Epilogue

And I would have been contented with such a conclusion. I completed my book, folded it and put it on the shelf amidst the other books I owned (though those others I did not write—at least not originally, anyhow) and I returned to any other business that filled my life, attending to a few obligations that the holistic engrossment of my book’s writing required me to neglect. No matter what I occupied myself with, however, the book never quite left my mind.

The single point which became most present to me was this idea that, although undoubtedly having written everything, as I had initially planned, there was still something missing. I pondered for some time the inceptive thought that had inspired my idea to begin with, the thought of writing what was not written, and I directed my attention to just what such a thing might be in the case of my book. Surely there could be nothing like it, for by my adopted procedure it was inevitable that any word or set of words one could write must have been written in my book—even symbols, images both material and imaginary, could have their appearances described and written, and though the symbols themselves would not have found themselves in my book, their literary forms, all of them, would have wound up there, and thus would have been included in my opus as much as anything can be expected to be included in a book. So what, then, if everything material, visible and invisible, thinkable and observable, had been included in my book, and all might agree that it is exactly these forms that constitute everything to any meaningful and operable extent, what then could I have been missing?

It was only then, while I was washing the dishes, that my mind was drawn to a rattling nothing, where my omission had been. I realised then that the only thing that could possibly have been missing from such a distinct everything was an intangible nothing, which undoubtedly was something, and irreparably my mind could never be drawn to it. If my book included everything that could be written, or described, then certainly it must not have included that which could not be described.

And I wondered for a while whether such a thing could exist. Surely, by attributing it the title of something that could not be described it became at once described, and no less establishing its own paradox than recognising its presence in, and thus not omission from, my book. But none the matter, paradox has no hold on reality, and thus the existence of that which could not be described did not, at least not absolutely, depend on my own discovery of proof towards any conclusion. If that which could not be described did exist, then I certainly had not included it in my book, and if it did not then the action of its acknowledgment was a betrayal of the same sensory truth that brings existence into its unary form. Applying logic, for instance, leads to two possibilities:

1. The book I have written contains everything, not including that which cannot be described, and
2. The book I have written contains everything, including that which cannot be described,

and it does not take much recognition to see that the second statement can only be absurd for a book, since no author will add to their opus that which they cannot describe. So surely, in binary fashion, the first statement must be true; however it too cannot, since that which cannot be described must too be included in everything, at the very least bearing the crest of nothing, but nonetheless included, and thus neither statement can be true, because the underlying assumption, that the book must include everything, is false. The alternate realisation, however, that the book instead includes only everything which can be described, is entirely sensible, and it must thus be accepted that it is that which I have written a book about, and not that which I had initially set out to do.

Pages: 1 2