You can never read all of the books, or see all of the films, or visit all of the places, or speak all of the languages, or see all of the theatre and the dance and the opera, or listen to all of the songs, or sing them, or embrace every lover, or wonder at every sight, or think every thought, or master every discipline, or fear all that can be feared, or savor every food, but you can experience the strange pleasure of a future foreboding, foretold in the present, and feel in your bones the musculature of dancers who reverse themselves on their axes like doors on hinges, and open your eyes to the odd prophetic ritual that taps the primal past of an imagined race, and watch human figures, their faces wrapped in the flags of nations like the subjects of Magritte’s “The Lovers,” devolve into tableaux from some new and bawdy “Garden of Earthly Delights,” Hieronymous Bosch redux, and see those flags washed and spun with centrifugal violence to get the water out of them, and laid upon the ground like beach blankets, flat on the shores of the universe, and watch conflict and eroticism and the one transformed into the other, and the love of the sexes, and of the same sexes, and enjoy the legs of the women and the chests of the men, and be disturbed by torture and abuse and sadism just as you are thrilled and uplifted by the surprise and the music and the verve of it all, and have little but the program in your hands and the words you can come up with to remember what you have seen. And you will not forget the lambs, who nibble the edges of the flags and go “baah,” whom you will love as the mother the child, the writer the innocent word, the painter the final brushstroke. You can see Ballet Preljocaj’s AND THEN, 1000 YEARS OF PEACE before it closes this weekend at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, assuming that there are tickets to be had, which, it is astounding to realize, there probably are.

For more on Ballet Preljocaj, click here. Visit BAM here for information on upcoming events.