Astonishing the Gods by Ben Okri Read Free Book Online

the greatest cure for sickness before it became sickness.
    The inhabitants of that land, who were the hardest workers in the universe, were seldom ill. When they were ill at all, it was in order to regenerate their dreams and visions.
    They went to the hospitals to improve their art of breathing. They went for stillness. They went there to remember their beginnings and to keep in mind their ever-elusive destination. Hospitals were places where the laws of the universe were applied. Individuals, mostly, healed themselves. The art of self-healing was the fourth most important aspect of their education.

10
    He understood all this in flashes as he passed the incomprehensible buildings and read the indecipherable signs. He began to suspect that somehow, without trying, he understood more than he was aware. And through all this his child-guide remained silent.
    He passed shops, where people exchanged the fruits of their talents, rather than sold goods for money. The concept of money was alien to the city. The only form of money it had consisted in the quality of thoughts, ideas, and possibilities. With a fine idea a house could be purchased. With a brilliant thought rooftops could be restored. Useful new ways of seeing things, imparted possibilities, could be exchanged for acres of land. The currencies of the civilisation were invisible, and had to do with values. There was no hunger in the city. The only hunger there was existed in the city’s dream for a sublime future.
    As he noticed and sensed these things he wondered about the kind of suffering that inspired this unending quest for the highest, this loving vigilance, this near-perfection of justice. It seemed to him that it must be a suffering which keeps renewing itself in the soul, which refuses to be forgotten, a suffering which demands to be continually turned into gold.
    The thought somehow frightened him. He knew that the inhabitants were not inhuman. He knew that they had perfected the art of invisibility, and could not be seen by him. But he began to wonder if they were gods, or if as a people they were becoming almost divine, through careful spiritual and social evolution. The possibility of a whole people approaching, in their humanity, the condition of divinity, scared and astonished him. The thought that suffering could give people insights into the intersection of life and eternity filled him with amazement.

11
    Stopping to breathe a moment, he tried to recover from the wonderful notions with which the city assaulted him.
    He came to the piazza of festivities. Even at night he could hear all the celebrations of the distant ages that the stones and fountains and silent buildings gave out in their dreaming. He wandered through the piazza’s memories of pageants and histories and festivals. The piazza, in its silence, seemed always to be in a carnival mood, seemed always to be laughing.
    In the city everything remembers, and freely yields its memories like certain flowers in moonlight.

12
    A delighted mood blossomed in him as he passed the glittering arcades and marketplaces where the Invisibles from all over the world came to buy and sell ideas. Here they traded in philosophies, inspirations, intuitions, prophecies, paradoxes, riddles, enigmas, visions, and dreams. Enigmas were their trinkets, philosophies their jewelleries, paradoxes their silver, clarity their measure, inspiration their gold, prophecy their language, vision their play, and dreams their standard.
    The season’s fashion was for paradoxes, and the marketplace, even at night, was abuzz with fresh-minted paradoxes and ancient riddles from the farthest corners of the world. The air was scented with them. Enigmas twinkled over the arcade roofs, with shining eyes, like owls at play. Paradoxes flew about in the emporiums, like birds of joy. Riddles danced in the dark places, like blissful fireflies. Beautiful lights thrilled in his spirit. He quivered in a sparkling sense of a renewed