Free The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

America. Unlike the other writers on the subject, Dark did not assume paradise to be a place that could be discovered. There were no maps that could lead a man to it, no instruments of navigation that could guide a man to its shores. Rather, its existence was immanent within man himself: the idea of a beyond he might someday create in the here and now. For utopia was nowhere—even, as Dark explained, in its “wordhood.” And if man could bring forth this dreamed-of place, it would only be by building it with his own two hands.
    Dark based his conclusions on a reading of the Babel story as a prophetic work. Drawing heavily on Milton’s interpretation of the fall, he followed his master in placing an inordinate importance on the role of language. But he took the poet’s ideas one step further. If the fall of man also entailed a fall of language, was it not logical to assume that it would be possible to undo the fall, to reverse its effects by undoing the fall of language, by striving to recreate the language that was spoken in Eden? If man could learn to speak this original language of innocence, did it not follow that he would thereby recover a state of innocence within himself? We had only to look at the example of Christ, Dark argued, to understand that this was so. For was Christ not a man, a creature of flesh and blood? And did not Christ speak this prelapsarian language? In Milton’s P ar adise Regained, Satan speaks with “double-sense deluding,” whereas Christ’s “actions to his words accord, his words / To his large heart give utterance due, his heart / Contains of good, wise, just, the perfect shape.” And had God not “now sent his living Oracle / into the World to teach his final will, / And sends his Spirit of Truth henceforth to dwell / in pious Hearts, an inward Oracle / To all Truth requisite for me to know”? And, because of Christ, did the fall not have a happy outcome, was it not a felix culpa, a s doctrine instructs? Therefore, Dark contended, it would indeed be possible for man to speak the original language of innocence and to recover, whole and unbroken, the truth within himself.
    Turning to the Babel story, Dark then elaborated his plan and announced his vision of things to come. Quoting from the second verse of Genesis 11—”And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shi-nar; and they dwelt there”—Dark stated that this passage proved the westward movement of human life and civilization. For the city of Babel—or Babylon—was situated in Mesopotamia, far east of the land of the Hebrews. If Babel lay to the west of anything, it was Eden, the original site of mankind. Man’s duty to scatter himself across the whole earth—in response to God’s command to “be fertile … and fill the earth”—would inevitably move along a western course. And what more western land in all Christendom, Dark asked, than America? The movement of English settlers to the New World, therefore, could be read as the fulfillment of the ancient commandment. America was the last step in the process. Once the continent had been filled, the moment would be ripe for a change in the fortunes of mankind. The impediment to the building of Babel—that man must fill the earth—would be eliminated. At that moment it would again be possible for the whole earth to be of one language and one speech. And if that were to happen, paradise could not be far behind.
    Just as Babel had been built 340 years after the Flood, so it would be, Dark predicted, exactly 340 years after the arrival of the Mayflower at Plymouth that the commandment would be carried out. For surely it was the Puritans, God’s newly chosen people, who held the destiny of mankind in their hands. Unlike the Hebrews, who had failed God by refusing to accept his son, these transplanted Englishmen would write the final chapter of history before heaven and earth were joined at last. Like Noah in his ark,