To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  MORE THAN ENOUGH SPACE FOR ALL YOUR MULTIMEDIA ARCHIVES. “… The size and complexity of the poem carry their own risks. The word carry is quite fitting in this case. The foremost danger is that it remain unfinished. One could die, or simply give up after too many years of solitary devotion to the same task (even if literary solitude, though highly touted, is in fact neither indispensable nor even desirable: the impersonal nature of the process would allow a well-trained team to expedite it by being placed in charge of gathering and organizing all the materials). Nor can the risk be ruled out that the poem become unmanageable through sheer overabundance and complexity, making it impossible to establish the least amount of order, or better still, to foster the rise of an implicit and spontaneous order of the kind that occurs in nature. I believe emergent order is the proper term. A building of such mass and immense complexity can collapse and sink under its own weight. Not that this would be a problem either. It might even be preferable. Unfinished things are melancholy, but what is overly finished and complete can produce a sense of horror. The Escorial, for instance. A frightful building. St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome; that gruesome baldachin, with its twisted columns of gilt bronze! Centuries of neglect would perhaps improve them, or perhaps a large earthquake or a fire. Nature rising from the rubble; fallen columns lying like colossal tree trunks in an American national park; cats in the Colosseum. Entire colonies of cats, a lineage going back for centuries like the patriarchs in the Book of Genesis. Splendid blades of grass between the paving stones and a wild fig tree growing out of a crack in the wall, life itself spilling out and burgeoning in the heavy rain and the fertile, humid heat of Rome. Imagine how horrible, how vulgar a building like the Colosseum must have been when it was just finished. Covered in marble and gold like a Vegas casino mimicking the Colosseum, with a big neon sign on top, or better yet, a name in solid gold letters: TRUMP.”

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  WE WANT OUR EXPERIENCE TO IMPROVE YOUR FUTURE. “… It will be the poem of Trump’s century, just as the Aeneid was the poem of Augustus. This is your catastrophe, I am only passing through. France under Louis XIV, China under Mao, Athens in the time of Pericles, the age of Trump. Each figure placing its name and its dreadful monuments on an entire age. The horror of Versailles, the merciless geometry of its terrifying gardens, the very trees and bushes ranged in regiments like a troop of Brown Shirts in Nuremberg. What Versailles needs is to be abandoned for a few centuries. Not even that, just fifty years. Nature acts quickly in wet climates. I’m not losing the thread of my argument. Or I lose it and I find it again. Theseus in the labyrinth, etc. What matters most about the labyrinth is that when Theseus arrived it was already in ruins. The best thing about the Aeneid is that it remained unfinished. Virgil had no time to spoil it by giving it a polish that is entirely alien to life: a shine, a finish. Look at the Divine Comedy, so horribly well-made, so complete and perfectly conjoined; one verse following another, eleven syllables, then a tercet, and another, and another, until you can’t bear another set of three, and then another canto, thirty-three, and then three parts, always three, like the Holy Trinity. The Holy Trinity! How can such an abstract abomination have been tolerated for so many centuries? Paradise, the angels, the archangels. Can anyone stand it?”

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  WE SHARE ALL YOUR DREAMS. “An unfinished Divine Comedy would have been more human and much more interesting. A pile of drafts and loose sheets of paper in a trunk up in an attic in a house somewhere, perhaps the house where Dante died. The trunk that held Pessoa’s manuscripts. The leather binders that Benjamin entrusted to that lunatic George Bataille when he was about to flee Paris. It was a great good fortune that Proust could not entirely revise the final volumes of his novel. Hundreds of nearly indecipherable handwritten pages fallen at the foot of his bed or mixed up in the sheets. Galley proofs with endless marginal additions, with pasted notes, and poor Céleste Albaret doing what she could so it wouldn’t all fall into complete disorder. Pascal was just as lucky (which is our own good luck as well) in dying without ever writing the theological treatise for which he kept jotting down notes here and there. Picture that treatise, as solid as a tomb, instead of the squiggles and scrawls, the flashes of lightning of the Pensées. Can you stand Camus’s novels? And those pompous philosophical essays? But just open any of his Carnets and you won’t be able to put it down. Or read the unfinished novel he was carrying in a suitcase in his car when he was killed in a crash. Give me works that are unpublished, posthumous, unfinished, failed, half lost. Give me Billy Budd, written in longhand and put away in a drawer from which Melville never brought it out again. Give me the monstrous novels, never to be published, that Henry Roth wrote in an RV parked in the middle of the desert in Arizona. How could he have published them, when what he wrote in them was that he and his sister had been lovers. There he is, sweating, sitting at a camping table, typing in his underwear in the desert like a hermit with a picnic cooler, as if he had survived a nuclear apocalypse. Just him, the typewriter, the RV, his folding chair, and a rickety table that must have shook each time he struck a key. Writing and writing as if an abscess had burst; feeding a tumor that grew with every page he wrote. Inspiration like an open hemorrhage, the catastrophic flood after a dam collapses…”

