A Reading Diary (18 page)

I find it curious that sometimes the words fall precisely into place as I follow a thought in my writing, as if, in the unravelling of that thought, shapes and sounds returned to a pre-established order that seems exactly right. It is as if the words were clustered from the very beginning into a shape which, from a distance, I can only vaguely make out, and which, as I approach it, reveals itself fully formed, distinct and apprehensible. On such occasions, it is as if
writing consisted in seeing clearly something which was already there from the start.

Ivan Morris notes that tenth-century Japanese used repetition as a deliberate stylistic device; what to an English or Spanish ear may sound clumsy becomes in Japanese “a sort of poetic refrain.” A warning to literal translators who, in attempting to reconstruct a text word by word in another language, forget that not only the instrument but the sensibility of the listener is other.

In
The Pillow-Book
, the choice of one right word will lend truth to an otherwise banal observation: “Moonlight makes me think of people who are far away.”

On the other hand, the wrong word renders an original observation unconvincing: “I have never come across anyone with such keen ears as Masamitsu, the minister of the Treasury. I believe he could hear the sound of a mosquito’s eyelash falling on the floor.”

The importance of the
mot juste:
Borges, on a trip to Portugal, asked a journalist who was interviewing him whether King Manoel II (on whom he had written a poem) was sixteen years old when he got lost in the North African desert. “No,” answered the journalist, “the king was twenty
four when he disappeared.” “Ah,” said Borges, “then the adjective in the poem should not be
mágico desierto
(magical desert) but
místico desierto
(mystical desert).”

But even the right word will not repair a lame creation, as Don Quixote points out, recalling a certain artist who painted a rooster in such poor fashion and so badly depicted that “he needed to write in capital letters next to it,
This is a rooster”

Sei Shonagon never needs to clarify anything.

I receive a letter from Luiz Schwarcz in Brazil, telling me that he is thinking of editing a series on literary heroes and asking me which ones I would choose. My list is not as long as I imagined:

• Alice
  
• Sancho
  
• Lord Jim
  
• Prince Florizel of Bohemia
  
• Wakefield
  
• Mr. Pond
  
• Peter Schlemihl
  
• Pinocchio
  

Sei Shonagon makes a list of what she considers “poetic subjects.” The list itself reads like a poem:

There is a certain magical arbitrariness to list-making, as if sense were to be created by association alone.

Sei Shonagon lists “Things that give an unclean feeling:

• A rat’s nest.
  
• Someone who is late in washing his hands in the morning.
  
• White snivel, and children who sniffle as they walk.
  
• The containers used for oil.
  
• Little sparrows.
  
• A person who does not bathe for a long time even though the weather is hot.
  
• All faded clothes … especially those that have glossy colours.”
  

Seneca’s father asked Albucius Silus (first century) for examples of unclean subjects
(sordidissima)
. He answered,
“Rhinoceroses. Latrines. Sponges. Pets. Adulterous people. Food. Death. Gardens.”

Saddam Hussein wrote a novel under a pseudonym, but everyone in Iraq knew who the real author was. An Iraqi journalist exiled since 1999 in Berlin told me that, after Saddam’s henchmen had ransacked his house, killed his father and brother and beaten him until he was almost unconscious, one of the men placed Saddam’s novel by his side, telling him that now he could try reading “something good for a change.”

The scraps of news about the imminent war alternate with long, insignificant television images showing monotonous desert landscapes and blurred military gatherings. Zapping through the channels, I am gripped by a nauseating feeling of incoherence, of fragments whose lack of meaning does not stem from the fact that they are fragments but from the fact that they belong to an incoherent whole. In the aftermath of the two world wars, the myriad voices denouncing, explaining, crying out and warning of the future may have sounded incomprehensible only as long as the framework was ignored. Today, the fragments merely echo a general state of incoherence. No attempt is made to disguise the folly, no excuses are proposed for absurd actions. (George
Bush Sr.: “I never apologize for the United States.”) Protests against the war, arguments based on international law, demands for explanations, reports of official committees, facts and figures published in the papers are all stripped of meaning by the lunatic speech of those in power.

I suggest compiling
A Pillow-Book for World Leaders
, to be distributed gratis at summit gatherings. I contribute two quotations:

From the fourth canto of Camoes’s
Lusiads:
“Oh, the folly of it, this craving for power, this thirsting after the vanity we call fame, this fraudulent pleasure known as honour that thrives on popular esteem! When the vapid soul succumbs to its lure, what a price it exacts, and how justly, in perils, tempests, torments, death itself! It wrecks all peace of soul and body, leads men to forsake and betray their loved ones, subtly yet undeniably consumes estates, kingdoms, empires. Men call it illustrious, and noble, when it merits instead the obloquy of infamy; they call it fame, and sovereign glory, mere names with which the common people delude themselves on their ignorance.”

From Erasmus’s
In Praise of Folly:
“I am, as you can see, that true dispenser of good things, she whom the Latins called
Stultitia
[Stupidity] …. I wear no makeup; I don’t
falsely twist my features to show a feeling my heart doesn’t share. I am myself, so that even those who most strenuously display the mask and the name of Wisdom cannot disguise me; they carry on like monkeys dressed in purple and like donkeys in the skin of a lion.”

