A Reading Diary

by Alberto Manguel

  Decipher: Today, during an interview on French radio, Catherine Henri, a teacher who has written a memoir of her high-school experience, defined a good student as “one who allows himself to be astonished.”

  SUNDAY

  I’m on the road again. I’ve travelled to the town of Umea, in northern Sweden, to give a lecture at the university. The hotel I’m staying at was a hospital in the 1800s, and ghastly photos of operating rooms, showing butcher-like doctors gathered around corpse-like patients, decorate the walls. I hear no comments on the war in Iraq here, as if the echoes of the conflict had died out in the distance. The landscape all around is Canadian: Regina or Winnipeg minus the skyscrapers. Waiting to be picked up, I sit in my room with Brás Cubas. The incongruity of reading a nineteenth-century Brazilian author at a distance of a hundred and fifty years, in an aseptic room in the far Scandinavian north on this Lutheran Sunday, does not escape me.

  I imagine a volume of memoirs in the style of one of those bookbags that travellers used to carry with them centuries ago. An account of my life through the books I have read in the places I have visited. A task for my afterlife.

  For Machado de Assis (or for Brás Cubas) the afterlife is the perfect place for self-reflection, because there we shall be all alone, with no witness. Unlike the crowded heavens and hells of Dante or Milton, Machado’s are like the intellectual space created by a reader and a book: utterly private. For Brás Cubas, life is riddled with shame and “the foul vice” of hypocrisy, miseries caused by the presence of others. “But in death, what a difference! what a relief! … Because, essentially, in death there are no neighbours, no friends, no enemies, no acquaintances, no strangers: no public.” Brás Cubas must tell his story from beyond the grave in order to leave a trace of his passing, which he feels was, like that of every other man, conducted in a crowded space under the indifferent glance of fellow-travellers.

  Nine years before he died in Paris, unknown and unread, the great Peruvian poet César Vallejo wrote in his notebook, “If, at the hour of a man’s dying, all other men’s pity were gathered to prevent him from doing so, that man would not die.”

  MONDAY

  Stockholm. Impossible to get the shower to work. The main inconvenience of travelling is having to learn how to manipulate new bathroom fixtures.

  The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is a book of digressions, very much (as Machado acknowledges) in the vein of Laurence Sterne or Joseph de Maistre: “I believe the reader prefers story to reflection, like other readers, his colleagues, and I think he is right in doing so. We will get there. But I should say once more that this book is written with indolence, with the indolence of a man no longer concerned with the brevity of this century; it is a supinely philosophical work, of uneven philosophy, at times austere, at times playful, something that neither edifies nor destroys, neither freezes nor sets on fire, and is more than a pastime and less than an apostolate.”

  “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; — they are the life, the soul of reading; — take them out of this book for instance, — you might as well take the book along with them.” Sterne, in Tristram Shandy.

  When Sterne died, only his bookseller was in attendance at the funeral. Weeks later, students in an anatomy course at Cambridge University were horrified to discover that the unearthed cadaver they were dissecting was that of the celebrated author of Tristram Shandy. Sterne’s remains were sent back to the graveyard for reburial.

  But digression does not mean jotting down everything. Brás Cubas is built up from carefully chosen digressions that allow room for the reader in the blanks between the nutshell chapters (for instance, between the memorable chapter made up of a list of words that cumulatively describe the funeral of Brás’s father, and that other chapter which transcribes a dialogue between Brás and Virgilia, made up entirely of punctuation marks).

  In Samuel Butler’s Note-books: “If a writer will go on the principle of stopping everywhere and anywhere to put down his notes, as the true painter will stop anywhere and everywhere to sketch, he will be able to cut down his works liberally. He will become prodigal not of writing—any fool can be this—but of omission. You become brief because you have more things to say than time to say them in. One of the chief arts is that of knowing what to neglect.”

  At dinner, the editor Anders Björnsson tells me that when a fire destroyed his entire library, he suddenly felt that, in order to assemble one again, he first needed to know what books not to include.

