To the Non-Specialist Reader From before the Nuclear Wars of the Contemporary Era, also known as the Four Wars of Entertainment, there is ample documentation of the widespread belief that an armed nuclear conflict, due to the balance of global forces and the nature of the defensive systems in play, would lead irrevocably to the complete and irreversible destruction of the planet. At the beginning of the work that concerns us, reference is made to this belief. The facts demonstrated the error of this prediction. The systems in place for security, prediction, and detection became sophisticated enough to permit what came to be known in Sweitzerian terminology as wars of entertainment: a game based in accepted rules, as with jousting in the Middle Ages or casino gambling, that set limits to investment, the dimensions of the battlefield, and the maximum permissible losses. In the XXI and XXII centuries, the Four Wars of Entertainment took place; it is not our purpose to tell their story except to the extent that they aid in situation and understanding the text we are presenting here. Between the first three wars and the fourth, there would be a radical change in approach. Toward the end of the third, the great powers, the USA, USSR, China, and the Union of Islamic States would bomb their adversaries' weaker allies, but in the last, the borders of the chessboard were erased, and the hegemonic countries were turned into uninhabitable deserts; thereafter began the long period of more than two-and-a-half years that we know as the Age of Interminable Return. How had the survival of the communities affected by a disaster of such magnitude been possible? We know that the principal leaders of the most powerful countries and the economically dominant class organized into secret and very selective associations (the occasional spiteful historian has called them the Egregians, while others dub them Owaysis) with the objective of surviving a nuclear war, and with a clear intention of carrying on that was at once pragmatic, optimistic, and perhaps, from another perspective, ruthless. There is archeological evidence of nuclear shelters in the cellars of the Vatican, the Pentagon, Tokyo, the Kremlin, the Champs-Elysées, and other centers of government; all of them were destroyed in the Fourth War of Entertainment. Vast documentation indicates that none (or in any case, an irrelevant proportion) of the Egregians, Owaysis, or what have you, took refuge inside them at the moment of the attack. The real hiding places were in Cairo (or other locations along the North African coast), in Canada, South Africa, Antarctica, and the south of the Himalayas. One of the most studied documents in relation to this historical problem is the tale we know as The Garden of Seven Twilights. Its study provokes numerous questions, in regards to the identity of its author, the intention and nature of the text, the circumstances of its geographical location and chronology, and, as a consequence, its authenticity. Within its discourse arise a number of contradictions that have led more than one person to doubt the accuracy of the author of the Garden... as regards the facts at his disposal, although we are inclined to consider, following Potmanova , that dates have been deliberately obscured. We will remind the reader briefly of the chronology of the Second World War, 1939-1945, and the Third World War, more commonly known as the First War of Entertainment, 2025. The Second War took place from 2059-2061, the Third in 2091, and the Fourth in 2113. Relying on comparisons the final narrator of the Garden... draws between his own age and those of the other characters and the consequent links that can be logically established to historical facts that are datable with precision (for example, the location of the Ferrets after the Second World War, as detailed in Part III), Potmanova has demonstrated that the final narration must be situated at some time falling between 2018 and 2030, a period thus corresponding to the First War of Entertainment. This is confirmed by the already mentioned surprise of the narrator faced with nuclear war, a sentiment that would be inexplicable had others taken place before. Cari Te Varinee objects that nuclear projectiles were already in use during the Second World War, and that this argument therefore cannot be considered definitive. She further adduces that the personality of Ferret is not so unquestionably reinforced as to permit him to form the basis of a chronology, and views the destruction of Paris, which one of the characters in the reunion makes reference to, as categorical proof to the contrary; as is known, Paris was destroyed in the Third War of Entertainment, seventy-six years later. In the ensuing polemic, Potmanova replies that the mention of the destruction of Paris is itself not an irrefutable finding, and offers documentary testimony as to the turmoil and false accounts that circulated in Barcelona (and in other cities of tertiary importance) throughout the course of the Wars of Entertainment. Other scholars argue that the Garden... may be strictly contemporaneous with the First War of Entertainment (the style and the moralizing obsessions of