Alphonse Millet is a seventy years old Frenchman who searches for his old notebooks he left in the attic or the basement of his country house. Alphonse quickly reads through his finds, and tells about their contents to his grand-daughter Lily who types and saves all the words she hears on her laptop computer, before the notebooks are thrown into a fire, because the old man doesn’t want anyone to ever waste their time and hurt their eyes deciphering what he calls, “that unreadable stuff”.
“Please write,” Alphonse says, “a black notebook. Eight per twelve centimeters. No title… No date… I wrote about the heart of a butterfly: Something sexy… About Voltaire, that he wasn’t at all an atheist, although he surely was an impious person… About turning time itself into fuel for an engine so we could visit other worlds… About the electric universe… About a child who believed that he could fool the world, who grew up to become a fool who believed that the whole world cheated on him... About a very hungry lady–I mean a dragonfly...” Etc.
Alphonse can’t find one special notebook, “the yellow one” as he calls it, but Lily discovers it in her room, at night, and learns an extraordinary secret her grand-father wrote about some thirty years earlier. What is Alphonse’s secret? What will happen next? I can not tell you now…
“Please write,” Alphonse says, “a black notebook. Eight per twelve centimeters. No title… No date… I wrote about the heart of a butterfly: Something sexy… About Voltaire, that he wasn’t at all an atheist, although he surely was an impious person… About turning time itself into fuel for an engine so we could visit other worlds… About the electric universe… About a child who believed that he could fool the world, who grew up to become a fool who believed that the whole world cheated on him... About a very hungry lady–I mean a dragonfly...” Etc.
Alphonse can’t find one special notebook, “the yellow one” as he calls it, but Lily discovers it in her room, at night, and learns an extraordinary secret her grand-father wrote about some thirty years earlier. What is Alphonse’s secret? What will happen next? I can not tell you now…
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[Picture: Divinity (detail) by reading_is_dangerous]
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The picture is soothing and intriguing. It is the shell of an egg that looks like a tiger's eye, with a god inside.
ReplyDeleteI would love to read what Alphonse says. And I want to know his secret, the secret of the yellow notebook. You will tell me, won't you?
d
//Divinity//
ReplyDeleteYour picture steals the scene
There is a certain hum, a soothing
sound in the background that sounds very much like "Ohm"...
The tones are pure, the tones are harmonic; I think they have wonderful healing properties.
//About Voltaire, that he wasn’t at all an atheist, although he surely was an impious person…//
Sounds like someone I know.
//turning time itself into fuel for an engine so we could visit other worlds//
How could this be done?
Time into fuel!
That is great thinking, only that
most people will say that "there isn't enough time" so do you think there was "enough fuel?" for the engine?
//The electric universe//
This makes me think of everything as being a balance of positives
and negatives. Any imbalance, any surplus of charges will require one body to move closer to another that bears the opposite charge
to regain the state of neutrality, The Center.
// About a child who believed that he could fool the world, who grew up to become a fool//
To his own eyes, he may be a fool, but he may have moved people to do crazy things. Those crazy things may have moved/overthrown crazy governments into their dooms.
//A very hungry lady--I mean a dragonfly//
Oh my.
//one special notebook, "the yellow one"... extraordinary secret...I cannot tell you now//
Please don't.
It will remove the thrill
of the unknown, the hunger
for what's coming.
But will you tell us
bit by bit... in the near
future?
Thank you for this beautiful
post (a time travel frees the
mind of the seemingly unbearable present)
and the Divine Picture!
Gold in a haze of time, that image--ahhhh to have a grand-daughter amanuensis, that WOULD be fine...I'm sitting at the new pc surrounded by festering journals, art supplies & notebooks--they're impeding the flow of chi...still have about 2 months to clear all this away (by Christmas, so my boys won't fret)--should I burn it???? Might be cleansing. But you should never burn yours. Oh, no....wait for that grand-daughter. You have a lot of time to create.
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