Where the Map Ends

There is a place, though place is nearly the wrong word for it, where every map I owned simply gave up.

The contour lines thinned, faltered, and at last confessed their ignorance in a wide margin of untroubled white.

I had spent my life hurrying toward such margins in order to abolish them, pen poised, ambition sharpened.

Now, standing at the true edge of the sayable, I found that I no longer wished to write anything down at all.

What lay beyond was not empty; it was merely unwilling to be named, which is a wholly different kind of fullness.

Language, that faithful pack-animal, had carried me faithfully to this border and could carry me not one step further.

Every word I owned was a small cage, and here was something that had never once consented to be caged.

I opened my mouth and found no noun willing to volunteer, no adjective brave enough to approach.

It was not that the thing before me lacked qualities; rather, it possessed too many for any single name to survive contact with it.

The mystics, I finally understood, are not being coy when they describe the highest things only by what they are not.

Not near, not far; not bright, not dark; not one, not many: such negations are not evasions but the last honest map.

To say what a thing is not is sometimes the only reverence a limited tongue can offer the limitless.

I set my instruments down on the bare rock: the theodolite and the compass, the rulers that had defined my whole life.

They looked suddenly like the toys of a clever child, precise and proud and entirely beside the point.

Silence rose around me, not the absence of sound but a presence so complete that any sound would have been an interruption.

Longing, which all my journey had been chasing, revealed itself here as a hunger that no arrival could ever feed.

For what I longed for was not a country but the very quality of the horizon: its permanent, shimmering refusal to be reached.

To possess it would be to destroy it, as a name possesses and thereby diminishes the wild thing it fixes.

I understood, at last, that the blank on the map had never been a failure of knowledge but a form of respect.

Some regions of the real exist precisely so that we may have something we are forbidden, mercifully, to own.

The wind moved across that nameless expanse and carried no message, which was itself the deepest message of all.

I thought of every explorer who had planted a flag and, in the planting, murdered the mystery he had crossed oceans to find.

Better, surely, to kneel at the edge and leave the interior forever articulate in its silence.

My hand reached for the notebook out of habit, then stopped, ashamed, like a guest about to steal from his host.

I wrote nothing; and that unwritten page remains, to this day, the truest thing I ever failed to record.

The unknown does not ask to be conquered; it asks only to be acknowledged and then, courteously, left alone.

As the light failed, the boundary between the visible and the invisible dissolved, and I could no longer tell which I inhabited.

I had come to the end of the map and discovered, past its edge, the beginning of a humility I had never before possessed.

When I turned back at dawn, I left the margin exactly as blank as I had found it, and felt, for once, unashamed.

Some journeys, I now believe, are completed only by the wisdom to stop just short of their destination.