the narrators reinforce this theory) and that the news relating to Paris represents the error of a character whom the final narrator portrays with -- elegiac -- credulity. Potmanova insinuates the possibility of the death of the author of the Garden... shortly after the work's composition. Leaving such matters aside, we believe that to situate the final narration after the end of the First War of Entertainment would generate many new questions without providing any solutions to them. Whatever the case, the emblematic (or at least literary) character of certain of the narrator's affirmations is evident in the lack of testimony relating to the civil disorder described at the beginning of the book. Events of this description seem likelier to have taken place in the period between the Second and Third Wars of Entertainment, when the partial destruction of the ports of Barcelona, Tarragona, and Valencia is documented. The problem of assigning a time period to the final narration in the Garden... continues, despite the pretense on the part of some authors to have corroborated it through a farrago of absurd details. According to Ahami , the ending of the book leaves open the suspicion that a greater evil, external to the narrator's intentions, impeded the story's continuation. Many hypotheses concerning the origin thereof have been advanced; the state of the original, now unfortunately missing, would have shed some light on the matter, at least after a radioactive analysis (no one at present doubts that the mansion of the Garden... was a highly secluded radioactive shelter). If, as some commentators sustain, the final narrator had been surprised by a nuclear explosion, and that was the motive for the story's interruption, this would point toward the Third War of Entertainment, but, from another perspective, it would raise enormous problems pertaining to the survival of the original and, as Potmanova indicates , this would call into question the authenticity of the work's finale. And a definitive refutation of this thesis is the amply documented destruction of Barcelona at the end of the Third War of Entertainment, by a conventional neutron bomb (which was an attempt to neutralize communications) launched without prior warning and hence without unleashing the scenes of disorder and the abandonment of the city described in the Garden... These contradictions lead us to classify the voyage of the final narrator as a metaphor for Barcelona between the Second War of Entertainment, when such a warning did in fact take place, and the Third, when Barcelona was actually destroyed. To our thinking, this is highly problematic. We consider exaggerated the opinion of Delvaux who sees, in essence, in the structure of the Seven Days in the Garden... an antimetaphor for other groups of meaning based on the number seven. Here one is obliged to make reference to the state of the question of point of view and the verbal situation of the narrators of the Garden... All of the aforementioned authors have pointed to the impossibility that, after a full and, one would suppose, rather restless day, a person should find time to transcribe the entire course of the same at length, appending numerous details and reflections. According to the story itself, between the moment he retires to his chambers and the moment when he awakens, the final narrator never has more than five or six hours free (often they are fewer) and it is unlikely that in this interval he would be capable of composing an account of the day. It should be added, the present perfect is rarely seen and far greater use is made of the preterit. Observe, in this connection, that the only fragment in which the final narrator employs the present tense is the final paragraph, which would lead one to suppose that the entirety of the Garden... was written between the night and daybreak of the eighth day, though this is every bit as impossible to accept as that the narrator endured seven days without sleep. Therefore, though not immune to the misgivings inspired by the above, we are inclined to place the final narration of the Garden... during the First War of Entertainment. The hypothetically incomplete nature of the text remains unresolved, as does the final narrator's taking the destruction of Barcelona for granted, though the latter, as we have noted, took place when the entirety of its residents considered themselves safe. In closing, we will refer to three equally debated questions: the identity of the final narrator, the location of the mansion, and the time of year when the final narrative takes place. Certain historians maintain that the cultural and political elites (the author of the Garden... certainly must have belonged to them, if he is to be identified with the final narrator) are aware of events prior to their coming to pass. Let us recall here those opinions that call into question the objectives and sincerity (understood here to mean that the narrator does not endow his words with an intention contrary to his own) of the author of the Garden... Delvaux himself ends his article by insinuating that the text was composed between the Second and Third Wars of Entertainment although the action takes place in