The Great Sufi Conclusion: When the Two Fingers Remained Between Clay and Eternity

Beneath the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel the narrator sees Adam reclining on the rock of beginnings, his body powerful and his hand still waiting, and begins a series of dialogues with what he sees. The painted sky says it escaped the function of stone and entered the function of dream, Michelangelo appears as the exhausted, stubborn sculptor on the scaffolding who could create an image and never life, and Adam explains that completion of form does not mean completion of the human being. The clay calls itself the beginning, the gap between the fingers says emptiness is the distance that makes arrival and longing possible, and the light says every human being carries a window that many leave closed. Turning to the Qur'anic verse in which God taught Adam the names, the narrator sees knowledge as the giving of meaning, tells the painting that the human body was the original architecture, with the column in the leg and the dome in the skull, and hears a voice ask the people of this century whether, having reached space, they have reached themselves. When the Sistine falls silent only the distance between the fingers remains, and the book ends by asking Adam to leave it there, since every question is an extended finger and the moment of creation has not yet ended.