A Reading Diary

by Alberto Manguel

  “Wait now, what do we have here? The most perfect journal of all: Kafka’s. Set it next to Saint Augustine; they should be honoured in just the same way. Now, a few other respectable exceptions: the journals of Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Julien Green. All these, my friend, are intimate, wise and revealing; you must preserve them carefully. Cesare Pavese’s This Business of Living: place it beside the previous three. And these? Two moving Canadian memoirs: Sharon Butala’s Wild Stone Heart and Wayne Johnston’s Baltimore’s Mansion, both exactly right, each in its own way. Keep all six on the same shelf. One more: Hermann Broch’s Autobiographical Writings, a uniquely conceived, intelligent memoir, mysteriously unknown in Germany.”

  “And this thing here, A Reading Diary, no less? Into the fire, don’t you think?”

  “Hold on! The author is a friend of mine, and even though the volume carries little grace and less intelligence, it has the merit of being enthusiastic and short, the latter thankfully atoning for the former. Spare it for now, later we shall see.”

  “Later! I’m not certain how much longer I can carry on with all this wallowing. All these first persons are becoming less singular by the minute. Bless me, what a lot of true-life stories! You would think we had enough unbidden confessions daily without deciding to pen more! How we enjoy the sound of our own voice!”

  Auden, quoting an Icelandic proverb: “Every man enjoys the smell of his own farts.”

  WEDNESDAY

  Idiocy in academia seems to have no limits. Amherst College in Massachusetts has decided to offer a course in Espanglish—that is to say, in the mixture spoken by Latin American immigrants who have not yet learned English. Among the assignments, the translation of Don Quixote. These are the first two sentences: “In a placete de La Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme, vivía, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny caballo y un greyhound para el chase. A cazuela with más beef than mutón, carne choppeada para la dinner, un omlet pa los sábados, lentil pa los viernes, y algún pigeon como delicacy especial pa los domingos, consumían tres cuarers de su income.”

  Yesterday, in Nigeria, Islamic protesters rioted after hearing that the Miss World contest would take place in their country. They set fire to churches and shops belonging to Catholics and wounded or killed more than five hundred people, stabbing them with knives or placing burning tires around their necks. They ran down the streets of Kaduna shouting, “God is great!” and “Down with beauty!”

  THURSDAY

  If I had to choose a favourite passage in the novel, I think it would be the episode of Clavileño, when Don Quixote and Sancho are tricked into mounting, with their eyes covered, a wooden horse that supposedly will take them through the air to visit the wizard Malambruno. If they are indeed flying, Sancho asks, how is it that they can still clearly hear the voices of those on earth? Don Quixote dismisses the question as simply another peculiarity of their magical business. Sancho then suggests that they at least peek from under their blindfolds to see where they are. And it is then that Don Quixote shows how ambiguous his supposed delusion is: he forbids Sancho to remove his blindfold.

  Faith must not be subject to the proofs of reason. Faith does not battle reason; it simply asserts itself by creating a place of emptiness for itself. It is into this emptiness, mystics believe, that God can enter.

  FRIDAY

  Leave for Canada to give a lecture at the University of Newfoundland.

  SATURDAY

  My first visit to St. John’s, Newfoundland. Immediately, the sense of being in an alien place, an island world with its own rules, its own language, its own imagination. I add St. John’s to the places where I think I could live happily.

  This evening, a blizzard broke out over the city. From my hotel room, which has two huge corner windows, I see the snow clouds blow in and shatter endlessly against the glass, as if the whole building were swimming into waves of white.

  Four of the most memorable weather experiences in my life have happened in Canada: this blizzard; the northern lights in Manitoba; a tornado in Saskatchewan; a storm coming up from the Pacific, seen from the librarian’s house perched on a cliff above Campbell River, British Columbia.

  Weather is a Canadian subject. There is no weather to speak of in Don Quixote.

  WEDNESDAY

  Back home to France. Rain and mist. The cat has climbed up on the pigeon tower, and watches the puddles in the garden from a box lined with towels.

  Dante wants us to believe in the beauty of Beatrice, so perfect that her place is in heaven. Catullus and Petrarch try to convince us of the many attractions of their beloveds. Don Quixote attempts no such arguments. When the merchants whom he meets on his first outing ask that he show them a portrait of Dulcinea before they swear to her unparalleled beauty, he answers, “If I were to show her to you, what would be the merit of your confessing such a notorious truth? The importance of my demand consists in your believing, acknowledging, affirming upon oath and defending her beauty before you have seen it.”

  Perhaps the great literary characters are those few who will always escape our full understanding. The unbearable Lear bringing his hundred cronies to his daughter’s house, the love-dejected Dante obsessed by a young girl he has only briefly met, the trouble-prone, delusional Don Quixote beaten and stoned for persisting in his delusions—why do they move us to tears, why do they haunt us, why do they intimate that this life makes sense after all, in spite of everything? They offer no reason; they demand that we believe, acknowledge, affirm their existence, “upon oath ”

  February

  The Tartar Steppe

  SATURDAY

  Similar to other “end of the world” places—Finisterre, Land’s End, Tierra del Fuego—Newfoundland has the quality of standing outside ordinary time. St. John’s has something of the Fort in Dino Buzzati’s novel The Tartar Steppe (which I reread on my return flight): a place that seems impossible to leave but also impossible to reach, a place so anchored in its own routine that nothing from the outside can touch it. Maybe that is why I found St. John’s so appealing.

