Member-only story
A Clue Hidden in an Unreadable Book
The strange Proustian fragment inside the Codex Seraphinianus.
The Codex Seraphinianus cannot be read, only experienced, except for a single sentence. The whole book is written in an unknown language. It looks beautiful, cohesive, organic, but it’s not readable. There were attempts, of course, since 1981, but none succeeded. The author, Luigi Serafini ended up confirming that the seraphinian language has no intrinsic meaning.
It’s not random, but the words don’t bear meaning. That’s not to say that the book is meaningless. The book has some sort of story. Or rather a direction. It has every aspect of an encyclopedia for a surreal world. Most of the understanding comes from the illustrations, full of wonder and weirdness.
There’s a single sentence in the whole codex that is actually readable, and it’s in French. It’s from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and it goes like this:
Fille orgiaque surgie et devinée, le premier jour sur la digue de Balbec.
(An orgiastic girl who had risen up and been surmised on that first day on the Balbec pier.)
For a while, it was speculated that this oddly specific sentence was means to decipher the language. Some Rosetta Stone included in the book so we can finally read it as a true encyclopedia. It’s…