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  CHOOSE THE WILDEST CONTENTS. “You are right in that respect,” he said, as if he had only become aware of my presence at that moment, following a brief silence, his thoughtful eyes remaining perfectly still behind the lenses of his glasses as he took a sip of water and wiped his lips with a paper napkin, his pale hand over his face like a shifting mask. “It’s true that some writers were able to finish their projects without falling into anything too heavy or monumental. Which no doubt was for the best. Cervantes finished Don Quixote, and Joyce finished Ulysses. Melville finished Moby-Dick. But don’t all three of those books seem like they move almost at random? Remember, Don Quixote is not a novel. It is two different books, published a decade apart and written in the course of fifteen years with an improvised, cumulative structure full of sizeable oversights that became the bread and butter of generations of academics; made up, in fact, of quite diverse materials that seem taken from all over. Not to mention that the second volume was finished in great haste, in a burst of anger against the author of an apocryphal Quixote. We have that wonderful word in Spanish: a vuelapluma. Who wants to read, who has the patience for jewelers and goldsmiths? Perfection is just jewelry. Cervantes, Joyce, Melville, all three of them work with waste materials. They reach into the alluvial deposits of stories written by others before them. They steal. They cut and paste. They let themselves be carried away by reckless digressions, courting disaster, almost wanting the book in progress to collapse, to burst and spill until it becomes impossible or nearly impossible to control, as Moby-Dick exploded in Melville’s hands after a few chapters to become a wild, chaotic mass of words, a flood, a pastiche, a thing of rags and tatters. Moby-Dick was a landslide that buried poor Melville’s name and reputation for the rest of his life; an explosion that destroyed whatever it found in its path…”

  GREAT BALL OF FIRE FLIES OVER SPAIN AT 60,000 MPH. It can take a glass bottle up to four thousand years to decompose. There are nearly four thousand chemical substances in a cigarette, among them nicotine, tar, ammonia, and Polonium-210, all of them carcinogenic and capable of contributing to the death of over six million people per year. Given its composition, a cigarette filter can take one to ten years to decompose. Chewing gum is 80 percent plastic. It takes an average of five years to decompose and the process requires oxygen, which during the first stages causes the gum to petrify. Polyethylene terephthalate, used in the manufacture of most of the world’s water bottles, is immune to nearly all naturally occurring decomposing microorganisms. It can take between a hundred and a thousand years for a plastic bottle to begin losing its toxicity and start dissipating in the air. By 2025, about 155 million pieces of plastic waste will have been dumped into the Earth
’s oceans. Two hundred years is how long it can take a sneaker to decompose. A household battery can pollute up to three thousand liters of water and take between five hundred and a thousand years to decompose. In addition to arsenic, zinc, lead, chrome, and cadmium, almost all batteries contain mercury, one of the most toxic metals known to humankind. In contact with water it produces methylmercury, a by-product that severely pollutes the ocean’s biosphere. Glass bottles are made of calcium, sand, and sodium carbonate. It can take four thousand years for a single bottle to decompose.

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  TRUE LUXURY SHOULD KNOW NO BOUNDS. By 2025, the world will produce six million tons of waste a day, twice the current level. If you weigh around 150 pounds, you should know that each year you produce six times your own body weight in trash. Humans produce 3.5 million tons of waste each day. By some estimates, total waste production could rise to eleven million tons per day by 2100. The economic model of consumption is at its most extreme in the city. These frenzied nodes of manufacturing and consumption produce enough trash in one day to fill a convoy of trucks stretching for more than three thousand miles. After the 2015 Paris summit, it was concluded that if no measures are taken the entire planet could collapse by 2050.

