Indeed, the defining experience of our Miguel’s life, what made him into the man and artist he was to become, were the harrowing five years (1575-1580) that he spent in the dungeons of Algiers as a prisoner of the Berber pirates. It was there, on the border where Islam and the West clashed and mixed, that Cervantes learned to value tolerance towards those who are radically different, and also there that he discovered that, of all the goods that men can aspire to, freedom is by far the greatest. While awaiting a ransom that his family could not pay, confronted with execution each time he valiantly attempted to escape, watching his fellow slaves tormented and impaled, he longed for a life without despotic walls or manacles that bound him to an arbitrary master. But once he returned to Spain, a crippled war veteran neglected by those who had sent him into conflict, once he found himself jobless and without recognition, as disappointments and betrayals piled up, he came to the conclusion that if we cannot determine the misfortunes that assail our bodies, we can, however, hold sway over how we react to them, we can engage in the more crucial task of emancipating our soul.
Don Quixote derives from that revelation. In the prologue to the First Part of his novel (1605) he tells the “idle reader” that it was “begotten in a prison, where every discomfort has its place and every sad sound makes its home.” Given that Cervantes was jailed many times in his life, always unfairly, always persecuted by corrupt and inept magistrates, we do not know for sure which Spanish city deserves the bizarre honor of housing the prison where the initial, tentative glimmers of the Ingenious Hidalgo first saw the light, but what seems certain is that this new traumatic experience of incarceration, which forced him to revisit the Algerian ordeal, thrust him face to face with a dilemma that he resolved to our joy: either succumb to the bitterness of despair or let loose the wings of his imagination, prove that we humans contain within us a limitless, indeed divine, capacity to go beyond the immediate materialistic prison-house of this Earth. The result, eventually, was a book which would push the frontiers of creativity, unfettering his writing from the chains and boundaries of previous literature, subverting every tradition and convention Cervantes had inherited. A miracle: instead of a rancorous indictment of a decaying Spain that had rejected and censored him, Cervantes invented a tour de force as playful and ironic as it was multifaceted, laying the ground for all the wild experiments in uncertainty that the novelistic genre was to undergo over the centuries, a fountain from which every writer since has been drinking.
Hailed initially for its farcical, festive, entertainment value, readers over the centuries gradually came to recognize that they were living, suffering, performing in the multidimensional windmill grind of everyday existence that Cervantes, for the first time in Western history, had proclaimed as worthy of fascinating, deliberate, caring narration. He realized, with tender brutality, that we are all madmen constantly outpaced by history, fragile humans powered by the mirage of who we are and what we desire, imprisoned by an identity built out of how others view us, shackled to bodies that are doomed to eat and sleep, to defecate and make love and someday die, made ridiculous and also glorious by the figments and ideals we harbor. Cervantes, to put it bluntly, discovered the vast psychological and social territory of the ambiguous modern condition. Captives of a harsh and unyielding reality, we are also simultaneously graced by the constant attempt to surpass, with some semblance of dignity, its battering blows. It was the genius of Cervantes to gently force his readers to concede and then jubilantly celebrate that they were equally woven out of the fabric of both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, that his two supposedly opposite heroes are, in effect, indispensable components of one hybrid humanity seeking freedom.
Those of us reading Don Quixote in 1973 in an Embassy we could not leave, surrounded by troops ready to transport us to stadiums and cellars and cemeteries, responded viscerally to that riotous work conceived in circumstances not dissimilar to those we were enduring. That continuous exaltation and practice of liberty, both personal and aesthetic, was inspiring, the wager that, beset though we may be by the most sordid events and accidents, we are all, each last one of us, a magnificent, ongoing experiment that only ceases with our final breath. This faith that the human spirit cannot be crushed was epitomized by a passage from the Second Part of Don Quixote that moved us to tears.
Sancho Panza has been made governor of a fictitious insula, an Isle, by a Duke and his lady, keen to amuse themselves at the expense of their guests. The lowly squire proves to be a far wiser and more compassionate ruler than the noblemen who mock him and his master. One night, doing the rounds, he comes upon a young lad who is running away from a constable. The boy gets cheeky with Sancho and the erstwhile governor sends him to sleep in prison. Infuriatingly, the prisoner insists that he can be put in irons and chains but that no one has the power to make him sleep, that staying awake or not depends on his own volition and not on the commands of anyone else. Chastened by this example of independence and self-possession, Sancho lets him go.
It is an episode that has stayed with me ever since. If I call it to mind again now, it is because I feel it contains the essential message Cervantes still has for today’s desperate humanity.
True, most of the planet’s inhabitants are not in prison, like Cervantes so often was, nor do they find themselves confined, like the revolutionaries in the Argentine Embassy, by multiple walls of dread. And yet we live, more even than the author of Don Quixote, in a world rampant with shifting mirrors and mirages, ever farther from one another, a species captured by violence and inequality, greed and stupidity, intolerance and xenophobia, marooned on a planet spinning out of control. As if we were lunatics sleepwalking towards the abyss.
Cervantes died four hundred years ago and yet he continues to send us words, the wisdom transmitted by that boy threatened by Sancho Panza, words that we need to read again and listen to and meditate upon before it is too late.
