Books are magical because they pull you back down to the ground. When we are too deep in the mundanity of our daily lives, we are walking through the comparatively infinitesimal cloud that engulfs that pragmatic, rigid, lowest common denominator shared understanding of the world. Books can snap us out of it to vividly see the actual richness of reality again. By reading the thoughts of others, written in that realm of ideas which we are all part of but which sometimes becomes a solitary place, we begin to see the details, the relations, the possibilities, the trajectories our flows of thought can take. Once more, some of the multifarious structures of enchantment, of surprising orders of things that overlap in the world as we live through it, reveal themselves to us. They lay hidden, like shapes and properties lurking behind halls of mirrors.
Behind the mirror we find the reflected thing, but in a different, mysterious, unseen guise turning its face to us. It is the same thing but not quite; it behaves differently, it responds differently to other things around it, it summons something else in us: unexpected constellations of things, where what was small now is big, sharing court as equals with what we thought was greatest and brightest, entering into partnership with the most unexpected associates, all recognisable but also in different form and attire. We had been blinded to these worlds by staying too long in the common cloud, obsessively highlighting certain things in a particular guise and behaviour while wrapping everything else in its thick mist, confounding it with meaningless background.
The world beyond mirrors, when the thick mist dispels or rearranges itself differently, can only be accessed once we are pulled back down to the ground. This is the realm of ideas, where books (and other products of deliberate engagement with thought and imagination, and a spirited effort to organise it) give it intelligibility while respecting its ethereal quality as ideas freed from the limitations of the current configuration of physical reality that we inhabit in the time and place in which we’ve been thrown into existing. These products are the ropes that pull us back to this solid ground, to a place where we can share this space with others instead of traversing it alone, trapped in the poverty of a single mind’s imagination.
We meet someone else in this realm of the imaginary, the book’s author and its acolytes. We walk these grounds lucid, like waking on a sunny spring morning after a good night’s sleep. And our period of dwelling in the common cloud lingers in our minds like a hazy dream. Like any dream, in our close-eyed fatigue we are gently drawn into its domain. We never realise that we have passed from one state of consciousness to another until we wake up. We play along with the dream’s own logic and rules, treating it as the way things have always been and always will be, until we wake up. And then it is as clear as this bright spring morning that it was a dream all along.
But in this world of ideas we need to dream as well, so we transition back and forth between these two spaces: the common cloud and the world of ideas. Just as the body tires, the mind grows inadequate for either realm and needs to be pulled to the other. During wakefulness we grow tired as the day passes, and we begin to crave sleep. Our lucidity and good sense dwindle as our whole being inexorably gravitates towards the sweet release of sleep and dreams. At some point we inevitably lie down, close our eyes, and drift off into another world with its own singular order. In this same manner, the mind requires the respite of shifting realms, from the mundane to the vividly strange and refreshing.
The ground, the realm of ideas, can be unforgiving at times and magical at others. Sometimes it is solitary, and sometimes it is communal as nothing else is. It will always eventually exhaust our minds, because our minds belong completely to neither realm: neither the sky nor the ground. In time it grows inadequate for either, and leaving for the other is the only wise choice. So, just as with sleep, from the ground we surrender (once more strangers to this land) and drift back into dreaming the common cloud. And we live through those strange situations, with their strange logic and figures, until we wake once more, drawn back down to the ground. But they are not the same. The ground, that realm of ideas, is the endless terrain above which the cloud of mundanity is but one of many clouds dotting the sky.
It could be said that the book is the rope to that ground, where we can see all the other clouds. And we may see them more clearly, in the good company of other dwellers of this particular region we find ourselves in today. But the common cloud is where society awaits. It may seem a deceitful haze from this vantage point, but as we find ourselves strangers in this land, our minds yearning for that sweet, dreamlike release, we gaze at it once more with a longing heart. After all, it is home as well, where we find our loved ones and the certainties that let us inhabit the physical world, however imperfectly.
In a sense, we are always at once dreaming our awakening, and awakening from a dream.
“Es verdad, pues: reprimamos
esta fiera condición,
esta furia, esta ambición,
por si alguna vez soñamos.
Y sí haremos, pues estamos
en mundo tan singular,
que el vivir sólo es soñar;
y la experiencia me enseña,
que el hombre que vive, sueña
lo que es, hasta despertar.
Sueña el rey que es rey, y vive
con este engaño mandando,
disponiendo y gobernando;
y este aplauso, que recibe
prestado, en el viento escribe
y en cenizas le convierte
la muerte (¡desdicha fuerte!):
¡que hay quien intente reinar
viendo que ha de despertar
en el sueño de la muerte!
Sueña el rico en su riqueza,
que más cuidados le ofrece;
sueña el pobre que padece
su miseria y su pobreza;
sueña el que a medrar empieza,
sueña el que afana y pretende,
sueña el que agravia y ofende,
y en el mundo, en conclusión,
todos sueñan lo que son,
aunque ninguno lo entiende.
Yo sueño que estoy aquí,
destas prisiones cargado;
y soñé que en otro estado
más lisonjero me vi.
¿Qué es la vida?
Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida?
Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño;
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son.”
Then let us curb this fierce ambition,
This rage of pride and passion,
For though we may dream again,
It is plain in this uncertain world
That life is but a dream.
The king dreams he is a king,
And in this delusive way
Lives and rules with sovereign sway;
All the cheers that round him ring,
Born of air, on air take wing.
And in ashes (mournful fate!)
Death dissolves his pride and state:
Who would wish a crown to take,
Seeing that he must awake
In the dream beyond death’s gate?
And the rich man dreams of gold,
Gilding cares it scarce conceals,
And the poor man dreams he feels
Want and misery and cold.
Dreams he too who rank would hold,
Dreams who bears toil’s rough‑ribbed hands,
Dreams who wrong for wrong demands,
And in fine, throughout the earth,
All men dream, whate’er their birth,
And yet no one understands.
’Tis a dream that I in sadness
Here am bound, the scorn of fate;
’Twas a dream that once a state
I enjoyed of light and gladness.
What is life? ’Tis but a madness.
What is life? A thing that seems,
A mirage that falsely gleams,
Phantom joy, delusive rest,
Since is life a dream at best,
And even dreams themselves are dreams.
From La vida es un sueño (Life is a Dream), by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, 1635
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