Once I wrote the sentence:
I would like to write a two-hundred-page book so that one word would contain these two hundred pages while one word would run through two hundred pages
I was delighted when I wrote it. It was like an illumination. I considered it a book I was dreaming to make.
The enlightenment lasted some time, till I experienced another illumination which turned that enlightenment into the enblindenment. One day I asked a question: isn't this brilliant idea just a brilliant bullshit? an elegant paradox? a knot being in fact but an optical illusion?

Two hundred pages make no doubt. Two hundred pages are simply one hundred leaves. This is clear, simple and obvious. It can be imagined easily. You can easily count one hundred sheets and put the pile in front of you. It would be more difficult to put one sheet beside another. They would need a lot of space, your room would not be enough, your eyes would not take them in...... Let's reduce the number of pages to eight. Eight pages – four sheets. Would be easier. Although a bit different: eight pages are not two hundred pages. If we place a word PARADOX on eight pages, most probably each letter will occupy one page except for the last X that should be extended on two pages or the last page would be blank (of course any other combination and composition is possible: the letters can be of various size – the last X can occupy seven pages while PARADO will shrink and cover only one page) what is impossible in case of two hundred pages because then, provided the letters are of the same size and are placed regularly, each letter will be spread on more than twenty pages and the black areas on the pages could hardly be interpreted as P or A . . . . . . . One word on eight pages would be with no doubt a very big word, although much smaller than one word on two hundred pages. However, in spite of the enormous size of the word making it almost illegible, it wouldn't be very difficult to imagine and make such a book.
One word makes no doubts, either. Although a book containing one word could really surprise a reader. But how can one word contain eight pages? It's hard to imagine. And two hundred pages? It's almost impossible to imagine: either this word would be enormously big or the pages would be enormously small . . . . . . . Would it be the same word? Yet one word makes doubts. It this was to be the same word that had been written on eight pages, how could it contain these very pages? (Can something that is inside something else be at the same time outside this something else? Can containing be at the same time contained? And if the page had the shape of a letter – or if the sheet has the shape of a letter – if the sheet itself was a letter..... of course, provided (but not necessarily) one letter would cover one pages.....) However, a slightly different page is to be considered here: a page as a text measuring unit. So, the word PARADOX should contain eight pages of text. Each letter would contain one page of text except the last X which would contain two pages of text – in case of the most simple version.

Would it be then an ordinary book, a normal two-hundred-page book having only one unusual feature: the text on these pages would be composed in one very very big word? A superword? Would this be anything really so amazing? Dazzling and fascinating? It's simply trivial, banal. It's a kind of endarkenment.
Something is wrong, is not as it should be. As it was. It was ravishing. I remember. A beautiful vision. Like a flash. Extreme clearness. And now there are but misty, smudged outlines.
A clumsy and crippled version of a fable about stork and starling.

It's a Polish fable, so you may not know it. It goes, more or less, like that:

a stork was pecked by a starling
and they changed places in the dark
now a starling was pecking the stork
that's the nature of change my darling

it happened more than one time
so now it has to be checked
what was the result of this game?
how many times a starling was pecked?



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