Here is how I wrote this book. I emptied my mind out like an old chest that has been stored in the loft for a long time and made a heap of what I found. There seemed no end to the things I kept piling up. As I looked around me I saw so many other things, books, papers, overheard conversations, paintings, photographs, secrets, dialogues with the dead, films and letters, magnets, moons and mysteries, that I could no longer tell what came from inside my mind and what already lay about me. It was then I understood that what the old alchemists used to say was true: that the matter of one's Great Work was to be found everywhere and in all places and at all times. In other words, it was as infinite as the universe itself and bounded only by my own mortality.