  TUESDAY

  Back home. Rain again. There is a reassuring feeling in this unchanging weather, as if its constancy in time underlined the constancy of place, making me feel welcome.

  How odd that in so little time (barely two years) the house has acquired a personal past that concerns me, a history of our intimacy. Now every moment here is not only the experience of whatever is taking place but also the memories that cling to it. It is as if, more or less consciously, we laid away present moments to draw upon them later, like funds in an old-age pension. “Ungrateful reader,” says Machado, “if you don’t keep the letters you have written in your youth, you will not know one day the philosophy of old pages, you will not enjoy the pleasure of seeing yourself far away, in the shadows, with a three-cornered hat, seven-league boots and a long Assyrian beard, dancing to the rhythm of anacreontic bagpipes.”

  And earlier: “Believe me, the lesser evil is to remember; no one should trust present happiness; there is in it a drop of Cain’s spittle. Once time has passed and the spasm ceased, then yes, then perhaps we can truly enjoy ourselves, because between one and the other of these two illusions, the better one is that which gives pleasure without pain.”

  Our neighbour comes to offer us some of his wood. He has calculated how much he will need if he lives to be ninety; all the rest he will give away.

  WEDNESDAY

  My reading attaches itself to everything I do, to every place I visit. Brás Cubas travels to Portugal to study in Coimbra. When, a few years ago, I first saw that ancient city, with its magnificent cathedrals and exquisite baroque library, I felt less the weighty presence of history (wandering through Portugal’s oldest university; visiting the House of Tears, where Inés de Castro, the beautiful wife of the infante Pedro, was murdered in 1355) than the fleeting ghost of the young Brás Cubas, who, for scarcely a paragraph, attended its august seat of learning. It seems to me that as I read I am taking notes, without knowing it, for what I will one day experience, or what I once experienced but failed to understand.

  A French publisher has brought out a volume of pieces by a nineteenth-century Czech writer, Ladislav Klima, of whom I knew nothing. He seems to me like a Machado de Assis character: student of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, inventor of a dubious tobacco substitute, steam-engine conductor, journalist, night watchman at a condemned factory, amateur philosopher. He left behind an immense hoard of manuscripts in Czech, German and Latin. Concerning the urge to understand our experience of the world, Klima argues, “Instead of saying, ‘I seek the meaning of the world,’ i.e., the superlative of all superlatives (and the very minute I pronounce the word, I have it, I achieve my purpose merely by having pronounced it), human philosophy has acted like the fool who would run through the streets in tears, looking for his own head on every street corner.”

  My reading colours my experience not only in the world but also on the page. I am often startled at finding the voice of one author F ve read in another quite different author, the two removed from each other by continents and ages. This is Machado de Assis speaking up in Muriel Spark’s very British first novel, The Comforters:

  It is possible for a man matured in religion by half a century of punctilious observance, having advanced himself in devotion the slow and exquisite way, trustfully ascending his winding stair, and, to make assurance doubly sure, supplementing his meditations by deep-breathing exercises twice daily, to go into a flat spin when faced with some trouble which does not come within a familiar category.


  FRIDAY

  On a day trip to Turin for a get-together of Canadian writers, a charming Italian woman greets me by saying, “Welcome to Turin, Mr. Martel.” I decide I’m too tired to contradict her and spend the day under Yann Martel’s name, all sorts of people saying to me how much they liked Life of Pi. That evening, when Yann arrives, I tell him not to be surprised if people remark on how much younger he looks now than he did in the morning.

  In the newspaper, I read that a group of hackers have broken into the Romanian finance ministry’s Web site and introduced a “tax on stupidity,” to be levied in direct proportion to the importance of the position held. The site remains down while efforts are made to restore it to its former condition.

  For Machado de Assis, stupidity is the essence of the human condition. “It is an old trick of Stupidity to become enamoured with other people’s houses, so that, when she takes one over, it is very difficult to throw her out. And what a trick! She can’t be dislodged, she lost all shame a long time ago. And if we consider the great number of houses she now occupies, many continuously, others only during the summer holidays, we must reach the conclusion that this amiable wanderer is truly the scourge of all landlords.”

