The text below is something I wrote at some point this last year to describe in a more literary manner the moment of my inspiration for ‘No Priphet’. For a time, it was the text that I had on the website to describe the book. My initial through was to include it in the book, to have it between the dedication and the ‘Prologue of Prologues’, but in the end, it may have confused or fatigued the reader. Because I don’t want the text to be completely lost however, I decided to publish it as a blog post instead.
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It was during the writing of the ‘Assault on Karthige’, as I was trying to put my notes in order and was writing the first chapters, when I met Marianna, in the small forest that I frequent.
It was the first time I was seeing her there, and it was clear she did not really know where exactly she was. Yet she was sitting on the fallen tree that I usually sit on too, to gaze at the lake, right next to the rock in the shape of a pyramid that had once rolled down from the nearby mountain, from which I was also descending that same day.
I greeted her and sat next to her, and she shrank to the opposite direction, either to give me space or to create some distance for herself. She was lost in her thoughts, her face troubled. She probably did not feel like having a chat, but the weather was good, she was in my way, and she was sitting at my usual place.
She looked at me, I looked at her, and we both felt as if we knew each other for years. I read her eyes and realized that we were kindred spirits, we had the same worries and concerns. I gave her some time, so I could also gather my thoughts, so I could decide if what she would tell me were things that would happen or things that had already happened.
‘Talk to me’, I told her, after a while. This brought her around, and without objecting, she started telling me things that had already happened and had troubled her, had amazed her, about people she had spoken to.
In the course of the day her friends and colleagues came to find her, Nikitas and Andreas, and they brought beers, refreshments and sandwiches. We sat there, next to the lake, and they also told me everything they had seen, everything they had read, about the reached they had conducted and all they were planning to write, their story stretched out in front of me.
It was dusk, a ginger light in the horizon, when their narration came to an end. I got up to stretch for a bit, and I stood next to the rock like a pyramid and looked at the sun that was going out in the horizon, considering all that I had heard. When I turned to look at them, to ask them one last question, they were no longer there. And yet, all they had told me, the scenes that had freely given to me, burned in my mind, and I felt them all a burden.
So I took the road of my return to the mountains, and ‘No Prophet’ started taking shape that same night.