A Reading Diary

by Alberto Manguel

  Buzzati in his notebooks: “All writers and artists, however long they live, say only one same thing.”

  In “The Death of Ivan Illich,” Tolstoy describes Ivan’s progress towards death as like being on a train and having the sudden impression of travelling in the opposite direction, and then being proven wrong. This is the feeling I have throughout The Tartar Steppe, that I am afforded the description not so much of a long death but of a sleep that sometimes resembles wakefulness.

  Death and his brother, Sleep: the first version of this image I find in the Epic of Gilgamesh, 2000 B.C.: “The sleeping and the dead, how alike they are, like painted death.”

  The Tartar Steppe suggests a familiarity with death. I suspect that, in spite of the hundreds of deaths we see every week on our television screens, we have become utterly unfamiliar with it. We hide our dying in hospitals and retirement homes, we make believe that we step from being there to not being there with no transition, as if the screen went suddenly blank. We make no allowance for passage.

  I think the skulls which medieval scholars kept on their desks as memento mori were useful acknowledgments of something we will become but which we already carry within us. I’m not sure why we speak of transformation when we refer to dying; we don’t change, we merely expose the dust within.

  Henri Michaux: “Man, his essential being, is but a speck. It is this speck that death devours.”

  The newspaper today describes the work of a German surgeon turned artist who exhibits cadavers of humans and animals in various positions. Apparently, several people have offered to donate their bodies for him to use after their death. Now the surgeon has announced that he will perform a dissection publicly, as a performance piece. The banality of such an exhibition is astonishing. It is that very banality of his use of the dead that renders this man’s work obscene.

  Tomás Eloy Martínez told me that the actress Norma Aleandro was once visiting a ranch somewhere in Patagonia. The wealthy landowners, proud of their property, displayed for her many of their treasures: valuable paintings, ceramics, books. Encouraged by Aleandro’s polite enthusiasm, her hosts said they would show her their favourite piece, and put a small copy of Goethe’s poems in her hand. Aleandro commented on the soft, delicately tooled binding. “Yes, that’s it,” they said. “It’s bound in human skin.”

  I loved someone who died. The last time I was with him, death made him look as if he had woken up in the past, magically young, as he had once been when he was without experience of the world, and happy because he knew that everything was still possible.

  SUNDAY

  A cold, crisp, sunny day.

  A friend who has been writing a novel for the past eight years is afraid of finishing it. Draft after draft, revision after revision, she postpones the day of handing it over to the publisher, knowing of course that, once it is printed, all hope of it resembling the novel in her mind will be extinguished, and she will be left with the reality of a creation independent from her will and her desire.

  Buzzati and Kafka (3): Drogo hears the news that a battalion of Tartars may at last be approaching the Fort. Feeling too weak to fight, he tells himself that the news will prove mistaken. “He hoped that he might not see anything at all, that the road would be deserted, that there would be no sign of life. That was what Drogo hoped for after wasting his entire life waiting for the enemy.”

  WEDNESDAY

  I finished The Tartar Steppe yesterday. The last pages are astonishing. I walk in the garden as they echo in my mind. The cat follows me.

  When Drogo dies (as an old man with his wish to fight the Tartars unfulfilled), Buzzati is there to console him. At the death of Don Quixote, Cervantes finds no words to take leave of his friend, his creation or his creator, and can only stammer, “His spirit departed; I mean to say, he died.” At Drogo’s death, Buzzati tells his creature that there is still another, better fight waiting for him, not against Tartars, not against “men like himself who were tortured as he was by longing and by suffering, with flesh that one could wound, with faces one could look into,” but against “a being both evil and omnipotent.” And Buzzati has this to add: “Be brave, Drogo, this is your last card—go to death like a soldier and at least allow your mistaken life to end well. Finally take your revenge on fate; no one will sing your praises, no one will call you a hero or anything like that; but for that very reason it is worth the effort. Step across the shadow line with a firm step, erect as if on parade, and, if you can, even smile. After all, your conscience is not too heavy, and God will certainly grant you pardon.”

  At the hour of my death, these are the lines I would like to remember.

  March

  The Pillow-Book

  MONDAY

  I note that Hervé Guibert bought Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet in order to read the same book at the same time as his lover, who was away travelling.

  Coincidences (even those created artificially), a chance encounter with a friend I have not seen for a long time, the taste of apricots, the discovery of a book I have been searching for, the light at dusk at this time of year, the sound of the wind in the chimney, utter quiet and darkness before falling asleep: all these are for me unexpected moments of happiness. But there are other happy moments attached to nothing: to no event, no particular thought, no pleasing sensation. A feeling utterly ignorant of its causes, silent and sudden and overwhelming.

  It was Silvina Ocampo who first told me to read The Pillow-Book of Sei Shonagon. “You’ll like it,” she said, “because you like making lists.”

  The edition I now have of Sei Shonagon’s book (I lost the copy Silvina gave me) has an introduction by Ivan Morris, the English translator, explaining that, in medieval Japan, a pillow-book was simply a notebook stored away in the drawer of a wooden pillow. It contained personal observations, gossip, impressions of daily events and, above all, lists. Sei Shonagon’s Pillow-Book contains 164 lists. I pick it up now, thinking what a perfect book it is to read at a time of fragmentation.

  According to Novalis, after the Fall, paradise was scattered in fragments all over the earth. That is why it is now so difficult to find.

