The Circular Ruins
No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sink into the sacred mud, but in a few days no one was ignorant that the taciturn man came from the South and that his homeland was one of the infinite villages upstream, on the violent slope of the mountain, where the Zend language is not contaminated by Greek and where leprosy is infrequent.
The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though supernatural.
He wantedto dream a man
; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality. This magical project had exhausted the entire space of his soul; if someone had asked him his own name or any trait of his former life, he would not have been able to answer.At first, his dreams were chaotic; then in a short while they became dialectic in nature. The stranger dreamed he was in the center of a circular amphitheater which was at times the burned temple, at times the ruins. Clouds of taciturn students fatigued the amphitheater; their faces hung beyond a hundred years.
Night after night, the man dreamed the man. At first, the dreamed man was vague; little by little, he was made more precise. One afternoon, the man nullified the entire dream and began again. He understood that to attempt to shape the whole man at once was impossible.
One night, the dreamed man stood up from the dream and walked. Fire revealed itself to him and told him that he was only an appearance, that another man was dreaming him.
With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.