Acknowledgments

Everything in these pages comes from two places, and neither of them is a scholar's study: from years of work, and from what others put into my hands before I knew enough to ask for it. Not one of them invented anything. They received and they transmitted, and it was through their hands that what is set in order here arrived. They are named one by one in the notes, and that is where I want them read, because each supplied what I did not have; and all of them, by different roads, light the same axis.

It should be said without ceremony: very little here is mine. A man who writes about a tradition does not invent; at most he sets in order what he has received and puts it back into circulation, clothed to the measure of his own age. Every age weaves a new garment for the same light; these pages claim nothing more. If the reader finds anything of value in them, it belongs to the chain of which this book is a late link: my only merit will have been not to interrupt it.

My gratitude reaches also to those who transmitted without leaving a name. The operative tradition raised cathedrals that no one signed, and the men who cut those stones were not working to be remembered. To that long file of anonymous men—master builders, copyists, instructors, men who taught what they had received—I owe more than fits in a bibliography.

I am grateful in equal measure to those who disagree: a man who contradicts you courteously obliges you to be exact, and helps more than one who nods out of inertia.

The errors are mine and no one else's, and for them I ask the reader's patience. None should be charged to the sources: if in citing them I have understood badly, the fault is the interpreter's and not the text's.

To the memory of Javier Guerra, for those illustrations we never finished, perhaps because the Great Architect did not have them in his plans. The few geometrical figures the reader will find in this work do not presume to take their place: they are chalk lines, not what they would have been in his hands. Let it fall to the reader, then, to raise within himself the images that are missing here.

A work like this one is handed over unfinished on purpose, the way a text without vowels is handed over. The author supplies the consonants: the order, the figures, the letter. The vowels are brought by the reader: his history, his questions, his wounds. And only when he supplies them does the text sound. That music is no longer the author's: it is born, each time, of the meeting.

To all of them I owe whatever worth these pages may have.

Fiat Lux!

A transmitter and not a maker, believing in and loving the ancients.

Confucius, Analects, VII, 1