A Reading Diary

by Alberto Manguel

  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.”

  TUESDAY

  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:

  Is not that the moon?

  And is not the spring the same

  Spring of the old days?

  My body is the same body

  Yet everything seems different.

  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.

  THURSDAY

  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.’ ”

  FRIDAY

  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.”

  SUNDAY

  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.

  April

  Surfacing

  FRIDAY

  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.”

  SATURDAY

  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.

  Surfacing is the story of a woman searching for her lost father in northern Quebec, and in the process surrendering herself to the natural world. The narrator’s companions fumbling along in the bush, the member of the Wildlife Preservation A
ssociation who wants to buy her father’s property, the francophones she meets during her quest, all seem to want to own the wilderness around them, without realizing that ownership loses meaning in the Canadian landscape.

  Once Atwood said to me that Robert Frost’s line “The land was ours before we were the land’s” has no meaning in Canada.

  In the thirteenth century, the great mystic Rumi wrote that “to praise is to praise the act of surrendering to the emptiness.”

  SUNDAY

  We walk in the garden before breakfast, discussing a wall that needs to be repaired and what to plant by the side of the church. Since the beginning, we have felt not that we own this house but rather that we have been given it in trust, to look after, as if it were inconceivable to own something centuries old, and fruit trees that have grown out of the bones of ancient dead. On the last pages of Surfacing, the narrator says that her father must have realized in the end that he was an intruder in the wilderness: “the cabin, the fences, the fires and paths were violations; now his own fence excludes him, as logic excludes love.”

  On the radio this morning: Bush’s army is at the gates of Baghdad. The soldiers force their way into the city under the banner of “liberators,” freeing Iraq of a vicious dictator in order to install American control in the region. Under such circumstances, there is no moral distinction between figures such as Saddam and Bush; both are Agamemnon, pushing on for his own sake, confident that he is the chosen instrument of gods, who will in turn privately reward him. Agamemnon is the father willing to sacrifice his own daughter, Iphigenia, for the sake of fair winds that will allow his fleet to reach Troy. According to Ovid, “the king sacrificed his paternal love for the sake of public interest.” Scant consolation for Iphigenia.

  In 1905, in a poem addressed to Roosevelt, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío accused the United States of believing that “there where you put the bullet/ You put the future.

  “No,” Darío bluntly concluded.

  On television, a French journalist interviews a young English soldier shortly after his first killing. “Was this your first time in armed combat?” “Yes.” “Were you frightened?” “You don’t have time to be frightened. You do what you’ve been trained to do. You don’t think about it.” Except that now nothing can be the same for him ever again, for as long as he lives.

  According to Kant, Reason and Madness are two neighbouring realms whose borders are so close that it is impossible to explore one without straying into the other.

  So it is in Surfacing. Halfway through the book, the narrator realizes that her explanation for her father’s disappearance must be mistaken; that he did not become so obsessed with his research into rock paintings that he lost his mind in the wilderness. On the contrary. “I had the proof now, indisputable, of sanity and therefore of death. Relief, grief, I must have felt one or the other. A blank, a disappointment: crazy people can come back, from wherever they go to take refuge, but dead people can’t, they are prohibited.”

  The Abnaki people of North America believe that a special group of deities, the Oonagamessok, presided over the making of rock paintings. The Abnaki explain the gradual disappearance of these paintings by saying that the gods are angry because of the lack of attention accorded to them since the arrival of the whites. The narrator’s father (Atwood tells us) is a man riddled by stolid reason, and is less interested in the meaning of the rock paintings than in the materials with which they were created; he is someone who explains to his children that God is a superstition “and a superstition … a thing that didn’t exist. If you tell your children God doesn’t exist they will be forced to believe you are the god, but what happens when they find out you are human after all, you have to grow old and die? Resurrection is like plants, Jesus Christ is risen today they sang at Sunday School, celebrating the daffodils; but people are not onions, as he so reasonably pointed out, they stay under.”

  Some Jews put little heaps of pebbles on the tombs of their dead in memory of the burials in the desert after the exodus from Egypt, when stones were used to mark the graves in the shifting sands. “It also prevents the dead from climbing out of their tombs again,” a rabbi once told me, jokingly. The last time I visited my father’s grave, I placed a heap of pebbles on the slab merely to mark my own passing. I now keep a couple of those pebbles in a wooden box in my library.

