I stood on a rock as close to the waves as I dared. It is a spot I go to often, where the water is deep and cold and the air is busy with sound. It is a good place to swim, or just to think. The sea, like the lake where many years ago I had fed the geese, was all a case of knives, and I stared out at the glinting waves for quite some time.

  Standing on the shore always makes me think of people who arrive in new places, particularly when travel was much more difficult and they did not know what to expect—people who left their native lands, for one reason or another, to arrive on the shores of someplace else. I come from such people. I belong to a tradition of people who feel displaced all the time, no matter which bewildering place we visit. I have written about some of these people, so perhaps you have read of the adventures and troubles they have had, when they left their homes behind and wandered this confusing and often frightening world. Perhaps you are one of us too, investigating your life and thinking about the world, always feeling native to nowhere. We put on disguises sometimes, to pose as people we are not, to hide, or to blend in, or just to see what will happen, hoping that our secrets will never be found out. We are scattered all over the world, and because we are scattered all over the world, we do not always understand each other. But people like us can try to imagine it, and try to feel like we are all in the same organization, or the same family, even if we do not even speak the same language.

  The sea-birds squawked around me, and I remembered when the sorcerer Makarandiká from A Syrup of the Bees is married to Arunodaya, who believes she is the reincarnation of his wife from the pandit class, and says the wrong thing, wrecking her marriage and her life. She turns to her husband and says, “How short a time it seems, since I settled on that parapet in the form of a sea-bird,” and he learns suddenly of her trickery, that she has spent years pretending to be something she is not. Why does she do this? I had thought that perhaps it made more sense in the original Sanskrit manuscript, but now I knew that there probably wasn’t such a manuscript. I might never know anything more, I thought, never in my entire life, and who knew how short my entire life might be, due to poison?

  The sea-birds settled together on a rock, and then flew around again, then settled, then flew around. I assumed they were native to the area, but for all I knew they were sorcerers. I did not know what they were called, and I did not even know what they were doing, flying and settling, settling and flying. I watched them for quite a while, wondering about my poisoned breakfast and all my unanswered questions, and knowing hardly anything about the birds in front of me. They do that.

  I jumped into the water.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It is said that there are three rules for writing a book. The first rule is to regularly add the element of surprise, and I have never found this to be a difficult rule to follow, because life has so many surprises that the only real surprise in life is when nothing surprising happens. Perhaps you were surprised to read, at the end of the previous chapter, that I jumped into the cold and swirling water, which means I managed to follow the first rule of writing a book, but truth be told I was just as surprised to find myself plunging into the sea. It was the sort of decision you make so quickly it does not even feel like you are deciding, just that you have already decided. One moment I was standing on the rock, thinking of how if I were poisoned, I might not have many more chances to swim here at this particular spot, and the next I was in the water.

  The second rule is to leave out certain things in the story. This rule is trickier to learn than the first, because while life is full of surprises, you can’t leave any part of life out. Everything that happens to you happens to you. Often boring, sometimes exhausting, and occasionally thrilling, every moment of life is unskippable. In a book, however, you can skip past any part you do not like, which is why all decent authors try not to have any of these parts in the books they write. But few authors manage it. Nearly every book has at least one part that sits on the page like a wet sock on the ground, with the reader stopping to look at it thinking What is this doing here? This is why I left out the part where I removed most of my clothing before jumping into the sea, because no sensible reader is interested in things of that nature. If Little Red Riding Hood, the hero of an old folktale, needed to use the bathroom while walking through the forest to see her grandmother, that is her business, which is why just about all of the books about her leave out that part. If Oedipus, the hero of a famous play, had an itch he couldn’t scratch and it really bothered him, that is not something we necessarily want to read about, so it should happen offstage where we won’t hear about it. And I can’t find a good reason to tell you exactly what I was wearing or if it required unbuckling or unbuttoning or if I folded things neatly or just dropped them in a heap on the rocks by the shore, so I have followed the second rule of writing a book, and left it out.

  Of course, there are some parts of a story you can’t leave out, or there is no story at all. I recently read of an old Japanese tale about a feudal lord, who, for some reason—it was left out of the story—hates old people, and so makes a rule that everyone over the age of seventy has to be brought to the mountains and abandoned there. One young man has an elderly mother, but he cannot bear to leave her in the mountains, and so hides her in the basement of their home. Soon afterward, some fierce enemies arrive and say that they will destroy the entire area unless the feudal lord can do three things:

  1.make a rope of ashes,

  2.pull a thread through a nine-sided jewel, and

  3.cause a drum to beat by itself.

  The feudal lord, of course, cannot do these things, but, the tale tells us, the mother can, and so everyone is saved and the feudal lord decides he doesn’t dislike old people after all.