the First. According to this theory, which cannot be categorically refuted, the Garden... must be considered a work of fiction from the first page to the last, written by a dissident or renegade from the Egregians who reveals his secrets anonymously and in code, with a didactic or exemplary intention, at the behest of an ideologically conservative group, or in the service of other interests that today, it goes without saying, lie beyond our grasp. If Delvaux's hypothesis is correct, it would completely refute the enduring belief (debated ad nauseam and thus unworthy of further mention) that the final narrator is, in effect, the author of the Garden..., and, whatever the case, lead back to the polemic (which does not seem close to abating) concerning the possibility of multiple authors of the work, rooted (and, we believe, grazing up against the absurd) in the presumed spuriousness of certain fragments of the text. On the subject of location, Reagan , Potmanova , and Te Varinee affirm that the mansion that forms the setting for the final narration is to be found in the Pyrenees. This conjecture is supported by the final narrator's observation related to the paradoxical return to the timetables of the XVIII century: in a journey lasting little more than two days, such a thing would be inconceivable unless the journey in question had covered a distance no greater than that which separates Barcelona and the mountains, taking account of the necessary detours. Taking the owner's identity, the nationalities of the lodgers, and the descriptions of the landscapes as his point of departure, Delvaux ventures the Alps as a possible setting, a thesis not excessively at odds with the return to XVIII century timetables. Ahami -- despite the overt repudiation of one of the characters -- declares that the distinguishing geological formations of the Garden of Twilight can only be found in the Himalayans; it is true that the foodstuffs provided are incongruous with the setting, but a dominant caste could arrange for their delivery; the problem of the journey, as well as of the explicitly occidental design of the mansion, is resolved through recourse to the symbolic or hieratic facet of the Garden... , which there is no need to emphasize. Ahami accounts for the adventitious vegetation present in the Garden of Twilight through recourse the same argument previously employed to explain the culinary anomalies, and to equally dubious effect. The problem of the final narrator's observations concerning the construction of the locale also remains unresolved; if (as he himself speculates) it is an astronomical observation point, comparable to the megaliths or the Egyptian temples, the angle of presumed alignment with the solstice would give us the latitude of the place under consideration; but the observer is not clear as to whether the second column referred to lies to the left or the right of first, and we are hence furnished with two extremely divergent possibilities. The first case would yield a latitude of some 42.6º N, corresponding to the Pyrenees, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the great ranges of Tian Shan (running from Kyrgyzstan to the Gobi desert) and, in the second, just fewer than 30º N, which would place us in the Himalayans; always assuming that the initial course of the sunrise was not obstructed by some object in the foreground; otherwise it would be necessary to posit a location further to the north, which would bring the Alta Mountains in Mongolia, the Carpathians, and the Alps into consideration -- a conclusion we may reasonably discard if, following the same line of observations, though this time with less sure footing, we accept the observation that Polaris is situated under forty-five degrees. The lone point of unanimity concerns the time of year in which the final narrative takes place, thanks to the objective data that the author of the Garden... has put at our disposal. In the context of a mountain setting of high altitude, the mere presence of snow and inclement weather would not have sufficed to locate the action in winter; there is, however, one detail that does not admit dispute: on the fourth day, there is a description of an after-dinner foray into the Garden of Twilight, at an hour that can be fixed between ten and twelve in the evening; whether the timetable in question is based on the solar or official day, the fullness of the constellations as described looking southward is only to be seen in the depths of winter; the (hypothetical) heliacal rising of Arcturus on the last night, which foretells the distant arrival of spring, confirms the hypothesis. An additional detail proffered by Potmanova examines the manner of dividing up the days, closer to popular customs than to an objective organization. The first version of the Garden... we have notice of is Document NGBW-582-F from the Library of New Haven, consisting of eight untitled discs appearing in the catalogue of the year 2429. In the subsequent inventory, after its transferal to the Congress building in the year 2476, only three of the original eight discs appear, and in the catalogue from the definitive implementation in the year 2481, all reference to the