A Reading Diary (16 page)

Weather is a Canadian subject. There is no weather to speak of in
Don Quixote
.

Back home to France. Rain and mist. The cat has climbed up on the pigeon tower, and watches the puddles in the garden from a box lined with towels.

Dante wants us to believe in the beauty of Beatrice, so perfect that her place is in heaven. Catullus and Petrarch try to convince us of the many attractions of their beloveds. Don Quixote attempts no such arguments. When the merchants whom he meets on his first outing ask that he show them a portrait of Dulcinea before they swear to her unparalleled beauty, he answers, “If I were to show her to you, what would be the merit of your confessing such a notorious truth? The importance of my demand consists in your believing, acknowledging, affirming upon oath and defending her beauty before you have seen it.”

Perhaps the great literary characters are those few who will always escape our full understanding. The unbearable Lear bringing his hundred cronies to his daughter’s house, the love-dejected Dante obsessed by a young girl he has only briefly met, the trouble-prone, delusional Don Quixote beaten and stoned for persisting in his delusions—why do they move us to tears, why do they haunt us, why do they intimate that this life makes sense after
all, in spite of everything? They offer no reason; they demand that we believe, acknowledge, affirm their existence, “upon oath ”

Similar to other “end of the world” places—Finisterre, Land’s End, Tierra del Fuego—Newfoundland has the quality of standing outside ordinary time. St. John’s has something of the Fort in Dino Buzzati’s novel
The Tartar Steppe
(which I reread on my return flight): a place that seems impossible to leave but also impossible to reach, a place so anchored in its own routine that nothing from the outside can touch it. Maybe that is why I found St. John’s so appealing.

Favourite cities:

• Venice
  
• Hobart
  
• Madrid
  
• Edinburgh
  
• Bologna
  
• Istanbul
  
• Poitiers
  
• Sélestat
  
• Oslo
  
• Bogotá
  
• Tiradentes
  
• Algiers
  
• St. John’s
  

Like so many of my favourite books, Buzzati’s is one that I first read during my adolescence: the story of Drogo, a young man posted to “the Fort” on the edge of the so-called Tartar Steppe, who over the years becomes obsessed with proving himself a soldier in battle with the never-materializing Tartars. The Fort is an uneasy haven; a complicated system of passwords controls its entry and exit. I remember feeling (I feel it again now) the terror of being caught in Drogo’s nightmare of daily secrets—secrets entrusted to only one commanding officer, who might lose his memory or his way. The web of absurd rules and the threat of an invisible enemy echoed then all the frustrations and helplessness of adolescence; now it echoes all the frustrations and helplessness of more-than-middle age.

Buzzati’s Fort exists within the concentric circles of its own rituals; it is a magical place that locks out time. It is not that time has stopped here but that, even more horribly, it continues at its own pace, distancing the Fort from the rest of the cosmos. In a place like this, everything inside you wants to move away; everything outside you keeps you back.

There is a memorable passage in the sixth chapter, describing Drogo in his sleep dreaming of the seemingly never-ending journey to the Fort, which he cannot imagine. “Is it far yet? No, you have to cross the river down below there, climb those green hills. … Another ten miles—people will say—just over that river and you’ll be there. Instead you never reach the end.” I wonder if this is what Alejandra Pizarnik (who certainly had read the novel) had in mind when she wrote that poem I love remembering: “And it is always the garden of lilies on the other bank of the river. If the soul asks, is it far? you shall answer: on the other bank of the river, not this one but that.”

Compared to the rain in Newfoundland, the winter rain in France feels warm.

Drogo needs to believe that the Tartars exist and that they pose a threat, so that he can long for the chance to fight them. He needs to believe in the Enemy.

In the paper last week: against the decision of the United Nations, eight European leaders have given their signed approval to Bush—including Vaclav Havel, whom I so admired. Maybe, now that the Communist threat has vanished, he needs to believe in some other Enemy.

Buzzati and Kafka (i): Perhaps it is not only impossible to achieve justice. Perhaps we have even made it impossible for a just man to persevere in seeking justice.

Drogo is aware that time will not stop, that time in the Fort is made of consecutive present moments and that he is a different man in each of those moments. In one of these he wishes he had never come, in another he accepts his condition, in yet a third he hopes he will be a warrior on the battlefield, in a fourth he realizes that none of these present moments will continue to be “now.” He describes his mother’s attempt “to preserve the time of his childhood” by shutting up his room, and adds, “She was mistaken in believing that she could keep intact a certain state of happiness which had vanished for ever, that she could hold back the flight of time, that if she reopened doors and windows when her son returned, things would be as before.”

My first sense of time passing: age six or seven, returning to our house after the holidays and finding that not
everything
was exactly the same.

