When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea’s deranging expanses.

Kali was the most compassionate, because she granted moksha—liberation—to her children, and her love for them extended beyond all human comprehension. Her black skin, she said, was the symbol of the void that transcends all form, the cosmic uterus in which all phenomena gestated, while her necklace of skulls comprised the egos she had freed from the principal object of their identification, which was nothing less than the body itself.