At the end of an article by Jonathan Bate in this week’s Times Literary Supplement, I am stunned and rendered desolate by the closing sentence, summarising a story copied into Ted Hughes’ notebook, following Hughes’ regret at having put Sylvia Plath’s journals into the public domain – “Maybe the stupidest thing I ever did”:

“Rabbah bar bar Hannah . . . having undergone a series of fantastic adventures through the desert and across the seas, set down his life upon a rock and slept. When he awoke, the rock had gone and he was on a precipice, staring into the abyss.”

This is terrible. That is to say, I sat up in bed for a full five minutes in a state of terror.

This is what we do: we have our adventures, full of joy and pain and sorrow, set down our story upon a rock, and sleep. Except our rock is not even a rock. It is a virtual space, a digitalised abyss.

I google Rabbah bar bar Hannah and on Wikipedia discover that he was a Jewish Talmudist who lived in Babylonia, and that he was an Amora of the second generation (3^rd Century AD). He was apparently not held in very high regard by his fellow Talmudists. I find part of the story cited by Bate, along with this, also from Rabbah’s writings:

“Once, while on a ship, we came to a gigantic fish at rest, which we supposed to be an island, since there was sand on its back, in which grass was growing. We therefore landed, made a fire, and cooked our meal. But when the fish felt the heat he rolled over, and we would have drowned had not the ship been near”.

As a purveyor of tall tales, Rabbah was sanguine as to how his fictions were received: “All Rabbahs are asses and all bar bar Hanas fools”, went a contemporary review. Or, as I have maintained elsewhere on this blog (quoting Björk): “Poets are liars.”

But that moment, of waking in the face of the abyss, seems terribly familiar, as though it were, somehow, an inevitable consequence, an ineluctable truth.