  Favourite cities:

  Venice

  Hobart

  Madrid

  Edinburgh

  Bologna

  Istanbul

  Poitiers

  Sélestat

  Oslo

  Bogotá

  Tiradentes

  Algiers

  St. John’s

  Like so many of my favourite books, Buzzati’s is one that I first read during my adolescence: the story of Drogo, a young man posted to “the Fort” on the edge of the so-called Tartar Steppe, who over the years becomes obsessed with proving himself a soldier in battle with the never-materializing Tartars. The Fort is an uneasy haven; a complicated system of passwords controls its entry and exit. I remember feeling (I feel it again now) the terror of being caught in Drogo’s nightmare of daily secrets—secrets entrusted to only one commanding officer, who might lose his memory or his way. The web of absurd rules and the threat of an invisible enemy echoed then all the frustrations and helplessness of adolescence; now it echoes all the frustrations and helplessness of more-than-middle age.

  Buzzati’s Fort exists within the concentric circles of its own rituals; it is a magical place that locks out time. It is not that time has stopped here but that, even more horribly, it continues at its own pace, distancing the Fort from the rest of the cosmos. In a place like this, everything inside you wants to move away; everything outside you keeps you back.

  There is a memorable passage in the sixth chapter, describing Drogo in his sleep dreaming of the seemingly never-ending journey to the Fort, which he cannot imagine. “Is it far yet? No, you have to cross the river down below there, climb those green hills. … Another ten miles—people will say—just over that river and you’ll be there. Instead you never reach the end.” I wonder if this is what Alejandra Pizarnik (who certainly had read the novel) had in mind w
hen she wrote that poem I love remembering: “And it is always the garden of lilies on the other bank of the river. If the soul asks, is it far? you shall answer: on the other bank of the river, not this one but that.”

  SUNDAY

  Compared to the rain in Newfoundland, the winter rain in France feels warm.

  Drogo needs to believe that the Tartars exist and that they pose a threat, so that he can long for the chance to fight them. He needs to believe in the Enemy.

  In the paper last week: against the decision of the United Nations, eight European leaders have given their signed approval to Bush—including Vaclav Havel, whom I so admired. Maybe, now that the Communist threat has vanished, he needs to believe in some other Enemy.

  Buzzati and Kafka (i): Perhaps it is not only impossible to achieve justice. Perhaps we have even made it impossible for a just man to persevere in seeking justice.

  Drogo is aware that time will not stop, that time in the Fort is made of consecutive present moments and that he is a different man in each of those moments. In one of these he wishes he had never come, in another he accepts his condition, in yet a third he hopes he will be a warrior on the battlefield, in a fourth he realizes that none of these present moments will continue to be “now.” He describes his mother’s attempt “to preserve the time of his childhood” by shutting up his room, and adds, “She was mistaken in believing that she could keep intact a certain state of happiness which had vanished for ever, that she could hold back the flight of time, that if she reopened doors and windows when her son returned, things would be as before.”

  My first sense of time passing: age six or seven, returning to our house after the holidays and finding that not everything was exactly the same.

  On the flight back from St. John’s I made these lists:

  On the theme of time suspended:

  Bioy Casares, “The Perjury of the Snow”

  James Hilton, Lost Horizon

  Kobo Abe, Woman in the Dunes

  Perrault, “Sleeping Beauty”

  Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle”

  Alfonso el Sabio, the fable of the singing bird that makes a hundred years seem like a few minutes, in Las Partidas

  On places that cannot be left:

  Léon Bioy, “The Captives of Longjumeau”

  Buñuel, The Exterminating Angel

  Sartre, Huis Clos

  Hans Christian Andersen, “The Snow Queen”

  Tennyson, “The Lotos-Eaters”

  On places that cannot be reached:

  Lord Dunsany, “Carcassonne”

  André Dhôtel, Le pays où Von n’arrive jamais

  Sir Thomas Bulfinch, My Heart’s in the Highlands

  Book of Genesis, the Promised Land (for Moses)

  Kurt Weill, “Youkali”

  Kafka, The Castle

  Buzzati notes that, from the very beginning of his writing career, people heard Kafka’s echoes in his work. As a consequence, he said, he felt not an inferiority complex but “an annoyance complex.” And as a result, he lost any desire to read Kafka’s work.

  MONDAY

  I’ve just discovered that Lord Byron’s dog, Boatswain (for whom he composed a moving epitaph), was born in Newfoundland.

