The Lost Ideas

A narrow path covered in myths leads to the valley of lost ideas.

Myths themselves lost among the burnt scrolls of Alexandria. Ringed all round by bare rock, cut off from the water of the sea by desert, somewhere out there in the sands, amid a mountain rising alone, lies the valley.

On its floor, paved with the stones of time, rest the lost ideas of people, forgotten memories, sudden flashes of inspiration, beautiful visions someone glimpsed for an instant but passed by out of absent-mindedness, the first notes of the unwritten sonata I would have liked so much, a few sentences from the middle of the never-begun book about the valley of lost ideas, vague smudges from the lower right corner of a painting by an unknown artist, flowers never given, left to wither in the garden… From the heap by the stream there juts the wheel of that machine which would have made all the others pointless… It is hard for me to describe, because most of what I saw had not yet settled into form and colours, sounds or a face. To some it might have seemed rather… unformed.

Here too lie all the forgotten memories of childhood, all the revelations received before She came to visit them. In the last instant before Her. And under the shade of palm trees hung with cypress cones lie scattered the gleams of pearls never conceived… Beautiful in its endlessness is this collection. Spellbound, I gazed at the fragments of unfulfilled beauty. I now had all the time in the world before me to delight in the whole picture, and I was in no hurry. I had time enough to examine and touch each idea one by one. The one who gave me the map to reach the valley must have been at ease. For he neglected to mention one important detail. The only way out of the valley was through a narrow gate with stone foundations and a rusty iron arch. And on the arch, in small iron letters, was written:

“To open this gate, find the shape of the most distant dark constellation and place it in the lock.”

I had put off solving the riddle indefinitely, because the place offered endless finds, and besides, I was in no hurry to get anywhere.