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  YOU’LL HAVE THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE. El Salvador, currently the world’s most violent country, was shocked by the death of a hippo after suffering a gruesome beating. Gustavito, as the hippo was christened by popular vote, was the only one of its kind at the National Zoo. Weighing more than three thousand pounds, it lived precariously in a pond that was far too small for its size. The government confirmed that the death of the animal was caused by severe blows inflicted by one or more unknown persons who illegally entered the zoo. Blunt and sharp instruments were employed. Gustavito, a sixteen-year-old hippo and the only one of its kind in the entire country, suffered “massive hematomas and lacerations on the head and trunk” that proved fatal. Judging from the type of injuries it received, the authorities believe it was attacked with rocks, ice picks, and sharp knives. Deep gashes on its snout and head have led experts to believe it tried to defend itself. Many public complaints have been made in recent years about living conditions at the zoo and the state of its facilities. A cobra and an African lion starved to death prior to this latest incident. Severe behavioral disturbances have been documented among the animals, including a tiger that tried to eat its own tail and birds that plucked off their feathers.

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  OREGON MAN BEHEADS MOTHER AND WALKS INTO A SUPERMARKET WITH HER HEAD UNDER ONE ARM. Three minors arrested in Seville for beating a man to death. Man dies after being attacked by a pack of dogs in a village in Alicante. Four dogs covered in tar and left out in the sun so they would stick to the ground. Film actress attacked by shark while shooting a commercial in the ocean. Dead wolf found strung up from a traffic light. This is the third instance of dead wolves strung up in Asturias in the past three days. All of the animals were killed by gunshot and displayed in public places. Intruders enter Paris zoo at night to kill a rhino and saw off its horn. Crocodile stoned to death by a group of visitors to the Tunis zoo. According to the mayor’s office, the animal died “of severe internal bleeding” after being hit by a large stone. The crocodile was killed by two heavy stones that struck it near the eye. The same group of visitors threw stones at wolves and hippos. Man brutally kicked by ostrich in South Africa.

  I CAN’T STOP LOOKING. It was the summer of Bosch at the Prado, Caravaggio at the Thyssen, Torres-García at the old Telefónica building and Fantin-Latour, Hergé, René Magritte, and Baudelaire in Paris. The photographs of Miroslav Tichý were on show in a small room at the Museum of Romanticism in Madrid, which was even emptier than usual in the general exodus of the summer holidays. “Glorifier le culte des images,” says Baudelaire. The cult of images had much to do with the constant, vibrant joy I experienced during the long and leisurely walks I took on those lazy days of summer. To set out toward the places where the images were waiting was to begin preparing my eyes in advance, my mind as well, which grew increasingly alert with physical exertion in the precious coolness of the early morning. My bicycle would glide in perfect silence down an empty tree-lined avenue. There was no traffic, the air was fresh, and by the time I went from one part of the city to another my mind felt sharply focused and my eyes wide open. In a dimly lit room inside the Thyssen there was a single painting, Caravaggio’s Saint Ursula. The darkness of the room and in the painting fused together. It was like going from the blinding sun into the gloom of a chapel deep in an Italian church. Looking at that painting requires a special patience; what it depicts seems to be happening very slowly. Gradually my pupils began to discern the metallic gleam of sword and armor; the soldier’s sunburned rustic faces; the paleness of the martyr pierced by the arrows of her torment and beginning to bleed out. Caravaggio put himself in the painting, craning his neck among the other witnesses like someone at the scene of an accident on a busy street. Saint Ursula spreads her wound open with her pale fingers as if she was spreading open her sex.

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  A NEW WAY TO LOOK AT LIFE. To get to the Prado and look at the paintings by Bosch I had to cross El Retiro. Walking through the park was in fact a good preamble to Bosch. It looked very different on the way back from the museum than on the way there. The ordered rows of trees stretching away over tidy lawns to an umber horizon was like the modest, practical view of The Garden of Earthly Delights in Bosch’s painting. Groups of young girls—foreign tourists—leaned their heads together to take pictures, holding out their cell phones and laughing joyfully as in an advertisement. Caravaggio’s Abraham, about to slit Isaac’s throat, pressed his son’s face against the sacrificial stone with the same fierce determination with which a jihadist had beheaded an octogenarian priest in Paris in front of the altar where he celebrated mass. There was an advertisement on every bus stop with a joyful group of fearless young people jumping off a cliff, throwing their arms up and flexing their knees as if taking flight. On every corner store there was a cardboard panel with an advertisement for Magnum chocolate ice cream bars. The same pair of catlike eyes stared at you all through Madrid, the same face split vertically in two: a young, dark-skinned girl on one side, a leopard on the other. On one half a human nose and lips; on the other a muzzle. A leopard-woman, a panther, daring you and holding out to you the thrill of an urge as powerful as the one that turned Henry Jekyll into Mr. Hyde or an ordinary man into a werewolf. Dare to go double. RELEASE THE BEAST.