  TUESDAY

  The passwords to get in and out of the Fort are contingent on time. Because they change daily, any soldier who forgets them is in danger of being left outside forever. Coded words must regulate every soldier’s existence. The coded language of the military, the conventional language of war, attempts to posit the world in an arbitrary and clear-cut context. Without it, conflict would be impossible.

  Buzzati’s method of passwords joins Bush’s vocabulary of unambiguous terms: good and evil, them and us, black and white, right and wrong. In the twelfth-century Chanson de Roland: “Païens ont tort et Chrétiens ont droit.”

  Ernest Bramah, in Kai Lung’s Golden Hours: “It is scarcely to be expected that one who has spent his life beneath an official umbrella should have at his command the finer analogies of light and shade.”

  SUNDAY

  War seems at the same time imminent and yet impossible. The view of the conflict offered by the European newspapers is merely allegorical: American power in the shape of a wilful monster attacking other monsters. Since we don’t believe in dragons, the allegory is useless. An editorial in the London Daily Telegraph tells us that the “World Economy requires the War Machinery.” We are in the realm of ornamental capital letters.

  Ron Wright called this morning from Port Hope. He argues that Bush’s bully tactics mark “the end of democracy.” I agree. But I wonder whether we can ever witness such titled events on a huge scale (“The Fall of the Roman Empire,” “The Conquest of America,” “The Holocaust”) or whether we are always left with a tiny corner of the picture from which, in the best of cases, we can intuit the whole. It may be that we have to resign ourselves to dealing in details.

  Voltaire: “Curse the details, posterity is blind to them all.”

  The suspect intentions of all sides in this conflict make it difficult to consider it with any clarity. One would require Buzzati’s ability to maintain coherence in the midst of constantly shifting points of view. For Buzzati, even the reader’s perspective must be brought into the story, since we too must be made responsible for the events. “Look how small they are,” Buzzati tells us, pointing at Drogo and his horse, “how small against the side of the mountains, which are growing higher and wilder.”

  The looming war has nothing heroic about it; we know that the motives driving the Anglo-American forces are less humanitarian than financial. In Buzzati’s story, on the other hand, the tragic feeling of absurdity that overcomes the reader stems largely from the utter futility of the heroic enterprise. No humanitarian or financial reasons can be invoked. The frontier gives no trouble, the Tartar Steppe has not seen Tartars in living memory, the heroes are never granted the chance of being heroic.

  Drogo: “So the Fort has never been of any use whatsoever?” The Captain: “None at all.”

  Someone told me this joke: Moishe meets his friend Jacob on the way out of their shtetl. “I’m leaving for America,” says Jacob. “Soon I’ll be far away.” Moishe: “Far away from what?”

  MONDAY

  Brilliant sunshine, crisp cold. My neighbour comes over with a gift of fresh eggs and stays for twenty minutes discussing the conflict in Iraq. How strange for an Iraqi farmer half a world away, if he were to know that his fate is the subject of a conversation here, in a small, almost invisible French village.

  Looking at the soldier who supplies him with the rules and laws governing the passwords, Drogo wonders what is left of him after twenty-two years in the Fort. “Did [he] still remember that somewhere there existed millions of men like himself who were not in uniform? Men who moved freely about the city and at night could go to bed or to a tavern or to the theatre, just as they liked?”

  “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me,” noted Meister Eckhart.

  WEDNESDAY

  From an apocryphal book of devotions: “God reveals in utter clarity that which we can’t understand; that which we can understand He lays out in riddles.”

  I have often had this idea: that the (false) impression of being able to see in front of us the entire chart of action, the totality of a situation, leads us to believe that other choices are open to us. I say to myself, “I am sitting here, in my room, writing, but I could be elsewhere, doing something quite different,” which is like saying, “I could lead another life, I could be someone else.”

  Buzzati and Kafka (2): Drogo is seized by the unfulfill-able desire to escape. “Why had he not left at once? … Why had he given in?” Drogo’s questions reaffirm the ineluctability of his condition. He can imagine escaping only because it is impossible. Kafka in his Diaries: “Should I greatly yearn to be an athlete, it would probably be the same thing as my yearning to go to heaven and to be permitted to be as despairing there as I am
here.”

  In the ninth-century Life and Times of Pai Chu-yi: “Walking towards the scaffold, Li Tzu turned to his son with these words: ‘Ah, if we were in Shanghai, hunting hares with our white hound!’ ”

  LATER

  I note that the philosopher John Rawls, who died last year, has been remembered by his publishers with this quotation:

  The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as he lives by them, each from his own standpoint. Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view.

  The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “I am myself alone an entire generation.”

  THURSDAY

  My friends Gottwalt and Lucie sent me a magnificent illustrated book on the “Dance of Death” in the Marienkirche in Lübeck, which we visited together a year ago. Against an unremarkable landscape of cities, ports and countryside, every one of society’s members is carried away in a macabre chorus line, linking arms with skeletons draped in shrouds. The ordinary atmosphere seems to contradict the monstrosity of death; in fact it grounds it in our daily business, a reminder of what we carry within. That reminder is present all along in Buzzati’s work.