lighting the dark night coming on

“We had no technical or other problems during shooting, until one moment almost at the end, when all our efforts seemed on the point of coming to nothing. Suddenly, in the scene where Alexander sets fire to his house—a single take lasting six and a half minutes—the camera broke down. We only discovered it when the entire building—our set—was already blazing, burning to the ground as we looked on. We couldn’t put the fire out, nor could we take a single shot: four expensive months of intense hard work for nothing. And then, in a matter of days, a new house was built, identical to the first. It seemed like a miracle, and proved what people can do when they are driven by conviction—and not just people, but the producers themselves.”

It is easy to get lost in Eudoxia: but when you concentrate and stare at the carpet, you recognize the street you were seeking in a crimson or indigo or magenta thread which, in a wide loop, brings you to the purple enclosure that is your real destination. Every inhabitant of Eudoxia compares the carpet’s immobile order with his own image of the city, an anguish of his own, and each can find, concealed among the arabesques, an answer, the story of his life, the twists of fate.

An oracle was questioned about the mysterious bond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpet and the city. One of the two objects—the oracle replied—has the form the gods gave the starry sky and the orbits in which the worlds revolve; the other is an approximate reflection, like every human creation.

For some time the augurs had been sure that the carpet’s harmonious pattern was of divine origin. The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing no controversy. But you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.

If you wake up one morning and it’s a particularly beautiful day, you’ll know we made it.

Sunshine

"Passingly, I think that this might always have been inevitable, that perhaps she had always known it but had wanted to hold on for me, for as long as she could."

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