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  TERRIFYING INCIDENTS. It was the summer of Bosch. There were as many bodies crowding around and in front of the triptych as there were bodies painted on its panels. Flushed, well-fed bodies with cameras and iPhones gazing at emaciated medieval bodies. Packed into the room where The Garden of Earthly Delights is displayed, visitors pace slowly around it in a circular motion, a motion that is very similar to that of the mounted figures riding around a small pool in the central panel. The bodies in the painting are all the same: tiny copies of the same man and woman, seen from a distance that grows even greater given how difficult it is to approach the painting in that crowded room. People get as close as they can, eager to look, to make out little figures and small details, hideous creatures, symbols that in most cases remain entirely unintelligible. People glutted with pictures of overabundance and with televised visions of paradise gaze in a slow stupor at barbaric and infernal scenes where every torment lasts forever. Tourists flock like anxious pilgrims desperate to touch a sacred relic. Those who get too close receive a warning from a guard. Unlike the figures they are looking at, they are as varied as a crowd of people strolling through an airport or as the multitude that will be summoned—as many of them doubtlessly believe—to the Final Judgment. Some of them, listening to the audio guide, nod as if receiving a secret message. The figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights, by contrast, are all alike. There are no children or old men. No one is fat, or skinny, or ugly, or handsome, or aged, or in their p
rime, and there is barely any difference between the sexes. The crowd in the museum moves around the room in all its chaos and variety. Fat, exhausted tourists sweating in the summer heat and shuffling their feet, red-faced, fanning themselves with the visitor guides they were given at the ticket counter. In The Garden of Earthly Delights it is never hot or cold. Bodies do not sweat, or weigh anything, or cast shadows.

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  DON’T MISS YOUR CHANCE. If you look closely, no one seems to be enjoying themselves very much in this Earthly Paradise or whatever it happens to be. Men and women surrender themselves to pleasure with a neutral and conscientious expression, as if taking part in an orgy that was also an assembly line. The catalog of their sexual postures and acrobatic maneuvers displays all the exhaustive and rigidly regimented variety of pornography. Instead of being aroused by watching or embracing others they seem lost in thought. Each of them, with the right software, could be given a little cell phone. They could hold it up to their ear or look at the screen, or type a message with those little hands that look like the tiny paws of lab rats. They walk through Paradise and are as lost in what they alone can see as people tracking Pokémon in the park outside the museum.

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  TURN YOUR ASPIRATIONS INTO REALITY. Eventually I had a realization. I would meet him at a certain place, but I never saw him arrive or leave. He would be sitting at a table in the Café Comercial and the next moment he was gone. If he wasn’t there already, he never turned up, and if he was, he had gotten there before me. It seems odd that it took me so long to notice, but going back in my mind to each of our meetings I couldn’t find a single memory of him arriving at the café when I was already there, or leaving before me, let alone together. Once or twice, when we made plans to meet, I got there early just to make sure I was on time. Ten or fifteen minutes early. But he was already there, sitting at a table halfway between the front windows and the back wall, where light began to give way to shadow. One morning I looked in and didn’t see him. I had in fact arrived twenty minutes early. Pleased with myself and with my punctuality, I went to the newsstand to buy some papers and maybe a cheap DVD. I kept an eye on the subway exit. I looked down Fuencarral and Sagasta, saying to myself I would surely see him come, since it was almost time for our appointment and he was never late. I remember the film I bought that morning, a rare find I couldn’t have come across anywhere else in Madrid: The Hands of Orlac, a movie that Buñuel was quite fond of. A pianist who has lost both hands in an accident receives as a transplant the hands of a murderer, and then, possessed by them, becomes a strangler. I stood on the sidewalk holding a couple of newspapers under one arm and a silent movie in my hand (which seemed to emphasize even more my perennial anachronism) and looking at the crowd that periodically came out of the Metro even though it didn’t seem like a means of transportation he would use. At one point, since I was standing outside the café, I looked in through the window. And there he was, perfectly settled at his usual spot, with his satchel or briefcase to one side of the marble-top table. Had he been in the bathroom when I went in? Was that why I had missed him? But I had no memory of him ever getting up to go to the bathroom or walking back to our table.