Free The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz Page A

look like pictures of a white sky studded with black constellations. There were times too when the letters, pictorial and abstract both, became so complicated that it would take several hours to write just one of them; so, of course, very little was written, although it doesn’t seem that anyone on the island was too concerned by this. Indeed, I believe the writer was actually pleased if, on his way across the line, he struck upon such a letter; he could then take a break from his narrative and immerse himself joyfully in the writing of a single character.
    Nor was it possible to read this kind of laboriously written script in a single, fleeting glance; it was necessary to go through it collecting distinguishing features—and there were a great many of these, hidden in its knotty network of lines. (It might be that two letters had twenty-nine distinguishing features in common, differing only in the thirtieth.) Hence, a reader could wade around in the bliss of a single letter, and the reading of a single letter of this labyrinthine script might take him one whole afternoon. It rarely happened, in the process, that the reader attained the meaning of the word of which this letter was a part, but he was certainly not concerned by this: his compensation was his encounter with the meaning of a single letter—which always far surpasses the reference point of speech, and its mysterious capacity for communication.
    Having decided to write this book, I considered how it should look. For a time I wondered whether it might not be best to produce a book which, instead of a narrative about the island, was made up of nothing more than a few of these complicated letters, thus allowing readers to read into it what they would. To the objection that my readers wouldn’t know the sounds to which the letters refer, the islanders’ riposte would surely be, “All the better!”
    Of course, the island’s script developed through its interaction with other scripts as well. Thanks to its precious stones, the island always had contact with the outside world. Sometimes I even think I see traces of the island’s viewpoint and manner of thinking in European culture—in Novalis’s meditations on shapes that generate sounds in wood shavings, for example, or in the origins of abstract painting, or in the letter-pictures of Klee. It’s far more difficult, on the other hand, to find manifestations of the spirit of Europe on the island. Although the islanders have always been very accepting of everything, in the end things always turn out the same way, as they did with the language, science, and religion of their erstwhile conquerors from Europe: all of these borrowings were perfectly absorbed into the rhythms of the island and thus transformed into everyday parts of island life, indistinguishable from any other. Nevertheless, it is still possible to find deposits in the island’s script that indicate several old encounters with the Latin alphabet, each of which led to the siphoning off of some of its letters. Marooned among the native letters, these orphaned Latin characters experienced a bizarre metamorphosis: they expanded, they hurled out offshoots in all directions, slowly revealing images of tigers, birds, and fantastical trees. (Was this not, in fact, a return to their mystical origins? A partial revelation of their enduring, hidden power?) Whenever the script of the island swallowed up foreign letters in this way, it would transform them so perfectly in the course of its digestion—into the aforementioned animals, or tangles of lines, or geometric shapes—that on second encounter they were unrecognizable. And it would accept the same letter again and again, and so seem to have grown a new symbol with a distant similarity to the existing one, when in fact what had happened is that the same alien character had been swallowed up by itself, by its own rampant form, which it had initially acquired after first being disfigured by the island’s