A Reading Diary (14 page)

Among celebratory remains of wrapping paper and Christmas food, I see that
Le Monde
has a long article on the copyright of landscapes. After the sale of museum reproduction rights to multinational companies, local governments, administrative organizations and private landowners have begun to claim rights over certain “natural views.” Monuments such as the Eiffel Tower can be photographed for free during the day, but the right to reproduce the lit symbol of Paris at night belongs to a private company. Among the examples of visual private property: the view from the cliffs of Cassis, near Marseilles; the boats on the beach of Collioure, in southern France; the Estuary of Trieux, in Brittany. Will a future Kenneth Grahame have to pay some large corporation for the use of his memories of Cookham Dene on the Thames?

In a folder I keep, marked “Odd Clippings”: “On 18 January 1949, an American by the name of James T. Mangan filed a charter with the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, and under the state attorney’s authority claimed ownership to the whole of space. After giving his vast territory the name of Celestia, Mr. Mangan notified all countries on earth of his claim, warned them not to attempt any trips to the moon, and petitioned the United Nations for membership.”

Foul weather. Tomorrow is the beginning of 2003. We’ll spend New Year’s Eve at the small restaurant in nearby Lencloître, Le Champ de Foire. Last December 31, they drew back the curtains at midnight and set up a minuscule firework display for us. Perhaps they’ll do it again this year.

In Toronto there will be snow now. We remember Christmas visits to Barbara Howard and Richard Outram, and the white garden outside their window, and Barbara’s rich voice and strong, beautiful hands. Living in France, I know that you can feel utterly at home in a place that is not the one to which you feel the deepest attachment. (Mole would agree.)

The dismantling after Christmas. My family (who, being Jewish, had no reason to keep Christmas) followed the tradition of putting away the holiday decorations by the morning after Twelfth Night, otherwise they would attract bad luck. We take down the ornaments and C. carries the tree in its pot out into the garden, where it will wait until spring to be replanted. The pleasurable sense of beginning, but not from scratch. Like rereading.

Trees and bushes are covered in caterpillar frost. I like these cold, blustery holidays. Until my twentieth birthday, Christmas signalled the beginning of summer: the long days in the garden of the rented country house in Buenos Aires, or on the beach in Uruguay, under the pine trees, reading and cycling week after week until the dreaded start of school in March. I recall the physical pleasure of coming to the end of my book and then daydreaming about the characters (if I liked them) for many days after, imagining their ongoing lives and other endings. Now it seems impossible to find such periods of long calm.

Last week, I read Susan Coyne’s
Kingfisher Days
and realized that we shared similar slow-paced childhood summers. This sentence, for instance: “Once a week the Moirs went into town in their canoe to exchange their library books.”

Out of the blue, I receive a letter from Professor Isaías Lerner in New York. He was one of my several Spanish literature teachers in high school, certainly one of the best and the most memorable. He saw a piece I had published and decided to get in touch, after all this time. I must have been fifteen when I attended his class. For a whole year we studied
El Lazarillo, La Celestina, El Libro del buen amor
, but never got to
Don Quixote
because Lerner would take us through the books in loving detail, more interested in depth than in quantity. I found out, however, that he was teaching
Don Quixote
to another class, and I would sneak in to listen. The following summer I took with me a two-volume edition of Cervantes’ novel, and spent all three months in its company.

To follow the reading in class and to read the book on my own, under the trees, were two utterly different experiences. I remember, for instance, Lerner’s careful commentary on Don Quixote’s library, which the Curate and the Barber decide to wall up in order to prevent further
madness. Alone, I was almost in tears when I read the description of the old knight getting out of bed and going to look for his books, and being unable to find the room in which he kept them. That was for me the perfect nightmare: to wake up and discover that the place in which I kept my books had vanished, making me feel that I no longer was who I thought I was. Gregor Samsa submits to the metamorphosis, to his loss of self; Don Quixote instead, in order to continue to be Don Quixote, bravely accepts the explanation that an evil enchanter has spirited his library away. By assuming the fantasy, he remains faithful to his imagined self.

When I returned to Buenos Aires for a year in 1973, the books I had left at home were no longer there.

Don Quixote wants to be a just man for his own sake, not out of obedience to human or divine laws. “Ah, Lord! Give me the strength and the courage/ To look upon my heart and my body without disgust!” The prayer by Baudelaire sums up Don Quixote’s ethics.

The Hassidic master Rabbi David of Lelov, who died in 1813: “The web of just acts holds the world together, making it golden.” Don Quixote: “Sancho, my friend, know that
I was born, by Heaven’s will, in this our iron age, to be reborn in that of gold, or golden, as it is often called.” For the Hassidim, the existence of the world is justified by thirty-six just men known as the Lamed Wufniks, for whose sake God does not annihilate the human race. Don Quixote sets out to act as a just man would act in a world whose main characteristic is injustice.

In the paper today, further indications that war in Iraq is unavoidable. An Iraqi friend asks, “What course of action is possible between the atrocities of Saddam, the extremism of religious leaders and the economic voracity of the United States? We have the choice of being beheaded, stoned or eaten alive.”

Reading
Don Quixote
, I’m distracted by the world Cervantes has recreated and pay little attention to the unfolding of the story. The landscape through which the two adventurers travel, their daily conflicts, their pain and grime and hunger and friendship are so powerfully real that I forget that they follow a narrative, and simply enjoy their company. I am less interested in what will happen next than in what is happening now. I sometimes feel the same reading Conrad or Thomas Mann, or the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Lionel Trilling: “All prose fiction is a variation on the theme of
Don Quixote”
Only if, by “theme,” he means the reality and truth of prose fiction.