Nobody has the power to make us sleep if we don’t wish it ourselves.
Cervantes is telling us that our besieged, besotted, captive humanity should not lose hope that we can awaken in time.
16.
THE DANCING COSMOS OF ALBERT EINSTEIN
Einstein was supposed to be the genius of eyes and light.
But it turns out that ears listening in the dark to the hidden music of the universe are his last gift to us. I am not surprised. As a child, I was sure that Albert Einstein was the most famous violinist in the world.
The confusion stemmed from a photo of the great man that adorned the New York Times in the late 1940s—let’s say 1948, to conveniently and coincidentally make me six years old, the very age when Einstein himself, in 1885, first started his violin lessons. That morning of 1948, my father opened the paper in our home in Queens, New York, and pointed to the man with the bushy moustache and wild hair and gentle laughing eyes. “The greatest man of our time,” my father informed me solemnly. “And I met him several times, when I was at Princeton in 1944, at the Institute of Advanced Studies. He even invited me to his house, served me tea. And how he played the violin!”
And that was enough, the awe with which my father pronounced those words he played the violin, for me to believe for many years that the most eminent physicist in history was renowned primarily for his ability to coax notes out of a musical instrument.
In time, of course—oh, yes, in time—I came to realize the errors of my ways. He began to appear on my horizon when my adolescent brain staggered to understand that mass and energy can be manifestations of the same phenomenon and then loomed even larger as my adult brain began to pen stories where the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion full of curves. And appeared in all his metaphorical glory when, growing older in a globe defined by what Einstein had discovered, a century torn asunder by the forces that this wonderful man had unleashed, I found my life splintered as if it were an atom. And through it all, I also came to admire Einstein as a man of peace and wis
dom and yes, a prankster—with that renowned tongue of his sticking out at us from his most notorious photograph and demanding that we not take him—or ourselves—all that seriously.
So many images, so much influence, the unforgettable speed of light in the center of the galaxies, and ever less my original impression of Einstein as a musician.
And yet, now that we are learning, with amazement and humbleness, that the universe is filled with the gravitational waves that Einstein predicted as existent in 1916, just over one hundred years ago, now that the ears and not the eyes of humanity will chart the inside of black holes and beyond, I have started to wonder if my first intuition about the great Albert was not correct after all. I wonder if those early violin lessons in 1885—for a boy who had not yet started to really enunciate words, who was a tardy speaker of German—were not the sweet fire where his mind was forged and tempered. If it was not in the mass of that wooden musical instrument filled with a baffling energy that resonated inside every electron of his being, if it was not there where and when and how he first conjured up the laws of cosmology. I wonder if the design of the universe was not contained in the emotion he wrested from those strings. And if it was not a heart tuned by Mozart that gave birth to his certainty that the quantum leap of the imagination is always more important than the dreary accumulation of conventional knowledge. Can it not be—my final wonderment—that Einstein’s grand cosmic theory owes more to an aesthetic revelation than to his overwhelming mathematical intelligence? That he surmised his gravitational waves of the great beyond from the waving, weaving sounds in the intimacy of his brain?
Because this he did know, really knew—and said it: “We all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.” And was exceptional because he understood this mystery, that distance, this invisibility, that piper, in a deeper and more humane way than most of those who, full of uncertainty and bewilderment, have danced ever since in the still luminous shadow of his music and his mind.
Isn’t it time—again, time!—that we listen to him all over again, now that refugees like him are denied safe passage and haven, now that the science that he defended with a fierce intelligence is under siege, being derided and underfunded, now that the hate crimes and anti-Semitism and discrimination of the sort he and his fellows suffered are rampant and retweeted by so many in power, isn’t it the moment to celebrate the melody of the messages that he, like a distant, pulsating star, is still sending us?
Here’s to you, Uncle Albert—the greatest violinist in the world.
17.
REVISITING MELVILLE IN CHILE
Santiago de Chile may seem a strange place from which to try to understand Donald Trump and how to resist his most aberrant edicts and policies, and yet, it is from the distance and serenity of this Southern Cone city, where my wife and I live part of the year, that I have found myself meditating on these issues, abetted by the insight and doubts of none other than Herman Melville.
When the Pinochet dictatorship forced me and my family into exile after the 1973 coup, the vast library we had laboriously built over the years (with funds we could scarcely spare) stayed behind. Part of it was lost or stolen, another part damaged by a flood, but a considerable part was salvaged when we went back to Chile after democracy was restored in 1990. What strikes me about these books that have withstood water and theft and tyranny is how they enchantingly return me to the person I once was, the person I dreamt I would be, the young man who wanted to devour the universe by gorging on volume after volume of fiction, philosophy, science, history, poetry, plays. Simultaneously, of course, those texts, mostly classic and canonical, force me to measure how much desolate and wise time has passed since my first experience with them, how much I myself have changed, along with the wide world I traveled during our decades of banishment, a change that becomes manifest as soon as I pick up any of those primal books and reread it from the inevitable perspective of today.
