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cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to thesame scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.
    I do not know whether or not science will formulate its grand theory of the universe. I know that it will not make it any easier to read the plain texts of our hearts. It is plain but it seems like a secret alphabet. We train as our own Egyptologists, hoping the fragments will tell a tale. We work at night as alchemists, struggling to decipher the letters mirrored and reversed. We are people who trace with our finger a marvellous book, but when we turn to read it again the letters have vanished. Always the book must be rewritten. Sometimes a letter at a time is all we can do.
    My search for you, your search for me, is a search after something that cannot be found. Only the impossible is worth the effort. What we seek is love itself, revealed now and again in human form, but pushing us beyond our humanity into animal instinct and god-like success. The love we seek overrules human nature. It has a wildness in it anda glory that we want more than life itself. Love never counts the cost, to itself or others, and nothing is as cruel as love. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.
    Merely human love does not satisfy us, though we settle for it. It is an encampment on the edge of the wilderness, and we light the fire and turn up the lamp, and tell stories until late at night of those great loves lost and won.
    The wilderness is not tamed. It waits—beautiful and terrible—beyond the reach of the camp-fire. Now and again someone gets up to leave, forced to read the map of themselves, hoping that the treasure is really there. A record of their journey comes back to us in note form, sometimes just a letter in a dead man’s pocket.
    Love is worth death. Love is worth life. My search for you, your search for me, goes beyond life and death into one long call in the wilderness. I do not know if what I hear is an answer or an echo. Perhaps I will hear nothing. It doesn’t matter. The journey must be made.

open it
    Night. The search engines are quiet.
    I keep throwing the stories overboard, like a message in a bottle, hoping you’ll read them, hoping you’ll respond.
    You don’t respond.
    I warned you that the story might change under my hands. I forgot that the storyteller changes too. I was under your hands.
    Later, much later, there’s a plane ticket on the screen—destination Naples.
    Maybe you want an opera not a story.
    Maybe, but the story has already gone on ahead. There it is, competing in the waves with the hydrofoils and rich men’s yachts. It looks like a plastic bottle but there’s something inside.
    You thought, didn’t you, that you could start something and stop it when you pleased? Pick it up, put it down. A little light reading. A bedtime story.
    Freedom just for one night.

    The story is reading you now, line by line.
    Do you know what happens next?
    Go on, open it.
    Open it …

VIEW
    An island of rocks. Sea-bound. Roofed with birds.
    The island is like an idea lifted out of the sea’s brooding.
    The island is an idea of itself—an imaginary island and a real one—real and imaginary reflecting together in the mirror of the water.
    Look in the mirror. What can you see?
    There’s Tiberius hiding from the plots of Empire. There he is, ruler of the ancient world, rowed from Naples in a hundred-oared galley, each stroke of the wood to the stroke of the drum, while flutes soothe him to sleep.
    He called Capri a sacred place and decorated its wooded slopes with villas and temples and
nymphaea
and shrines. Nowadays, underneath the tourist trade are the remains of the professional gods. The mosaic of the past is a fragment—a bit of coloured glass, a corner of tile—but the present is no more complete. The paint is fresher, that’s all.
    From an open boat the tourists crane