  You can see at once that too much was left out of this story, and I was annoyed at whatever long-dead person had written it down without telling me how someone’s mother managed to do the three seemingly impossible tasks of

  1.making a rope of ashes,

  2.pulling a thread through a nine-sided jewel,

  and

  3.causing a drum to beat by itself.

  If you leave this part out, I wanted to explain to this author, there is hardly any story at all, except for a vague lesson that we shouldn’t hate old people, which all sensible readers know anyway. You can’t hate old people, because if you are not an old person, you will become an old person, or die while trying to do so. So I will leave out the part about taking my clothes off—not every stitch of clothing, mind you, but just enough to swim and be decent at the same time—but I will keep in the book how it feels to me to swim in open water, a phrase which here means “not in a pool or a bathtub, but in a river or a lake or, best of all, the ocean,” because it is important to the story and philosophy of this book.

  Water and I have always gotten along. I was not a child who complained about having to take a bath or a shower, because I enjoyed being alone somewhere where people could not interrupt me, or if they did, I could pretend not to hear them over the water running. It was one of the delights of my childhood to say, over and over from my side of the bathroom door, “I’m sorry, I cannot hear you over the running of the water,” even when I could often hear very clearly somebody or other saying, “Will you be much longer?" or “You must be clean by now” or “I think you’re just turning the water back on every time I try to say something to you, Master Snicket.” To this day, I like to sneak to a sink sometimes to splash water on my face, to wake myself up if I am feeling drowsy or to cool myself off if I am feeling cranky, and then to splash the droplets from my hands onto the mirror so it looks like the entire room is crying. I have always enjoyed a glass of water, something clear inside something clear, which seems to me full of hope. Sometimes when I am leaving my house, I decide to surprise myself by pouring myself a glass of water and leaving it on my desk for me to find a small gift from myself when I return, although sometimes, like the day I am writing about, I am in too much of a hurry to leave myself a surprise, so I tell myself, never mind me, I’ll be fine when I get home, I’ll explain to me that I didn’t have time to leave me some water.

  This morning I had hurried out of the house without even thinking about water, but now I was immersed in a body of water, which is my favorite kind. I like all sorts of ponds and lakes and seas and things. I like to stand at the edge of still water tossing pebbles, watching the little splashes and the circles spreading on the surface, always the same but different each time, like water itself, looking the same and different everywhere at once, the way an ocean will always be there but each wave will never happen again. I like to step slowly into a body of water, wading farther and farther in, the water getting deeper and deeper until I must give up walking and swim, but I also love to jump in and feel the sudden shift into being underwater, like the swift click into darkness when I turn the light off before bed.

  Once I was in the water, I held absolutely still for a second, as I always do, as if waiting for something, which I was. I have always suspected that if and when my actual finest hour arrives, those perfect sixty minutes, I might be in a body of water, but of course I am always, in a way, in a body of water. The human body is about sixty percent water, more than half of each and every one of us. Being a body of water is something you can say about absolutely anyone, so if you are ever asked what a certain person is like, and you cannot think of anything nice to say, you can just reply, “They’re mostly water.” I lay there underwater, a body of water inside a body of water, and then began to move, feeling graceful and elegant even though I am not an especially impressive swimmer and I knew I was likely sputtering around gracelessly and inelegantly. I didn’t care.

  To some people, swimming in the ocean may seem very dicey, a word which here means “as risky as rolling dice, if getting a certain number means you will drown,” and it is true you should never swim in a part of the ocean with which you are not familiar, because the tides and currents can behave like angry bus drivers taking you someplace far, far from where you want to go. There are also creatures in the sea, of course, and although most of them are harmless, you cannot regularly swim in the ocean without getting the occasional sting or nibble, the way you cannot walk regularly in a park without getting some dirt on your shoes, or attend school regularly without feeling, one day or another, that you are all alone and nobody likes you. Once I was swimming in the Pacific, one of my five favorite oceans, and a sea lion bumped right into me, very hard. We both stopped swimming and looked each other in the eye. I understood at once the sea lion’s question—Who are you and what are you doing here?—I hope the sea lion understood my silent answer, which was, I am a stranger and mean you no harm. Then, to my relief, we both went back to swimming, although in different directions.

  There was no sign of any such beast now, though, so I kept swimming, my ears getting used to the gurgle of the water and my arms and legs finding a suitable rhythm to keep myself moving, and then my favorite thing began to happen, the thing I like best about swimming in open water, which is nothing. I don’t mean there is nothing to like. I mean there is nothing, and I like it. Even with all of the creatures and the seaweed, the waves and the currents, the birds and boats on the surface and the submarines and coelacanths somewhere down below, the ocean has a vast emptiness, an immense open space that feels gaping and vacant even though it is full of water. Swimming in the ocean is like being a speck of dust in a large empty suitcase, or one tiny star in the endless sky. Every thought you have feels unnoticed, the way the sky pays no attention to one star’s flickering light, and every word in your brain echoes unremembered in the enormous suitcase of the sea,

  so

  you

  stop

  thinking

  at

  all.

