Solenoid

by Mircea Cărtărescu

Night by night, we fall sleep and dream. We sink into our visions’ cistern of melted gold. Like pearl divers, we cannot stay in these places for a long time: the need to breathe and the pressure on our tympana force us, periodically, to the surface. Four times a night we descend into the deep waters of our mind, we stay there a time and then, almost suffocating, we work our way up to the surface. In the morning we open our hands to reveal, glimmering among the lines of our palms, the frosty pearls for which we put our lives in danger: small fragments of our interior caliphate. Although we go there every night, most of the time we come back empty-handed. We are left amazed and unhappy, because we know we descended, we remember how our knife opened the oyster valves, but the pearls were scattered along the way, as though they had been nothing but unusually dense clouds, or abyssal fish who exploded from their own interior pressure.