u/Visual_Hedgehog_1135

Furber did not stay long with the later books. He was disappointed with them. Of Revelation he was even a little disdainful. What this saint had dreamed of, Moses and Joshua had done. His book was filled with the wind of trumpets and the insubstantial wings of angels, and while there were cataclysms of all kinds which the emperor's prisoner promised would destroy a fifth or a fourth or a third of the earth, his threats were like those Jethro himself had sometimes shouted from his yard at the bullying fat girl with whom he often played and who had showed him, as Rome he supposed had showed John, her private parts; and in consequence no one whose foot would raise real dust in the road was deprived of his bowels by the sword; for Furber had already read how King David had numbered Israel, angering the Lord, and how the Lord had offered him a punishment for his people: either three years of famine, three months of flight before their foes, or three days of pestilence brought by an angel, and how King David had wisely chosen the latter, saying: let us fall into the hands of the Lord, for His mercy is great; but let us not fall into the hands of man; so Furber felt, even as a boy, that if the Lord really wished to bring the world to a terrible end, He would not toss earth and heaven together or bring forth fire from the ground or roll up the sea like a scroll, but simply withdraw Himself so that the whole earth and the heavens beyond the earth would settle quietly into the hands of man.

Cleave is the name, Alexander Cleave, called Alex. Yes, that Alex Cleave. You will remember my face, perhaps, the famous eyes whose flash of fire could penetrate to the very back row of the stalls. At fifty I am, if I say so myself, handsome still, albeit in a pinched and blurry sort of way. Think of your ideal Hamlet and you have me: the blond straight hair – somewhat grizzled now – the transparent, pale-blue eyes, the Nordic cheekbones, and that out-thrust jaw, sensitive, and yet hinting at depths of refined brutality. I mention the matter only because I am wondering to what extent my histrionic looks might explain the indulgence, the tenderness, the unfailing and largely undeserved loving kindness, shown me by the many – well, not many, not what even the most loyal Leporello would call many – women who have been drawn into the orbit of my life over the years. They have cared for me, they have sustained me; however precipitate my behaviour may be at times, they are always there to break my fall. What do they see in me? What is there in me to be seen? Maybe it is only the surface that they see. When I was young I was often dismissed as a matinée idol. This was unfair. True, I could, as I say, be the flaxen-haired hero when occasion called for it, but I played best the sombre, inward types, the ones who seem not part of the cast but to have been brought in from the street to lend plausibility to the plot. Menace was a specialty of mine, I was good at doing menace. If a poisoner was needed, or a brocaded revenger, I was your man. Even in the sunniest roles, the ass in a boater or the cocktail-quaffing wit, I projected a troubled, threatening something that silenced even the hatted old dears in the front row and made them clutch their bags of toffees tighter. I could play big, too; people when they glimpsed me at the stage door were always startled to find me, in what they call real life, not the shambling shaggy heavyweight they were expecting, but a trim lithe person with the wary walk of a dancer. I had mugged it up, you see, I had studied big men and understood that what defines them is not brawn or strength or force, but an essential vulnerability. Little chaps are all push and self-possession, whereas the large ones, if they look at all presentable, give off an appealing sense of confusion, of being at a loss, of anguish, even. They are less bruiser than bruised. No one moves more daintily than the giant, though it is always he who comes crashing down the beanstalk or has his eye put out with a burning brand.

On a bed, surrounded by a confusion of potted plants, exotic palms and cut flowers, faintly over-sung by the notes of unseen birds, which seemed to have been forgotten—left without the usual silencing cover, which, like cloaks on funeral urns, are cast over their cages at night by good housewives—half flung off the support of the cushions from which, in a moment of threatened consciousness she had turned her head, lay the young woman, heavy and dishevelled. Her legs, in white flannel trousers, were spread as in a dance, the thick-lacquered pumps looking too lively for the arrested step. Her hands, long and beautiful, lay on either side of her face. The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorus glowing about the circumference of a body of water—as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations—the troubling structure of the born somnambule, who lives in two worlds—meet of child and desperado. Like a painting by the douanier Rousseau, she seemed to lie in a jungle trapped in a drawing room (in the apprehension of which the walls have made their escape), thrown in among the carnivorous flowers as their ration; the set, the property of an unseen dompteur, half lord, half promoter, over which one expects to hear the strains of an orchestra of wood-winds render a serenade which will popularize the wilderness.

Gwyon bounded out of bed in sudden alarm, his feet on the cold tile woke him to himself in Madrid and he stood shivering with life, and the sense of being engulfed in Spain's time, that, like her, he would never leave. He dressed with his usual care but more quickly, drank down a glass of coñac, and went out. The rain was over, When the huge gates were opened he walked into the formal winter wastes of the Retire Park, waiting for the late sunrise, menaced on every hand by the motionless figures of monarchs.

In that undawned light the solid granite benches were commensurably sized and wrought to appear as the unburied caskets of children. Behind them the trees stood leafless, waiting for life but as yet coldly exposed in their differences, waiting formally arranged, like the moment of silence when one enters a party of people abruptly turned, holding their glasses at attention, a party of people all the wrong size. There, balanced upon pedestals, thrusting their own weight against the weight of time never yielded to nor beaten off but absorbed in the chipped vacancies, the weathering, the negligent unbending of white stone, waited figures of the unlaid past.

Gwyon fingered the stick under his arm, extended it, struck at a leaf which he missed. He looked again. Like his family they waited; and he stood in every moment of his blood's expenditure a stranger among them, and guilty at the life in him, for like these figures of stone, each block furrowed away from the other so that the legs were an entity, the cuirassed torso another, the head another, his family had surrounded him in a cold disjointed disapproval of life. As the statues bore the currents of the seasons his family had lived with rock-like negligence for time's passage, lives conceived in guilt and perpetuated in refusal. They had expected the same of him. Each generation was a rehearsal of the one before, so that that family gradually formed the repetitive pattern of a Greek fret, interrupted only once in two centuries by a nine-year-old boy who had taken a look at his prospects, tied a string round his neck with a brick to the other end, and jumped from a footbridge into two feet of water. Courage aside, he had that family's tenacity of purpose, and drowned, a break in the pattern quickly obliterated by the calcimine of silence.

Gematria is an alphanumeric cipher system that assigns a numerical value to a word or a phrase based on its hebrew translation. The famous number of the beast (666) was actually a reference to Nero who was among the first kings to explicitly persecute Christians. The cipher became a way for Christian writers to speak of him without committing blasphemy.

So it hit me as to what Bolaño's 2666 might have meant. It might be a gematrian cipher. So I checked it on an online calculator that gave back a lot of phrases with hebrew index of 2666, some that piqued my interest are as below: -

Living By The Great Sword All Be A

Enjoy The Zhow

Why Does It Seem Like Forever

Patient For Unbelievable Answers

Vengeance Belongs To Being God Yehowah

Good Always Beats Evil In The End

You Have The Key To My Heart

Equal Justice Under The Law

Cabal Tryin To Rewrite The Ten Commandments

Anger Gove Way To Sadness

Jesus Is Alive And Telling The Truth

Dont Worry About It Im Okay

The Ciphers Are Discontinued When They Are Cracked

Ive Got The Key Ive Got The Secret

Trouble Comes Your Way

Can You Govern Your Soul