakes him while reading, in a posture too different from the one in which he fell asleep, it is enough for his arm to rise to stop and send back the sun; and in the first minute of waking he will not know the time, he will think he has only just gone to bed. If he dozes off in a position still more displaced and divergent, for example after dinner, seated in an armchair, then the upheaval will be complete in the worlds thrown from their orbits; the magical armchair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and at the moment of opening his eyes he will believe himself lying down, several months earlier, in another country."

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

 

 – Imprudent reader, you may come into this world, whereas I cannot, alone, come into yours. Take care not to become, as I have, a prisoner of this one... or of the other. The world to which I belong reveals itself with every page and disappears the moment it is closed and another appears...

For an instant, in that clearing, near the giant tree, the Moon Child... or perhaps Don Carrot... thought he saw an old-fashioned wagon advancing, drawn by a donkey. Hardly had he turned his head before both the obscure vehicle and the animal had vanished.

Had the image awakened a memory, or had the memory brought forth the image?

And, more troubling still... perhaps the same was true of him.

 

 

 

 How and why had the Moon Child arrived there, in that clearing situated at the very heart of the circus, drifting from island to island?

He did not know.

Like every day, he forgot the one before it. He no longer asked questions.

This was without reckoning with the questions he tried in vain to escape, questions that sparkled at his ears day after day. They were not words but tiny lights that danced around him. They possessed no more physical presence than he himself, who, without words to name him, would not exist.

Long years had passed, during which he had grown.

Without knowing it—and still less knowing where or when it had happened—he was no longer called the Moon Child.

His name had changed.

Don Carrot was now his name... or at least that was what others called him.

A name he had neither chosen nor consented to bear, yet one he was obliged to carry if he wished to obtain an answer to the question that circled endlessly around his head, day and night, like a star governed by its sun.

Subject to the vagaries of a mind he hoped was not overly troubled, installed by force within a story he continually strove to bend, Don Carrot placed one foot before the other as one places one letter after another and, word by word, bravely attempted to read what, within the dust of stories, was being written and erased with every step.