It is a happy coincidence that the works I have chosen to revisit on this occasion are by Melville, as I can think of no other American author who can so inform the perilous moment we are currently living. Roaming my eyes on shelf after shelf, I soon lit upon his enigmatic novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, and sandwiched between it and Moby-Dick, a collection of his three novellas, Benito Cereno; Bartleby, the Scrivener; and Billy Budd, Sailor.
Having just participated, as an American citizen, in the recent election that elevated to the presidency an archetypal liar and devious impostor who has hoodwinked and mesmerized his way into power, The Confidence-Man seemed like an appropriate place to start. Though published 160 years ago, on April Fool’s Day, 1857, Melville could have been presciently forecasting today’s America when he imagined his country as a Mississippi steamer (ironically called the Fidèle) filled with “a flock of fools, under this captain of fools, in this ship of fools!”
The passengers of that boat are systematically bilked by a devilish protagonist who constantly shifts his identity, changing names and shape and schemes, while each successive ambiguous incarnation tries out one scam after another, swindles and snake-oil-trickery that were recognizable in his day—and, alas, in ours. Fraudulent real estate deals and bankruptcies, spurious lies disguised as moralistic truths, grandiose charitable undertakings that never materialize, financial hustles and deceptions, bombastic appeals to the honesty of the suckers while showing no honor whatsoever—it all sounds like a primer for Trump and his buffoonish 21st-century antics and “truthful hyperbole.” Of course, Melville’s time was not the age of Twitter and Instagram and short attention spans, so his ever-fluctuating rascal engages in endless metaphysical discussions about mankind, quoting Plato, Tacitus, and St. Augustine, along with many a book that Trump has probably never even heard of. And rather than a bully and a braggart, this 19th-century pretender is garrulous and genial. But just like Trump, he displays an arsenal of false premises and promises to dazzle and befuddle his victims with absurd and inconsistent projects that seem workable until, that is, they are more closely examined—and then, when cornered by demands that he provide proof of his ventures, the scamp somehow manages to distract his audience and squirm away. And also like Trump, he exercises on his dupes “the power of persuasive fascination, the power of holding another creature by the button of the eye,” which allows him to mercilessly best his many antagonists, exploiting their ignorance, naïveté, and, above all, greed.
Indeed, Melville’s misanthropic allegory often seems less a denunciation of the glib and slippery trickster than a bitter indictment of those gullible enough to let themselves be cheated. The author saw the United States, diseased with false innocence and a ravenous desire for getting rich, heading toward Apocalypse—specifically, the Civil War that was a scant four years away. Fearful that, behind the masquerade of virtue and godliness performed by the role-playing passengers, there lurked shadows of darkness and malignancy, he was intent on revealing how the excessive “confidence” in America’s integrity, virtuousness, and “ardently bright view of life” can lead to tragedy.
And the novel ends in a quietly terrifying way. As the light of the last lamp expires and a sick old man, one final quarry of the Confidence Man, is “kindly” led toward extinction, the narrator leaves us with this disturbing forecast: “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.”
Those words pester me, because the “something further” that we are living today is a grievous circumstance that Melville could not have anticipated: what if somebody like the slick Confidence Man were to take power, become the captain of that ship of fools—in other words, what if someone, through his ability to delude vast contingents, were to assume control of the republic and, like mad Ahab, pursue the object of his hatred into the depths (in Trump’s sea there are many white whales and quite a few minor fish) and doom us all to drown along with him?
If Melville was not concerned with the possibility that his Confidence Man might become a demented, uncivil pres
ident, he did bequeath us, nevertheless, three short masterpieces where the protagonists rebel, each in their own special way, against an inhumane and oppressive system. By reading once again the novellas Bartleby, Billy Budd, and Benito Cereno, I hoped, therefore, to discover what guidance Melville might provide to those of us who ponder how to fight the authoritarian proclitivies that Trump and his gang epitomize as they seek total and uncontested power to radically remake America.
I began, obviously, with Bartleby, the Scrivener.
“I would prefer not to”: those are the emblematic words with which the protagonist, a copyist for a Wall Street lawyer (who is also the bewildered narrator of the tale), invariably responds when asked to perform the most minimal tasks but also when offered a chance to better or protect himself, to the point of losing his job, his housing, and, eventually, his life, as he ends up starving his body to death in prison. When I initially read this novella in my youth, I saw it, not incorrectly, as an allegory about Melville himself. At the time of its writing—in 1856, a year before the experimental, uncompromising The Confidence-Man was published—the author (whose Moby-Dick had sold poorly and been, in general, misunderstood when it appeared in 1851) was struggling with his own refusal to accommodate his style and vision to the commercial literature of his age, a refusal that corresponded with my own 1960s ideas about not selling out to the “establishment.” Though I was able to grasp, as many readers have since Bartleby appeared, that this radical rejection of the status quo went far beyond a defense of artistic freedom, delving into mankind’s existential loneliness in a Godless universe, it is only now, beleaguered with the multiple dangers and dilemmas that Trump’s authoritarianism poses, that I can fully appraise the potential political dimensions of Bartleby’s embrace of negativity as a weapon of resistance.
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