Sei Shonagon is snobbish, venerates the imperial family, despises the lower classes, shows no interest in the lives of those outside the court. And yet her fragments acquire meaning for us, their future readers, outside their historical framework. We ignore the conventions that rule her daily transactions, her trains of thought, her displays of emotion, and yet we feel her observations to be true. For instance: “When one has stopped loving somebody, one feels that he has become someone else, even though he is still the same person.”

In the
Tales of Ise
, a collection of prose and poetry written during the time of Sei Shonagon:

In the newspaper: the Japanese company NCR is financing research, at the University of Southern California, into a machine that will read and interpret facial expressions of emotions.

In spite of the United Nations’ decision to the contrary, the Americans have begun to bomb Baghdad. On television, all that is shown is a continuous black screen with occasional bursts of light signifying missile hits.

Kafka to his friend Oskar Pollak, on Sunday, 24 August, 1902: “I sat at my beautiful desk. You don’t know it. How could you? It is namely a good bourgeois well-disposed desk, meant for teaching. It has, there where usually the writer’s knees are, two frightful wooden points. And now pay attention. When one sits quietly, carefully, and writes something good and bourgeois, then one is fine. But woe to one who becomes excited and twitches the body just a little, for then one inevitably gets the points in the knees and how it hurts. I could show you the dark blue marks. And what does that mean, then? ‘Don’t write anything exciting and don’t allow your body to twitch.’ ”

It is curious how the books I choose to read at a certain moment often contradict the mood of that moment. Not stark oppositions, rather shifts of atmosphere.

Now I’m reading classic detective novels in which murder is given a reasonable setting. In
Surfacing
, Margaret Atwood has her narrator say of detective novels, “cold comfort but comfort, death is logical, there’s always a motive. Perhaps that’s why she read them, for the theology.”

Also, a collection of elegant essays by Stevenson,
Memoirs and Portraits
. And Stevenson tells me why: “Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt, and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate.” This defines for me Sei Shonagon’s book of fragments.

Sei Shonagon on reading: “Pleasing things: Finding a large number of tales that one has not read before. Or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a disappointment.”

Marguerite Yourcenar: “Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.”

A crisp, sunny day, intensely blue.

A wedding in our church. Most of the year, the church is empty; the village flock is not large enough to justify a weekly mass, so St. Martin is only used for the occasional wedding or funeral. During the summer months, Mme. M. opens the doors in the morning and locks them towards seven o’clock in the evening, assuming that a stray visitor may be interested in inspecting it. She also looks after the bells, though they are now on an automatic tolling system. However, just before locking up, she sometimes enjoys ringing the bells by hand. She grabs hold of the rope and swings, the whole weight of her body jerking up and down as the deep, hollow peals echo through the ancient emptiness.

Sei Shonagon tells how the Governor of Ise visited her one day and found her pillow-book on the veranda; in spite of her protests, he took it away with him and did not return it until much later. After that, her book was passed about in court. Did Sei Shonagon’s fellow courtiers suspect that this woman’s keen eye was granting them a minuscule form of immortality?

This morning, I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don’t know that I am their reader.

At dinner, my daughter Rachel asks me what I remember most about my father. I take a long moment to answer because I think what I remember most is his physique (he was a big, mustachioed, black-haired man), and I know that is not what she is asking. My children barely knew him, since he died almost twenty years ago, and I don’t know what to tell her.

Curiously, for a long time now I have been dreaming about him: brief, episodic dreams whose relationship to one another I can’t make out.

Two instances:

There is an avalanche of stones, somewhere that looks like a Wild West desert. The stones, huge and round and white, come rolling across the plain with a deafening rumble. I know I’ll be caught in their path, but I can’t move. The stones hit me, but instead of them hurting me, I myself become a stone. As I roll on with them, I notice that a larger stone rolling by my side is my father.

My father and I are having dinner at a restaurant. He smiles and caresses my face with the back of two fingers (as he used to do sometimes) and I’m thinking, “What will we talk about? What can I say that will interest him?” Suddenly the waiter, whose face I can’t see, puts a covered silver dish in front of us. He takes the lid off, and there on the dish are the remains of a tiny charred mermaid, the skull visible through the leathery skin. I’m horrified. My father smiles, not noticing my horror.

I think he would have liked our house here in France. He would have enjoyed walking in the garden, especially now, in April, when you can see the beginning of the roses that C. trimmed back last year.

“Would he have come to visit you if he hadn’t died?” Rachel asks.

Margaret Atwood, in
Surfacing:
“But nothing has died, everything is alive, everything is waiting to become alive.”

Surfacing
was the first Canadian novel I read with the full awareness that it was Canadian. I had read Robertson Davies’ Deptford trilogy, and a memorable science-fiction novel,
A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder
, by James De Mille, as well as the Whiteoaks saga of Mazo de
la Roche, which my father had in his library in a stammering Spanish translation—all without realizing that the authors were from Canada. Perhaps proof of how aleatory the concept of nationality is lies in the fact that we must learn it before we can recognize it as such. The concept of nationality is not self-evident, like the concepts of autobiography or fable-telling.