Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

MODERN CLASSIC

DORIS LESSING

Briefing for a

Descent Into Hell

this is for my son John,

the sea-loving man

If yonder raindrop should its heart disclose,

Behold therein a hundred seas displayed.

In every atom, if thou gaze aright,

Thousands of reasoning beings are contained.

The gnat in limbs doth match the elephant.

In name is yonder drop as Nile’s broad flood.

In every grain a thousand harvests dwell.

The world within a grain of millet’s heart.

The universe in the mosquito’s wing contained.

Within that point in space the heavens roll.

Upon one little spot within the heart

Resteth the Lord and Master of the worlds.

Therein two worlds commingled may be seen …

The Sage Mahmoud Shabistari, in the fourteenth century

(The Secret Garden)

… this minuscule world of the sand grains is also the world of inconceivably minute beings, which swim through the liquid film around a grain of sand as fish would swim through the ocean covering the sphere of the earth. Among this fauna and flora of the capillary water are single-celled animals and plants, water mites, shrimplike crustacea, insects, and the larvae of infinitely small worms—all living, dying, swimming, feeding, breathing, reproducing in a world so small that our human senses cannot grasp its scale, a world in which the microdroplet of water separating one grain of sand from another is like a vast, dark sea.

The marine biologist, Rachel Carson, twentieth century

(The Edge of the Sea)

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

Afterword

Read On

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

The Good Terrorist

Love, Again

The Fifth Child

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

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