A book, of pristine origins

“Yes, Co-creation. And I love to read it every day. Only not with your letters, Papa. Mama taught me to read this book with different alphabetical letters. I love all sorts of happy letters. This is a book I can read my whole life. It tells about everything. And soon a new book will appear on the Earth. And you, my dear Papa, will write about this new book.”

“I don’t think you said that right, Volodya. You should have said: ‘will write this new book’.”

“But your ninth book, Papa, will not be one you will write. It will be co-created by many people — grown-ups and children. It will be a living book. It will consist of a whole lot of splendid chapters — paradise domains. People will write this book on the Earth with their Father’s happy letters. It will be eternal. Mama taught me to read these living and eternal letters, to make words from them.”

“Wait,” I interrupted my son. “I have to think about that one.”

He meekly fell silent at once.

Incredible, I thought. That means, somewhere here in the taiga Anastasia has an ancient book written in letters nobody else knows. She knows these letters, and she has taught our son to make words out of them and read them. She read me chapters from this book for my Co-creation. The chapters about how God created the Earth and Man, and I wrote them down. That’s how it worked out, according to my son. But I never saw Anastasia with any kind of book in her hands. And yet my son tells me that she translated the letters of this book for me. I shall have to find out everything through my son.

And I asked him:

“Volodya, you know that in the world there are a whole lot of different languages — for example, English, German, Russian, French and many others?”

“Yes, I know.”

“What language was it written in — the book Mama can read, and you too?”

“It is written in its own language, but its letters can speak in any language. And they can be translated into the language you speak, Papa. Only not all the words can be translated, because in your language, Papa, there are so few letters.”

“Can you bring this book to me — the one with ‘all sorts of happy letters’, as you put it?”

“I cannot bring you the whole book, Papa. I could bring you some of the little letters. Only why carry them around — it is better for them to stay where they are. If you wish, Papa, I can read you the letters right from here. Only I cannot read as fast as Mama.”

“Well, read it as best you can.”

Volodya rose to his feet, and pointing his finger out into space, began ‘reading’ sentences from the chapters of Go- creation-?

The Universe itself is a thought, a thought from which was born a dream, which is partially visible as matter. ... My son, you are infinite, you are eternal, within you are your dreams of creation.

He read syllable by syllable. I followed the expression on his face as it slightly changed with each syllable — now showing wonder, now attentiveness, now joy. But when I looked in the direction his finger was pointing, there were no letters, let alone syllables, to be seen out there in space, and so I interrupted this strange reading:

“Hold on a moment, Volodya. Does this mean you see some kind of letters out there in space? Why can’t I see them?”

He gave me a quizzical look. He thought for some time before saying hesitantly:

“Do you not see, Papa? Do you not see that birch tree over there, the pine, the cedar, the rowan-tree?”

“Sure I see them, but where are the letters?” ’Quoted from Book 4, Chapter 8: “Birth”.

“Those are the letters, the ones our Creator writes with!”

He began to read further, his finger pointing to each plant or tree in turn. And at last I grasped this incredible phenomenon. The whole area of the taiga surrounding the lake where my son and I were sitting (and where I had sat many times with Anastasia) was filled with growing things. The name of each tree or plant began with a particular letter, and some were known by different names. Name by name, letter by letter — and out came a syllable, then a word, and a sentence.

It was much later that I learnt that the trees, bushes and herbs throughout the whole area of the taiga around the glade were not just arranged randomly, but that they actually formed living, growing letters. It was an incredible book that, it seemed, one could read ad infinitum. It turned out that the very same plant names made up one set of words and sentences if read from north to south, but a whole different set if read from west to east. A third set resulted if one read strictly around the perimeter. And the names of the plants made up yet another series of words, sentences and images if one followed the movement of the Sun’s rays, which acted literally as a pointer.

I understood why Volodya called these letters “happy”. In traditional books all the printed letters are pretty much uniform. But in this situation, the living letters, even those associated with the same species, were always different. Under different angles of the Sun’s illumination, they greeted Man with their rustling leaves. Indeed, one could go on ‘reading’ them indefinitely

But who wrote this amazing book and when, and how many centuries did it take to write? Generations of Anastasia’s forebears? Or...? Later I heard from Anastasia this brief, laconic answer: For thousands of years generations of my forebears preserved the letters of this book in their original order.

I looked at my son and feverishly tried to find a topic of conversation on which we could reach a complete mutual un-derstanding.

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