Saint Brendan and the monks accompanying him had been sailing for several weeks already, perhaps several months, without the smallest island appearing on the horizon, the sea and time flattening, swallowing the adventurers together in their immensity; the abbot had ordered the sails to be furled, as no wind had filled them for a long time. The monks had rowed through sunrises and sunsets, the single celestial body testifying that time still seemingly existed. The sea itself had ceased to offer the valiant men its marks of encouragement; the wake no longer showed its undulating arm driving boats toward their destination; each stroke of the oar seemed futile to the monks; were they still advancing in this impassive sea that no longer responded to what should have disturbed it? They were losing all conviction, their faith. The consecutive nights, the last always similar to the previous, giving birth to days ever identical, was this ceaseless pendulum alone enough to indicate to the monks that time continued to cradle them, that they were still living when nothing differentiated anything anymore, neither when, nor where, nor how?

As provisions eventually ran out, Saint Brendan spoke and said:

“Monks, you who followed me in my quest, you who suffer to see what few living beings have seen with their own eyes, rejoice, for from the trial God sends you, you will emerge victorious and satisfied with the blessings to come. Today, abandon the oars, fast, and wait in a spirit of humility and serenity, for the Lord does not forsake those who trust in him!”

During the first days without food, hunger gripped the monks and the abbot. This new sensation, though painful, provided them with a feeling of life, of resurrection—a life they were no longer sure inhabited them. They felt alive in the pain of fasting and believed themselves to be martyrs—happy to be so for the love of God. Then hunger gradually faded, along with their hope; strangely, they no longer felt or had the need to nourish themselves. All remained in silence and expectation, of whom? of what? they no longer knew. The thought of ending their lives was alien to them, and what difference was there for them between living in the death of everything and ceasing to live, apart from the sun being more or less present…?

Days followed days, doubled, and multiplied…

One morning, just as the sun, invigorated by its nocturnal course, was preparing to repeat its ancient and worn dance, a thick mist descended upon the sea and a breeze picked up. The monks lying in their vessel stood up and woke the abbot who was still sleeping. Without delay, the vessel unfurled its sail on the mast and sailed as best as it could to cross the opaque veil of fog. Anyone standing near the boat could have heard the rhythmic, almost warlike grunts full of new vigor from these monks who, with bony arms, helped their vessel pursue the direction where the breath pushed it with energetic oar strokes in a sea that had become sea once more. The abbot, to encourage them, began to chant, and all joined his hymn in their efforts:

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

Suddenly the hull struck an object, the mist cleared, and a cliff of immeasurable height rose before them. An island. After consulting together, the monks decided to circumnavigate it entirely before choosing a spot to land. They wanted to ensure they would face no danger upon boarding.

This island presented four narrow access gorges between rock walls, just wide enough for the monks to enter. Between the rock walls, above each entrance, hung a sign with this inscription: “VERITAS VERITATUM ET OMNIA VERITAS”. The abbot and his monks recognized it as a pastiche of the words of Ecclesiastes; read “NO TRUTH IS REVEALED”. They took one of the paths and rushed inside.

As they advanced toward the center of the island, the walls grew lower, as if this island were a hollow volcano, a place prone to an eruption that did not want to present itself as such, an island with something to hide, an island playing a role, a hypocritical island. At the end of that day, they reached what they assumed to be the center of the island: an immense plain at the same level as the sea, which was separated from the land only by an invisible boundary preventing the ocean from encroaching upon the territory. The monks moored and placed their sorrowful feet on the long-awaited earth. The eyes of the group preceded the religious men in exploring the site: a desert.

As they wandered at random, the rise of the night brought a light in the distance, a kind of beacon for prospective land travelers. They headed toward it in the hope, kept quietly to themselves, that they had reached paradise; for the closer they got to the light, the less it resembled a beacon, its dimensions growing step by step testifying to their own smallness. Arriving before what they had first identified as a beacon, they felt humbled and oppressed by the dimensions of the thing facing them.

A man, the first they crossed paths with, emerged from the mound of light. He spoke to them thus: “Welcome to Coruscant, and rejoice!”, then laughed, seemingly without reason, while giving them a few cordial pats on the shoulder blades with the flat of his hand, leaving them as stealthily as he had approached.

