On Entering the Next Nest

You could stop here. The whole of it has been said.

But the smallest nest is built to be outgrown, and there is a larger one waiting—made of the same shape, at greater size. To enter it is not to learn anything new. It is to begin again at the beginning, and to let each line you were just given open into a page, and then, beyond this book, into a volume. What was a sentence becomes a paragraph; what was a paragraph becomes a chapter; what was a chapter becomes a life’s argument. This is how understanding actually deepens—not by gathering more facts, but by returning to the same truth at ever-larger scale, until at last you can live inside it.

What follows is the second nest: the five volumes, gathered and retold with a little more room to breathe, so that when you go to them in full you will already know the country.

VOLUME I