  I realize that I think in fragments. When I think of Silvina, what I hold in my memory is a composite portrait made up of images and snatches of conversation of varying degrees of intensity, torn from their context or transformed through retelling and forgetting. I remember her husky, tremulous voice on the phone, her large spidery handwriting, the dark glasses that hid her eyes because she thought her face was not attractive, the book-lined apartment she shared with Bioy Casares. I remember her sitting with her beautiful legs tucked under her in the armchair, inventing games for her guests, reading out loud her stories and poems.

  About Sei Shonagon’s book I remember Silvina saying, “How nice not to have to worry about a beginning or an ending.”

  Sei Shonagon was lady-in-waiting to the Empress of Japan during the last years of the tenth century. Her contemporary, Murasaki Shikibu—author of the world’s first psychological novel, The Tale of Genji—had this to say about her: “She is a gifted woman, to be sure. Yet if one gives free rein to one’s emotions even under the most inappropriate circumstances, if one has to sample each interesting thing that comes along, people are bound to regard one as frivolous. And how can things turn out well for such a woman?”

  Jane Austen, in one of her letters: “I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”

  TUESDAY

  Like close-ups in documentary films, brief sketches in books of memoirs suddenly give a sense of immediacy to the writing. Chateaubriand is a master of this device.

  Sei Shonagon, giving an example of “People Who Looked Pleased with Themselves”: “A man who has received the governorship of one of the first-class provinces that is being offered in the current period of official appointments. ‘What a splendid appointment!’ people say and congratulate him warmly, to which he smugly replies, ‘How so?
I’ve been ruined.’ ”

  I’ve noticed that women who observe things closely seem to make men uneasy. Schiller writes to Goethe about the observant Madame de Staël: “She wants to explain, to understand, to measure everything, she accepts nothing obscure, unfathomable, and for her nothing exists that cannot be illuminated by her torch.” And he concludes, “She hasn’t the slightest feeling for that which we call poetry.”

  Though much of Sei Shonagon’s social life appears to be conducted through plotting, scheming, flattering the empress and gossip, her writing never resembles that of a tabloid columnist or a scandalmonger. Her descendants are John Aubrey, Jane Austen, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Barbara Pym. “If I am really close to someone, I realize that it would be hurtful to speak badly about him and when the opportunity for gossip arises I hold my peace. In all other cases, however, I freely speak my mind and make everyone laugh.”

  THURSDAY

  A thin, irresolute drizzle. The cat sits on the step at the entrance of my writing room and watches the flooded garden. I read to it out loud this passage in The Pillow-Book: “When you have gone away and face the sun that shines so crimson in the East, be mindful of the friends you left behind, who in this city gaze upon the endless rains.”

  It’s my birthday. I’m suddenly fifty-five years old. Victor Hugo tells how Pope Pius IX met with Hugo’s nephew Jules and asked him how old his uncle was. “Fifty-five,” Hugo’s nephew answered. “Alas!” exclaimed the pope. “He is too old to return to the Church.”

  For many years now, I have always sat down to write something (even one sentence will do) on March 13. I have the feeling that if I put down a few words, the act will somehow colour the year ahead and I will not feel empty. Then, shreds of routine: preparing lunch, a nap, reading the paper.

  I imagine a “sentimental library” made up of books I’d like to have for purely anecdotal reasons:

  Alice Liddell’s copy of Alice in Wonderland

  the Boileau that Gide read sailing down the Congo

  Saint Augustine’s Cicero

  the copy of Leaves of Grass that Walt Whitman gave to his lover, Peter Doyle

  Keats’s Chapman’s Homer

  Wallace Stevens’s annotated copy of Keats’s Poems

  Averroës’s Aristotle

  the copy of Metamorphosis that Kafka gave to his father

  Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer given to his teacher, Georges Izambard

  Mishima’s copy of Une saison en enfer

  Akhmatova’s Dante, annotated in her hand

  John Gielgud’s copy of The Tempest

  the Amadis that belonged to Cervantes

  the copy of Heine’s Poems that Borges used to learn German

  Freud’s copy of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

  LATER

  Bush and Blair refuse to listen to the demands for more time from the chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix. It becomes increasingly obvious that the Anglo-Americans no longer require an excuse for the war.

  Sei Shonagon: “There are times when the world so exasperates me that I feel I cannot go on living in it for another moment and I want to disappear for good. But then, if I happen to obtain some nice white paper, Michinoku paper, or white decorated paper, I decide that I can put up with things as they are a little longer.”

  SATURDAY

  Life in tenth-century Japan was excruciatingly monotonous for the women at the imperial court. Subjected to meticulous rituals of appropriateness, they could do little more than glimpse, from time to time, the goings-on in the world of men. They were restricted to certain quarters, expected to move, eat and speak in certain prescribed ways, and while the accepted language of the court was Chinese, women were taught only Japanese, which was thought unfit for serious literature.

  In such a context, I wonder whether lines like the following, describing male activities, should be read ironically: “It is delightful when a man on horseback recites poetry at dawn.”

  What tone should we lend to a text written ten centuries ago, in a language we cannot read, by a woman whose circumstances are perhaps beyond our imagination?

  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.

  SUNDAY

  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:

  The capital city. Arrowroot. Water-bur. Colts. Hail. Bamboo grass. The round-leaved violet. Club moss. Water oats. Flat river-boats. The mandarin duck. The scattered chigaya reed. Lawns. The green vine. The pear tree. The jujube tree. The althea.

  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 h
is side, telling him that now he could try reading “something good for a change.”

  MONDAY

  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: