The angel handed me a book, saying, "It contains everything
that you could possibly wish to know. "  And he disappeared.
        So I opened the book, which was not particularly fat.
        It was written in an unknown character.
        Scholars translated it, but they produced altogether
different versions.
        They differed even about the very senses of their own
readings, agreeing upon neither the tops nor the bottoms of
them, nor upon the beginnings of them nor the ends.
        Toward the close of this vision it seemed to me that
the book melted, until it could no longer be distinguished from
this world that is about us.
 
                                        -Paul Valery
 
Quoted in Carolyn Forch=82, The Angel of History.  New York:
=09HarperCollins, 1994. =1A