Excerpt from THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE ROAD by Neil Gaiman''...I spoke that language too, the first language, and I had dominion over the nature of all that was real. In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the basic building brick of everything... I would say in that tongue, "Be whole," and they would become whole, not broken people, not any longer, because I had spoken the language of shaping."'I wondered, as I so often wondered when I was that age, who I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If this face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?''... I thought I knew everything. Lettie Hempstock's ocean flowed inside me, and it filled the entire universe, from Egg to Rose, I knew that. I knew what Egg was - where the universe began, to the sound of uncreated voices singing in the void - and I knew where Rose was - the peculiar crinkling of space on space into dimensions that fold like origami and blossom like strange orchids, and which would mark the last good time before the eventual end of everything and the next Big Bang, which would be, I knew now, nothing of the kind. I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. I saw the world from above and below. I saw that there were patterns and gates and paths beyond the real. I saw all these things and understood them and they filled me, just as the waters of the ocean filled me. Everything whispered inside of me. Everything spoke to everything, and I knew it all. That if I looked inward I would see infinite mirrors, staring into myself into eternity.I was no longer cold and I knew everything and I was not hungry and the whole big complicated world was simple and graspable and easy to unlock. I would stay here for the rest of time in the ocean, which was the universe which was the soul and which was all that mattered. I would stay here forever. "You can't,' said Lettie. "It would destroy you... dissolve you... a little of you would exist everywhere... there wouldn't be anything left that would think of itself as an 'I.' No point of view any longer, because you would be an infinite sequence of views and of points..."
