(192) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

Continuation of (190)

Where Félix comes to understand that memory is not quite as simple as he had thought… and that he is going to have to find a path which, until this day… he has perfectly ignored… and of which he has no idea…

He therefore begins by subjecting it to everything a reasonably well-trained intelligence can inflict upon a recalcitrant sheet of paper: he turns it around, turns it upside down, imagines a mirror for it, searches for some learned permutation, while the page, which has received no particular training of its own, continues quite calmly to resist him. Lucian says he received it from Igniatius, who attributes it to the Moon Child… The lineage is impeccable; only readability is lacking, a detail to which Félix, from long habit, still attaches a certain importance.

Then matters become more complicated, or clearer, which sometimes amounts to the same thing… the last letter is the first. There was therefore nothing to turn around except the path by which one thought one ought to arrive at the text, and Félix discovers that he must begin at the end in order to recover the beginning, an experience sufficiently improper for someone who had always assumed that time, at least, would respect the order of the files.

But there is better still… while he was trying to work out how the page had been made, something in him retained the vague memory of having faced this problem before… before remembering more clearly what it was, so that the very act of searching seems to find Félix again before Félix himself finds his memory. This is becoming troublesome, for the text, precisely, appears to speak of beginnings, of what was already there, of a door that is entered in one direction and exited in the other, “or the reverse,” and finally leads our reader towards a mirror and a Chamber of Reflection where a bridge is thrown between oneself and oneself.

This is what the beginning of the text says… at the bottom of the page… once the key has been found:

“In a beginning…”

Félix carefully refrains from drawing any conclusion from this… he still has principles. Only those principles… which are his own… have begun to take side roads, and it occurs to him that the past might sometimes be recovered from what comes after it, that a thought might arise from a gesture rather than precede it, and that an outline perhaps becomes visible to the person willing to follow it before demanding that it be drawn.

The Child Moon still explains nothing, which, all things considered, may be his most effective way of teaching Félix. Félix wanted to decipher a page… and finds himself suspecting that it was his way of reading that had been written backwards.