What was this heap of light standing proudly before the sixteen adventurers? What they had before them was a square monument, of which they could only see one side, terrifying in its size and even more piercing through its white walls, stripped of all humanity, illuminated by thousands of lamps suspended high up, flameless lamps of an unknown and terrifying kind to the monks and their abbot, who agreed that this monument was a temple. As they stepped forward, double doors sliding into the wall framing them allowed them to enter the temple.

Lamps hung from the ceiling, projecting such brightness inside the temple that eyes required time to adapt. They heard cries and groans of pain without knowing at first where they originated, then, as their vision adjusted to this new sun, they saw rows of stalls extending as far as the eye could see. Behind each stall, a man or woman stood and pressed animals between screens like a vise, making them smaller and smaller due to compression, eating the tiny cube thus formed. Other people moving between stalls appeared to pay for the torture of compression. The monks mingled with the crowd and attempted to question some of the people they met. Every encounter resulted only in the recitation of a “Welcome to Coruscant, and rejoice!”, always accompanied by a cordial pat and an incomprehensible laugh. Only through persistent insistence did the travelers obtain a few explanations from a stranger about this place where no one cared for anyone, yet all took pleasure in everything. They were urged, to understand better, to go to the very back of the temple to listen to the words of the seer, observe the operation of the stalls more carefully, and then, once the rules were understood, join in the game themselves as the best course of action.

Saint Brendan and his monks went to the back of the temple and found a crowd that people joined or left at any moment. In unison, all shouted “Long live the seer! Long live the seer!” and cheered at will.

The religious men slipped further ahead and saw men and women succeeding one another on a small platform. Clearly, anyone in the crowd could become the seer of the moment if they so desired and wished to say or do something. Following a woman who left in tears, her face bruised and soiled with spit due to a mechanism the public could activate to express disapproval, a man stepped onto the platform and began executing a dance while chanting sentences:

“Here is what he who has the sharp two-edged sword says: I know your works; you have the reputation of being pious but are greedy for money and spawn death. With blows of the crosier you killed and blood flowed. Perhaps you wanted to lead them faster to the kingdom of heaven! Repentance? No, case closed… Blablabla… Let whoever has ears hear what the spirit says to the crowd: the pagan shall not be touched by the second death, for he shall have only one… Blablabla… Turn away from this ecclesiastical brood, do not become another victim of the cross lest you join those in the place of torment where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth… ''God is dead!'', ''God is dead'', ''God is dead''… Let us consume! Let us consume! Let us consume!… fill the void! The void! The void!… what else is there to do!…”

The abbot and his monks withdrew, troubled and bewildered. Without a word, they headed back to the stalls and spent time observing as recommended. They noticed that buyers of compression torture could turn into sellers; the roles were interchangeable. From time to time, they saw bellies distending visibly from eating compressed cubes, men and women so voluminous that their legs snapped under their weight; from afar, they witnessed a belly burst near a stall; the entrails littering the ground were immediately picked up by the human mass. The religious men gagged and wished to leave.

As they stood near the gates of Coruscant, the abbot stopped before a stall to examine the compression screens more closely before leaving the temple. What the abbot saw in the screens froze him: they contained faces of living men and women, and these faces—or rather these mouths filled with hungry teeth—were not compressing but nibbling, devouring, chewing, and swallowing bite by bite, drooling over whatever was applied against them via the screens; sometimes the mouths laughed heartily… But the abbot was not at the end of his horror. It was then that he distinguished, in the center of one of the cubes nibbled by the screens just before a buyer grabbed it to eat, a… it was not… the unspeakable abomination…

The abbot and his monks left Coruscant, a temple-city that truly deserved its piercing description, for in the hearts of the religious men Coruscant had deposited its eggs of bitterness. After their visit to the temple, the missionaries were never the same again. They exchanged vows and promised never to speak to anyone about their stop in Coruscant, but to let whoever wished believe upon their return home that they had indeed found Paradise. They would have liked to pray to ask God to erase their memories of Coruscant, but what was the point of praying; their faith and hope vanished like the light of Coruscant on the horizon as they rowed away toward their vessel.

They cast off and headed out to sea through the channel by which they had reached the island hollow. Before returning to the mist, the sea, and the lifeless time, Saint Brendan at the stern threw a last glance toward the rocky walls and read one final time the words inscribed on the sign: “VERITAS VERITATUM ET OMNIA VERITAS”—words that, without him knowing yet, would resonate within him until death and that he would whisper with his last breath.

Then Brendan, his eyes filled with a formidable fire, turned back to his rowing sailors and shouted:

“In girum imus nocte ecce et consumimur igni!”