  A book of philosophy usually ends up talking about God, or whatever name anyone has for the author of the story of the world. People have wondered about this since people, and wondering, were invented. Countless books have been written on this topic, and no book will ever provide a definitive answer, a phrase which here means “solution that is so clear people will stop arguing about it.” Some people think the story of the world has a very specific author, who is very opinionated about everything that is going on, and some people think the author has better things to do than worry about such events, and others think the story of the world has several or even many authors who are all working together or fighting or both. And some people think there is no author, and indeed the miracles of the world can seem even more impressive if you look at a meadow or a baby or some butterscotch syrup and believe that it all came from nothing.

  There is a philosophical idea I have always liked called tzimtzum, which is as tricky to say out loud as it is to think about. Tzimtzum proposes that the world did come from nothing, but that the nothing was made by something, so something made nothing in order for something to come from the nothing, and this may be why we spend most of our lives drifting between nothing and something. Perhaps you find this confusing and might need to pause for a second to read that sentence again, and that is an important part of tzimtzum too. To think about something, you often need to pause first—to make nothing in your mind, just for a second, so there is room for you to think about what it is that has grabbed your attention. To think about something, you need nothing, just like whoever or whatever created the world, or, as one of my favorite writers once put it, “God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.”

  This is a very deep sort of bewilderment, but I was in very deep water, and all this wondering about everything or nothing, someone or nobody, floated in my brain as my body of water floated in a body of water. They weren’t quite thoughts, just little scraps of thinking, like the note about my poisoned breakfast, which was still in the pocket of my jacket neatly folded on the rocky shore, and from this I knew where I could go next, a place that might actually solve the mystery of my own poisoning.

  It was strange that so clear a thought had come to me out of the blur of something and nothing, but that is often the way of the story of the world. Once I read a book that I admired very much, so much that I wrote a few notes in the margins of a few pages, something I only do when I am sure I will keep the book forever. I wrote things like “I like this” and “Yes, this is true” and “Look at this again” for me to find later when I reread it, much like the glass of water I occasionally leave for myself on my desk. Then years went by and I had a series of adventures. I moved from place to place, and I was forced to leave portions of my library in boxes, kept in closets and attics of various comrades and patient friends.

  Finally, quite a few years later, I decided it was time to reread the book, but my copy couldn’t be found—it was stuck in a box, probably, somewhere else. It was not a book that most bookshops happen to have on their shelves, so I had to search a little for a new copy of this book, and finally I found a library, in a part of the world I had never visited, which was selling some of its books to make room for new ones. There was a copy of the book I was looking for, and it was sent to me in a puffy brown envelope. I opened the envelope and then the book, and I saw there were some notes in the margins. It took me a few minutes to recognize my own handwriting, in the notes on the pages of my copy of this book that had somehow found me again. It was something so clear, my own notes to myself, out of the muddle of losing the book and looking for it again.

  It was like one of many ideas I have had while swimming, that I hurry to write down, on any scrap of paper I can find so I will not forget it, as soon as I am out of the water and back on dry land. Every new idea is a fresh surprise, like finding my own book again after so many years, and the element of surprise, as I have mentioned, is the first of the three rules of writing a book. The second rule is to leave out certain things, which is why I did not add, to my story of finding my book, the very peculiar thing the author said to me when I tracked her down and told her what had happened, although I thought of it, as I pulled myself up onto the rock and shivered on the shore, leaving behind the bewildering nothing of my swim.

  Nobody knows what the third rule is.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I sat on the shore shivering, which is how the body warms itself up. If you swim in cold water, you get used to the feeling of your body shaking and rattling, and the shaking and rattling view as you look at the world through shivering eyes. Eevvvvvven yyourrrr thoughtssss seemtoseemtoseemto shishishishiverververver forforforforfor awhiawhiawhilllle unununtiltiltil youyouyou’ve’ve’ve warmwarmwarmeded uuuppp enenoughough toto ththink clearly. But the idea in my head was as clear as the water I’d had it in, and I wrote it down in shaky handwriting as I shivered and waited for the wind to dry me.

  The bewildering ocean, so busy and so empty at the same time, had reminded me suddenly of another busy and empty enormous place—the first place in my journey that actually seemed suspicious. The tea shop, even when closed, was a brave and unusual place, not suspicious at all, and the beekeeper seemed above reproach, a phrase which here means “too interested in uncovering the trickery of certain authors to slip poison into my honey,” and my swim in the sea, although thrilling, was not going to uncover the story behind the terrible note I had received. There was too much water in the world to try and find the poison bit, particularly if I had already swallowed it. But there has always been something sinister to me about a supermarket.