  SUNDAY

  Like Voltaire, Machado ironically proposes a philosophy of optimism, through the character of the destitute thinker Quincas Borba—a philosophy Borba calls Humanitism, which argues that pain is illusory. Chesterton: “The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are. … Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness.”

  MONDAY

  A short night full of dreams. I give up trying to fall asleep again.

  I often have dreams that take place in the library. Last night I dreamt that, as I walked in, the room was full of people, mostly writers whom I had known and who are now dead. I was overjoyed to see Denise Levertov and went over to kiss her, but she turned away with a smile and then started pulling books off my shelves and tossing them merrily in the air. I was afraid she’d hit someone.

  In one of his journals, Gide tells of a dream in which he visits Proust in his library. Suddenly, his attention is drawn to a piece of string attached to some of the books. He pulls and several volumes fall, badly damaging their spines. “It’s nothing,” Proust says, with exquisite kindness and the attitude of a gentleman. “It’s an edition of Saint-Simon of … ,” and gives a date. At once, Gide recognizes that the book he has damaged is one of the rarest and most sought-after editions ever published.

  TUESDAY

  The warm days have started. The wisteria over the entrance is in full bloom. Following Mavis’s advice, C. has planted a large bed of cosmos flowers, a name that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was first used in 1650: “As the greater World is called Cosmus from the beauty thereof.” The universe named after a flower.

  I’m looking for a sundial to place on a pedestal that stands in the garden. When I find it, I’ll inscribe a motto on it, such as “This Too Will Pass” or “All Wound, the Last One Kills.” Or perhaps:

  I am a sundial. No words

  Can express my thoughts on birds.

  LATER

  The wallpaper in my room at the Hôtel des Grands Hommes in Paris (where I stayed on my way back from Turin) had an eighteenth-century design with three separate mottoes. First, inscribed under a woman sitting among ruins, watching a solemn dog: “Friendship is not afraid of Time.” Then, as Father Time is rowed across a stream by Cupid: “Love makes Time pass.” Finally, while Cupid (asleep) is rowed across the same stream by Father Time: “Time makes Love pass.”

  To chronicle the passing of love and time, flowing back from the afterlife, Machado de Assis merely places a book full of random memoirs and observations in the hands of his readers. It is up to them to make his recollections theirs, to approve or disapprove of what he has done, to leave off at any chapter, to connect or not the scattered snapshots. Machado expects from his readers the constancy of friendship.

  The obvious, central theme of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is love: the nature of love, the persistence of love, the fading and transformation of love, the rediscovery of love, after it has disappeared, past all expectation. Thinking of the women he has loved (the Spanish Marcella, his sister Sabina, his idealized Virgilia), Brás Cubas says he recalls them “as if these names and persons were only different aspects of my own affections”—much as Machado expects readers to recognize the phantoms of their own thoughts and passions on the page, like spectators in “the very serious matter of the theatre.”

  Up to a certain point, this is true of every book we love. We think we approach it from a distance, watch it part its protecting covers, observe the unfolding of its tale from a safe seat in the audience, and we forget how much the survival of the characters, the very life of the story, depends on our presence as readers—on our curiosity, on our desire to recall a detail or to be surprised by an absence—as if our own capacity for love had created, from a tangle of words, the person of the beloved.

  I don’t know yet to what book Machado’s words will lead me.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to early readers of the diary: Alice Manguel, Edith Sorel, Susan Swan, Katherine Ashenburg, Marie-Catherine Vacher, Hans-Jürgen Balmes, Michelle Lapautre, Derek Johns, Carmen Criado, Jonathan Galassi, Gena Gorrell, John Sweet, and most especially Louise Dennys. Many thanks to CS Richardson for the exquisite design of the book. And to the team at Westwood Creative Artists, as always.

  Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. A.M.

  Internationally acclaimed as an anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist and editor, ALBERTO MANGUEL is the author of several award-winning books, including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places and A History of Reading. He was born in Buenos Aires, moved to Canada in 1982, and now lives in France, where he was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters. His most recent book is With Borges.