On the flight back from St. John’s I made these lists:

On the theme of time suspended:

• Bioy Casares, “The Perjury of the Snow”
  
• James Hilton,
  Lost Horizon
  
• Kobo Abe,
  Woman in the Dunes
  
• Perrault, “Sleeping Beauty”
  
• Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle”
  
• Alfonso el Sabio, the fable of the singing bird that makes a hundred years seem like a few minutes, in
  Las Partidas
  

On places that cannot be left:

• Léon Bioy, “The Captives of Longjumeau”
  
• Buñuel,
  The Exterminating Angel
  
• Sartre,
  Huis Clos
  
• Hans Christian Andersen, “The Snow Queen”
  
• Tennyson, “The Lotos-Eaters”
  

On places that cannot be reached:

• Lord Dunsany, “Carcassonne”
  
• André Dhôtel,
  Le pays où Von n’arrive jamais
  
• Sir Thomas Bulfinch,
  My Heart’s in the Highlands
  
• Book of Genesis, the Promised Land (for Moses)
  
• Kurt Weill, “Youkali”
  
• Kafka,
  The Castle
  

Buzzati notes that, from the very beginning of his writing career, people heard Kafka’s echoes in his work. As a consequence, he said, he felt not an inferiority complex but “an annoyance complex.” And as a result, he lost any desire to read Kafka’s work.

I’ve just discovered that Lord Byron’s dog, Boatswain (for whom he composed a moving epitaph), was born in Newfoundland.

The passwords to get in and out of the Fort are contingent on time. Because they change daily, any soldier who forgets them is in danger of being left outside forever. Coded words must regulate every soldier’s existence. The coded language of the military, the conventional language of war, attempts to posit the world in an arbitrary and clear-cut context. Without it, conflict would be impossible.

Buzzati’s method of passwords joins Bush’s vocabulary of unambiguous terms: good and evil, them and us, black and white, right and wrong. In the twelfth-century
Chanson de Roland: “Païens ont tort et Chrétiens ont droit.”

Ernest Bramah, in
Kai Lung’s Golden Hours:
“It is scarcely to be expected that one who has spent his life beneath an official umbrella should have at his command the finer analogies of light and shade.”

War seems at the same time imminent and yet impossible. The view of the conflict offered by the European newspapers is merely allegorical: American power in the shape of a wilful monster attacking other monsters. Since we don’t believe in dragons, the allegory is useless. An editorial in the London
Daily Telegraph
tells us that the “World Economy requires the War Machinery.” We are in the realm of ornamental capital letters.

Ron Wright called this morning from Port Hope. He argues that Bush’s bully tactics mark “the end of democracy.” I agree. But I wonder whether we can ever witness such titled events on a huge scale (“The Fall of the Roman Empire,” “The Conquest of America,” “The Holocaust”) or whether we are always left with a tiny corner of the picture from which, in the best of cases, we can intuit the whole. It may be that we have to resign ourselves to dealing in details.

Voltaire: “Curse the details, posterity is blind to them all.”

The suspect intentions of all sides in this conflict make it difficult to consider it with any clarity. One would require Buzzati’s ability to maintain coherence in the midst of constantly shifting points of view. For Buzzati, even the reader’s perspective must be brought into the story, since we too must be made responsible for the events. “Look how small they are,” Buzzati tells us, pointing at Drogo and his horse, “how small against the side of the mountains, which are growing higher and wilder.”

The looming war has nothing heroic about it; we know that the motives driving the Anglo-American forces are less humanitarian than financial. In Buzzati’s story, on the other hand, the tragic feeling of absurdity that overcomes the reader stems largely from the utter futility of the heroic enterprise. No humanitarian or financial reasons can be invoked. The frontier gives no trouble, the Tartar Steppe has not seen Tartars in living memory, the heroes are never granted the chance of being heroic.

Someone told me this joke: Moishe meets his friend Jacob on the way out of their shtetl. “I’m leaving for America,” says Jacob. “Soon I’ll be far away.” Moishe: “Far away from what?”

Brilliant sunshine, crisp cold. My neighbour comes over with a gift of fresh eggs and stays for twenty minutes discussing the conflict in Iraq. How strange for an Iraqi farmer half a world away, if he were to know that his fate is the subject of a conversation here, in a small, almost invisible French village.

Looking at the soldier who supplies him with the rules and laws governing the passwords, Drogo wonders what is left of him after twenty-two years in the Fort. “Did [he] still remember that somewhere there existed millions of men like himself who were not in uniform? Men who moved freely about the city and at night could go to bed or to a tavern or to the theatre, just as they liked?”

“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me,” noted Meister Eckhart.

From an apocryphal book of devotions: “God reveals in utter clarity that which we can’t understand; that which we
can
understand He lays out in riddles.”

I have often had this idea: that the (false) impression of being able to see in front of us the entire chart of action, the
totality of a situation, leads us to believe that other choices are open to us. I say to myself, “I am sitting here, in my room, writing, but I could be elsewhere, doing something quite different,” which is like saying, “I could lead another life, I could be someone else.”

Buzzati and Kafka (2): Drogo is seized by the unfulfill-able desire to escape. “Why had he not left at once? … Why had he given in?” Drogo’s questions reaffirm the ineluctability of his condition. He can imagine escaping only because it is impossible. Kafka in his
Diaries:
“Should I greatly yearn to be an athlete, it would probably be the same thing as my yearning to go to heaven and to be permitted to be as despairing there as I am here.”

In the ninth-century
Life and Times of Pai Chu-yi:
“Walking towards the scaffold, Li Tzu turned to his son with these words: ‘Ah, if we were in Shanghai, hunting hares with our white hound!’ ”

I note that the philosopher John Rawls, who died last year, has been remembered by his publishers with this quotation:

The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “I am myself alone an entire generation.”