Atlas

A book is all things, and there are books that are all books. In the past there was a book called an encyclopedia where the world looked at itself and tried to find out about itself: find the jungles, the seas, the stars, the princes and the beggars, the philosophers and the prostitutes, the truth and the lies that it tries to imitate her The world was sparse and colorless, but the encyclopedia made it worthy of the adventure: where objects lived isolated and in the dark, without contact with the nondescript bodies around them, the book made them meet, call each other, share traces, resorting to metaphor and plagiarism; where the delivery note and the administrative procedure prevailed, the book called to vertigo, to the treasure map; where the anonymous faces of men clustered to queue or catch the bus, the book identified assassins, courtesans, secret agents, priestesses, and madmen. The world was dull and gray behind the window glass; the encyclopedia was luminous and vast, inexhaustible, under the role of the endpapers. They say that those books ceased to exist, that they became extinct before the arrival of machines that know everything, or that boast of it. But there are some who do not give up, and continue to caress that old ambition: that what is inside is what is outside, that wakefulness imitates sleep, that the tiger, the clouds, the diamonds, the sewing machines, the teeth, the swords, cities, blood and crocodiles are, first and foremost, words on a page, signs to be discovered.