  MONDAY

  In Spanish, Surfacing translates as Saliendo a la superficie, or Emergiendo (“coming up to the surface” and “emerging”), both of which are clumsy and carry no music. Looking for a title for the Spanish translation, I suddenly think of Alborada, the surfacing of a new day.

  What exactly is it that surfaces in Surfacing?

  TUESDAY

  C. points to a swallow flying over the garden and skimming the pool. “It is an owl that has been trained by the Graces. It is a bat that loves morning light. It is the aerial reflection of a dolphin. It is the tender domestication of a trout.” I wonder how many readers would guess that these lines are by John Ruskin.

  In the post today, a letter from Peter Oliva in Calgary. I think of the endless Canadian landscapes and realize that the difference between those and what lies around me now, here in France, is essentially one of dimension. Here I feel as if I could simply stretch out my arm and touch a church, a copse, a hilltop. In Canada (as in Argentina) the horizon is always receding, what Drieu La Rochelle called horizontal vertigo.

  Atwood: “We moved through flattened cow-sprinkled hills and leaf trees and dead elm skeletons, then into the needle trees and the cuttings dynamited in pink and grey granite and the flimsy tourist cabins, and the signs saying GATEWAY TO THE NORTH, at least four towns claim to be that. The future is in the North, that was a political slogan once; when my father heard it he said there was nothing in the north but the past and not much of that either.”

  In the European imagination, the Canadian north is blank; it is into this blankness that Frankenstein’s Monster disappears at the end of Mary Shelley’s novel.

  LATER

  A large bee or a small bird flies in and out of the flowers C. has planted in the pots at the entrance. I think it’s a tiny hummingbird, but I can’t tell, it moves too fast. I need to know what it is before I can properly see it.

  On one of the last pages of Surfacing:

  From the lake a fish jumps

  An idea of a fish jumps.

  Earlier, as the narrator enters the northern Quebec of her childhood (“home ground, foreign territory”), she is filled with a sense of unreality: nothing seems the same as it once was. Perhaps that is our only true experience of our past: that whenever we revisit it, it (or our memory) has changed. We have as many autobiographies as moments of recollection.

  In the introduction to her Cambridge lectures of last year, Atwood wrote, “we are all stuck in time, less like flies in amber—nothing so hard and clear—but like mice in molasses.”

  WEDNESDAY

  No one gets lost in the European landscape, except in fairy tales. Maybe they did in the Middle Ages, maybe they still do in a few secret corners of the Pyrenees or the Carpathians. But in the Europe I know there is always a road, a house in sight. I remember sitting by Lake Geneva and thinking how artificial its beauty is compared to the lakes I know in Canada. In Canada, Atwood’s narrator says, “The lake is tricky, the weather shifts, the wind swells up quickly; people drown every year, boats loaded top-heavy or drunken fishermen running at high speed into deadheads, old pieces of tree waterlogged and partly decayed, floating under the surface. … Because of the convolutions it’s easy to lose the way if you haven’t memorized the landmarks. …” And also: “The small waves talking against the shore, multilingual water.”

  A poem by Gwendolyn MacEwen ends:

  Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you

  came for

  Although it is good here, and green;

  You had meant to move with a kind of

  largeness,

  You had planned
a heavy grace, an anguished

  dream.

  But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper

  And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper

  In an elementary world;

  There is something down there and you want

  to he told.

  THURSDAY

  Grey weather. I think of staying in the kitchen after breakfast, reading, but remember that today is the deadline for the review I have to write. I can’t free myself from the conviction that I can only relax after having done my homework. The idea of spending the morning doing nothing but idling with a book which I don’t have to read feels slightly obscene. I felt the same way as a child, telling myself I would only play with my toy farm after tidying my room, for instance.

  I think Atwood’s narrator shares this need. Early in her quest, she realizes that whatever end she is to attain, she must attain it through suffering: “We’re here too soon and I feel deprived of something, as though I can’t really get here unless I’ve suffered; as though the first view of the lake, which we can see now, blue and cool as redemption, should be through tears and a haze of vomit.”

  Saint Teresa, on the scorched soul seeking God’s rain: “Do not weaken, unless you wouldst lose everything, for tears will win you all; one water brings on another.”