document has disappeared. The Codex Dy. QH-200 from the condensed program of the Orientation Course at the University of Portsmouth, dated 2460, is, according to the exegetes, the oldest version of the Garden... that has been conserved. It consists of five discs with the title Narratives from the Mansion of Twilight, and its introduction makes clear that it derives from a previous codex recorded in Damascus on analog tape, which has vanished in the interim, though its existence is attested to by references in the libraries of Varna, Smyrna, and Baku. The Narratives... contains the totality of what is now established as Part I, minus the fragment of the beginning entitled "The Escape," and with the inclusion of three stories from Part II on the morning of the third day; it also contains the entirety of Part III with the exception of the first and last stories. The whole of the second part is missing apart from the stories already mentioned. There is documentary evidence attesting to two pirated editions (of which there are no surviving examples), one from Auckland near the end of the XXV century with the (rather absurd) title Eight Days in the Exile of Thirty Survivors of the Third World War, and another from Kabul, probably contemporary with the Portsmouth Codex and, to all appearances, heavily expurgated, with the no less arbitrary and presupposing title Manuscript Found at the Mountain Palace. The first edition conserved in a substantially complete state, with a clear delimitation of the ten days (three from the commencement of the action in Barcelona and seven in the mansion) and an absence of important gaps in the plot is that compiled by Vlada Browoska, from the year 2533, recorded on twelve KJEK-22 discs. Lamentably, the coding introduction, which undoubtedly contained an account of the sources used, was lost in a reproduction (in 2714 or 2786), and the only data regarding its precedence that have been preserved are the transcription codes, which comply with a system of ionized quartz clearly current some time before the XXIII century. It is the first version in which Part II appears (without the "Story of the Orly Airport," the "Story of the Swing and the Stars," and the "Story of the Three Friends") and the entirety of Part III, including the final polemic, widely considered spurious; absent, however, are the central repetitions in the "Story of the Dinner at the Home of Virginia Guasch." In a copy of this edition made in Zebid in the year 2840 and conserved in Codex Nmj. NHAX-40-BNB in New Jerusalem, The Garden of the Seven Twilights appears for the first time as a designation for these texts taken as a group; the name will quickly take hold, overcoming other attempts such as that of Theodor Heikein in Tiflis in 2862, whose edition, preserved in 135mm film, is christened Memoirs of a Recalcitrant Agonist. The origins of the title that the work has retained to the present day had been forgotten during the past five hundred years, until the reclassification of the Sidney Library rediscovered Browoska's version. The cataloguist gives a personal perspective on the reason for the title, which to his thinking relates to the recognizes joke of infinite regression, and he offers a number of lengthy earlier citations (now lost to us) in which this concept figures; for this reason, we are inclined to accept his verdict. At present there exists an extensive bibliography concerning the pros and contras of this title, a number of numeric ones among them: to wit, including the stories which are actually no more than introductions to other stories or form a block of more abstract lucubrations, and excluding the continuations, there are 13 narratives in the first part, 27 in the second, and 9 in the third, hence: 13 + 27 + 9 = 49; √49 = 7. It may be objected that 50 is not a bad number to round off the grouping, and that it would suffice to add in the initial narrative, which includes the entirety of them -- something which would not exactly be out of place. To compose the present version, we have relied on the Codex Nmj. HHAX-40-BNB in New Jerusalem, which is in a significantly better state than Browoska's original, reproduced in Sydney; we have supplemented with disc VUZN-6A from Neckanti for the three missing stories from the second part, and with Codex 40-MPMM-78700 from Mozartown for the beginning of the first part and the finished "Story of the Dinner in the Home of Virginia Guasch" in the third part; both choices are amply supported by scholarly opinion. We believe that our ordering of second part and the beginning of the third (in principle, the matter most open to controversy) is the one that best respects the logical sequence of the gathering; to our thinking, there is an imbalance in the critical editions of Sashmi and Kublakan, which place too great an emphasis on the third part, thereby distorting the internal conflict of the final narrator, a figure who from the very first is already highly dubious and divergent. MIQUEL DE PALOL I MAHOLY-McCULLYDILLY Resident Librarian, the Nachmanides Institute New Jerusalem (EU) Excerpted from The Garden of Seven Twilights by Miquel de Palol All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
