YOU MIGHT EXPECT TO FIND ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS PARTICULAR DOOR
unusual things lie behind this door. amongst them are articles which possess the ability to shock, jolt, quicken, abstract. you may wish to encounter them. in particular, those of you who enjoy collecting cigarette cards will find a great deal to enjoy.
at least accept that in choosing to NOT open this door you are enacting a protest against curiosity. you will remain forever bereft of this particular form of knowledge.
nevertheless, it may be worth remembering that almost every door we encounter in our lives will remain closed to us. there are reasons for this, although it is not always clear what they are. but we should be mindful nonetheless that there are a great many consequences arising from this fact.
A CERTAIN FEELING OF CAUTION IT MIGHT BE WISE TO ADOPT BEFORE PROCEEDING ANY FURTHER
it would be wise for readers of this notice to consider the many possibilities present when one is still at the stage of anticipation. it is not always better to rush ahead, to be in a hurry to begin.
if you decided to walk away from this notice and only return once your anticipation had peaked, when it became impossible to stand the tension any longer, perhaps your enjoyment would also be increased. using this technique it would then become possible to imagine what lies beyond this notice and so invent your own room, which in your imagination may well seem a more perfect room than the one which you might actually encounter. this perfection can linger as long as you will allow it to and need never be shattered. to walk through the door now will only result in the disappointment of it being different from the ideal room that you will have fashioned in your mind.
still, a confrontation with the actual, tangible truth is surely preferable to fanciful flights of the imagination. perhaps you should simply discover what lies beyond the door and accept it for what it is.
THE ACCURACY OF PREDICTIONS BASED ON ACTS OF INTUITION
it might be possible for you to guess what lies beyond this door. or perhaps ’deduce’ is the more appropriate term. you would be working from nothing more than various clues left in this notice. you would have become a sort of detective. not that there is anything deliberately hidden in these words. there is certainly no elaborate system of hints for you to follow in order to guess what lies beyond the door. i am only suggesting that it may be, in theory, possible for you to anticipate with some degree of accuracy what you will find on the other side.
if you do successfully manage to intuit what lies beyond the door i hope you will be made happy by finding your suspicions verified. considering the vast unlikelihood of this happening, i hope you might, in that instance, venture to take it as a particularly positive omen.
it is difficult to gauge precisely from where our intuition arises. perhaps what we refer to as intuition is in part an entirely rational process involving the ordering of facts of which we are already in possession. using these facts we grasp at the most likely possibilities through processes that are concealed from our conscious minds, employing a series of no-less-analytical and precise methodologies and forms of reasoning that we have however long since interiorised and forgotten.
this couldn’t of course account for those things that are wholly unknown to us but of which we still manage somehow to grasp the truth. even if it is only a truth perceived vaguely, opaquely, seemingly untrustworthy. somehow, within this fog, we nonetheless arrive, sometimes, at the facts.
A COMPARISON OF THIS DOOR WITH EVERY OTHER DOOR IN THE WORLD
perhaps every door in the world has its own piece of writing, of a more or less similar length to the one you are now reading, scrawled in invisible letters across its surface. each such notice is doubtless different from every other, just as no two snowflakes are the same and no two people, etc. each notice presumably corresponds to the people who live behind each door, or the people who have lived there in times past, to the things that have been done there and the words which have been spoken inside.
perhaps, in each case, the words are waiting to be written, already existing, tentatively, in an indefinite future. these words are waiting to be caught and pulled from the air and brought to rest upon a series of notices like the one you are now reading.
in many cases this writing should probably remain invisible. imagine if words suddenly appeared upon the surface of every door in the world. the weight of the world would increase to an enormous extent!
so many subsequent actions would be affected. the continual temptation to ”read” every doorway might cause an epidemic of indecision and doubt. it would take some time for humanity to adjust and feel comfortable in such an environment.
gauging the relative importance of each notice would be a difficult enterprise. going about from day to day, completing one’s chores and necessities, as one did previously, might suddenly seem an insurmountable task.
it feels almost immoral to go about encouraging such forms of behaviour.
feel content in the knowledge that writing will only appear on doors as and when it will. this will happen from time to time. that is the way of these things.
(1958–1959)
For a relatively short period of time, Maximilian became addicted to a strange practice for which he never coined a name. He wondered if, in fact, he was the first human being to engage in this activity, whatever it happened to be.
Riding underground trains during the afternoon rush hour periods, he would, for short durations of time, become the opposite of a pickpocket. With enormous care he would slip tiny objects into the pockets and bags of unsuspecting commuters. Sometimes these were merely slips of paper bearing quotations or messages that he had screwed up into tiny balls, often liable to be mistaken for pieces of litter. On other occasions he deposited small enamel lockets that opened to reveal picture puzzles cut out from the backs of matchboxes, or pieces of card upon which he had written lurid predictions of the distant future, or else discs the size of a fingernail emblazoned with barely perceptible swirling patterns and shiny-bright colours.
He would prepare these objects late at night, drawing the shadows and the hush of evening close around him before retiring to bed. Seated in an armchair, drowsy with the pull of dreams and oncoming sleep, he would find himself in a very particular mood, one in which his imagination felt free to wander far afield and grasp hold of new ideas. In some cases he would spend weeks preparing a single object, chipping away at its edges, licking it gently with a tiny paintbrush, holding it up to scrutiny through the lens of a magnifying glass. Whenever he had produced something that he felt especially proud of, he was very careful to reserve it for the “right” person, the individual for whom it would be most suitable, and who would, in turn, most deserve it.
Any object would do, so long as it was interesting enough, and then small enough not to be detected. This came to include examples of many tiny knick-knacks, odds and ends discovered in junk shops, in forgotten old shoeboxes, or lying discarded in heaps upon suburban street corners. It never ceased to bemuse Maximilian, the range of objects that he could find belonging to no one.
On the first occasions of his depositing these objects with strangers, he’d experienced exquisite feelings of fear. Nervous energy was generated by his constant thoughts of discovery. Specific scenes would play themselves over and over again in his mind. He could already hear the piercing shriek of a hysterical woman feeling him brush up against her. Suspicious eyes would fall upon him, to be followed
