While I was considering this metamorphosis my distance from the Sun was growing shorter, though with great slowness, because of the serenity of the ether which became more rarefied the closer I came to the source of the day. For as the ether which makes up this stratum of the sky is spread apart through the great void that it fills, and as this material is consequently very lazy (the void possessing no action) this air could no longer produce anything but a tiny wind, passing through the hole of my box and scarcely capable of holding it up. I never reflect on the malicious caprices of Fortune, who always so opposed the success of my enterprise, without being surprised that my mind didn't fail me. But listen to this miracle, which future centuries will scarcely believe. Closed inside my little box, which I had ceased to see, and with my momentum slowed so much that I had trouble not falling over-that is, in a state where everything which surrounds the great machine of the World was no longer able to help me, I found myself in a period of great misfortune. Yet even as we are about to expire we are pushed from within toward those who have given us existence. And thus I lifted my eyes to the Sun, our common father. This ardor, coming from my will, not only kept my body upright, but lifted it toward the thing that it sought to embrace. My body pushed my box, and in this way I continued my journey. As soon as I noticed this I stiffened as much as I could the faculties of my soul and attached my imagination to that thing which attracted me. But with my head bearing the weight of my little cell, the top of which held back the efforts of my will, finally this burden forced me to try to grope my way toward the door, which was, of course, invisible. Happily, I finally found it, opened it, and threw myself out. The natural fear which all animals have when they find themselves supported by nothing drove me to stretch out my arm. Being guided only by Nature, by instinct, which doesn?t reason, I could not stop Fortune from pushing my arm onto the little capital of crystal. Alas, what a thunderous sound it made when the icosahedron broke into pieces. Such a disorder, such a misfortune, such terror are beyond expression. The mirrors attracted no more air, since there was no more vacuum. The air no longer became wind from trying to fill the vacuum and the wind thus stopped pushing my box upward. In short, I saw it fall in fragments through the vast fields of our World. It recovered the opacity it had breathed out earlier, as it fell into the lower regions-even as some souls come back after death to try to rejoin the bodies they have left, sometimes wandering for a hundred years around their sepulchers. I believe that it lost its diaphanous quality in this way, for later I saw it in Poland, in the same condition as it was when I first stepped into it. I know that it fell directly on the equinoctial line, landing in the kingdom of Borneo, that a Portuguese merchant bought it from the islander who found it and that, from hand to hand, it came into the possession of a Polish engineer who now uses it to go flying in. Thus, suspended in the wave of the heavens, and already frightened by the death that awaited me with my fall, I turned, as I have said, my sad eyes toward the Sun. My glance carried my thought. My gaze, fixed on its globe, traced out a pathway which my will followed in order to carry my body. The power of my soul to move my body in this way will be understood by anyone who considers the simplest effects of our will. I know, for example, that when I want to leap, my will, supported by my fantasy, having drawn together the entire microcosm of my body, seeks to transport it to the proposed goal. If it occasionally fails to reach that goal this is because of the principles of Nature, which are universal, and weigh on all. Since the power of my will is individual and prey to the senses, and since the impulse to fall toward the center is general for all material, my leap is forced to stop as soon as matter has overcome the insolence of the will that has acted suddenly against it. I will not speak of the other things that transpired during the rest of my journey, for fear of taking as long to tell as it took to go. All I can say is that at the end of twenty two months I finally landed on the great plains of the Day, on the surface of the Sun.
Translation copyright Timothy Hampton 2004
Page
view 