My son, Rupert, tells me, once again, how difficult he finds it to hold out for what he believes in: to refuse buying this, subscribing to that. He is only twenty, and constantly tempted by offers of betrayal which he wants to resist. I imagine he feels like a chess player who wants to see where a move will ultimately lead but is only able to foresee the immediate consequences.

Don Quixote knows his acts will have consequences, even though these remain invisible to him. Macbeth’s dilemma is that he wishes for acts without consequences—the only real impossibility.

I remember a friend in Buenos Aires telling me of a woman who had to sit one day in a café next to the man who had tortured her son. That is the consequence of Argentina’s refusal to act justly. Will this ever change? Not until the impunity granted to the military murderers is lifted, since this infamous amnesty will endlessly invalidate any attempt to restore social order. No society can exist coherently without a functioning code of justice; it must be part of society’s definition of itself, and its citizens must
believe in it, whether they uphold it or not. And abide by the consequences.

For Juan José Saer, Don Quixote is an epic hero because he is uninterested in whether his mission of justice will succeed or fail: “This is the essential point that must be retained,” says Saer; “that the clear or muddled awareness of the ineluctability of failure in every human enterprise is something fundamentally opposed to the moral of the epic.” Compare this to Stevenson’s remark: “Our mission in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in the best of spirits.”

Mysteriously, this faith in the ineluctability of justice survives even when the hero himself cannot carry it further; the faith then becomes contagious and infects others with just zeal. At the end of Part I of
Don Quixote
, when Sancho brings home his wounded master, there is no feeling of conclusion but rather a promise of new beginnings. To his wife’s demands for a cape for herself and shoes for their children, Sancho answers with the hope of other rewards, rewards that he may acquire some future day, after further adventures. This may seem mere greed, but then, while Don Quixote lies dazed in his bed and his niece and housekeeper curse the guilty novels that have made their master mad, it is Sancho who picks up the knight’s
chivalrous ideal, telling his wife that “There is nothing better in the world for an honest man than to be the squire of a knight errant in search of adventures.”

Brilliant observation by Schelling in his 1809
Philosophie der Kunst:
“The main idea in
Don Quixote
is the struggle of an ideal against the reality that dominates the entire book, in its most diverse variations. At first, it seems as if the knight and his ideal are defeated, but this is only an appearance, because what becomes manifest throughout the novel is the absolute triumph of that ideal.”

Don Quixote as Lamed Wufnik.

I have to stop working on the diary in order to write a bread-and-butter piece for a certain publication.

Virginia Woolf on the impossibility of writing a 25,000-word story on commission: “I think I’ve proved that to be true in this way: the humiliation, that is the obstinate refusal of the brain to comply & one’s drubbings, & re-writings, & general despondency, even for 2,000 words, make it not so much morally, as physically, intellectually a torture.”

Humiliation of the trade: I ring up a magazine editor, for the sixth time, to request the payment now three months overdue. After yet more excuses, she asks, “Do you really need
£100
so badly?”

Dorothy Parker: “The two most welcome words in the English language are ‘Cheque Enclosed.’ ”

Icy rain. C. lights a fire and we listen to Tom Jobim playing Vinicius, a gift my publisher, Luiz Schwarcz, sent us from Brazil.

About generosity: Saint Martin, Bishop of Tours, the saint to whom our village church is dedicated, is celebrated for having cut his cape in two and given half to a freezing beggar. Don Quixote observes that it must have been winter, “otherwise the saint, who was so charitable, would have given him the whole.” “No, that surely wasn’t the case,” Sancho answers. “Instead, he must have upheld the old proverb that says, ‘The man in wisdom must be old, who knows in giving where to hold.’ ”

Something has been moving in the crawl-space all night. It sounds too big to be a mouse, too small to be a cat. I sit up,
listening to it. Then I go downstairs and, in the dark, watch the very last red glimmers in the fire die out. After fifteen minutes, I go back to bed. When I was in my twenties, I was able to sit (at a café table, for instance) for hours on end, neither reading nor talking, not even concentrating on anything. Now I find it very hard to sit and
do nothing
.

Petra von Morstein, “Before Evening”:

There is no wasted time in
Don Quixote
. Reading
Erec et Enide
, the twelfth-century novel by Chrétien de Troyes, I come upon the word
récréantise
, a word that seems to combine “relaxation”
(récréation)
with “haunted feeling”
(hantise)
, and which the annotator defines as a sort of lassitude, weakness, negligence, lack of caring that is deemed a vice in the novels of chivalry.

More on consequences:

There are revelations that are not meant for us. Tchouang-Tseu (who in the fourth century
B.C
. Imagined
the dreamer who dreams he is a butterfly and who, upon waking, no longer knows if he is a man who dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who is now dreaming he is a man) wrote this story: The son of a poor family makes his living fishing for pearls. One day, he dives into the sea and emerges with a pearl worth a thousand gold pieces. Instead of congratulating him, his father orders him to take a stone and smash the pearl. He argues that a pearl worth a thousand gold pieces must be so rare that it could only be found in a chasm nine fathoms deep and under the chin of a black dragon. It therefore follows that the son has been able to take the pearl only because the dragon had fallen asleep. “O my son!” he concludes, “think of what would happen to you once the dragon woke up!”