That was why Håkan attempted to seek a balance between his true opinions and necessary expressions of politeness. He watered down even justified annoyance and made frequent use of such phrases as “perhaps,” “a little” and “not necessarily.”
He would have liked to have written, “You are wasting both your own time and other people’s. Have pity on yourself, your family, and the overworked editors at the publisher’s. For God’s sake, go and do something of benefit to both yourself and your fatherland.”
Instead, he wrote dryly and falsely, “The manuscript contains promising starts and interesting trains of thought, but it remains fragmented and uneven.”
Or he would very much have liked to say: “You are not well. Stop this chatter and get yourself a therapist before you are forced into rehab and a straightjacket.”
But he wrote: “The reader will not easily grasp perhaps personally significant lines such as ‘As the century departed he hanged the iris on its line,’ or ‘Anne inside the plum / a museum car her skirt / in the ice-cream bar.’”
When Håkan read a collection of aphorisms whose author aspired to be a humorist as well as a satirist, he wanted to write: “You miserable wretch, so you think you amuse the writer? Your pseudo-jokey rhymes make me sick.”
But instead, he wrote, “The manuscript also attempts satire, but these experiments remain a little feeble.”
Håkan had a particular horror of aesthetes who imagined that being a poet—even in cases where this was merely a title the writer had awarded himself—would isolate them from the activities and senseless business of ordinary people.
Another wearisome category included those writers who constantly lined up learned quotations and mottos or musical terms. But the writer’s own thoughts, what he himself had to say, would have fitted on one line, and even if it was a new and previously unwritten line, one forgot it as soon as one had read it.
Håkan yawned and wrote and yawned again: “It is worth weighing up very carefully when a quotation really does open up one’s own text, and when it is just an extra additive or a proof of learning. A richly nuanced collection, but one that still needs adjustment.”
Håkan found himself reading mottoes that, in recent years, were increasingly taken from Foucault or Baudrillard, or even Lacan. There were texts that swarmed with references to Baudelaire, Lorca, Dostoevsky, the Pre-Raphaelites and pre-Cretan mythology.
Some cultivated Dante with all their might, others Montesquieu. But they never remembered the latter’s words: “It seems to be a wise provision of nature that the follies of men should be short-lived; but books interfere and immortalize them. A fool, not content with having bored all those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting generations to come . . . he wishes posterity to be informed of his existence, and he would have it remember forever that he was fool.”
Many wrote 500 or 750 pages about their miserable lives, which even they loathed. But they wanted above all to write a novel, not an autobiography, and so they catalogued the events of their days in the third person. One began with spring 1995, another from December 1921. The main character was without exception noble, upright, faithful, intelligent, and humorous, but he was always and everywhere surrounded by cheats, slanderers, and plotters. His decency was shamelessly exploited, greedy and base characters schemed for their own benefit, violent, fraudulent, and twisted people swarmed around him.
Håkan wrote: “The reader is forced to wonder whether such minute documentation deserves archiving and would be more suited to the direct memoir, without any attempt at fiction.”
A red plastic Christmas star had been lit in the window opposite. Håkan fetched a cup of chamomile tea which he drank to soothe his stomach, and a tuna sandwich.
But how could one even hope, Håkan thought, that amateurs would write well when professional reporters in relatively decent newspapers could present interviewees with questions like, “Some places to chill out in,” or “I hear you dig neat cars like crazy?” And when a reporter meant to say, “You have apparently traveled a great deal,” what he wrote was, “Your energy field has moved round the world a lot.”
Håkan thought, as so often before, that since the nineteenth century no one—with a couple of exceptions—had written literature any longer. The development of the novel had already anticipated the decay of prose. But while readable sentences had still been written in the thrillers of the 1930s, now they were hardly ever encountered even in so-called literature. Indeed, Håkan preferred reading Rex Stout to contemporary prose. Today, authors wrote in an impoverished way, as if all their readers were idiots: truisms, platitudes, sensationalist confessions which nevertheless embroidered the narrator’s motives, short sentences in which one could wade as if in a stubble field without finding the first seed of thought. Such books should not, in Håkan’s opinion, be written, published, or read.
In the case of poetry, there was more of it to be found in the weather forecast, business news, and stock exchange prices than in most of the collections Håkan read. The former had more truth about them, and poetry was precisely what was true.
Håkan remembered the portrait of a certain Miss Lysbet van Duvenvoorden, a woman who lived in the fifteenth century. She held in her hand a slip of paper on which was written: “It makes me sad that one must hope for so long. Who is he who keeps his heart completely open?”
He remembered the words of Charles d’Orléans: “I am he whose heart is clothed in black.”
On Håkan’s desk a translation of the Persian Letters awaited him, but now he could not read any more; instead, he picked up the television remote control. A stage show was in progress on channel three. Men whose wives had left them, and wives whose husbands had left them, were telling the presenter about their unhappy marriages. Many wept bitterly. Then it was the turn of the cheats, those who had sinned.
No need for a confessional any more, Håkan thought. The studio is a church, the media are the confessors, the public is God. The announcements of the Holy Spirit are heard during the advertisement breaks. What you say on television you say to God himself.
Who would write, any longer, “O how healthy, how pleasant and sweet it is to sit alone and be silent and speak with God.”
Håkan ate his tuna sandwich and listened to the confessions. Whenever those wretches finished telling their life stories—or the story they believed to be the story of their life—the audience applauded. One divorced woman had with her a remote control. The presenter asked why she had a remote control and the woman said that she always carried it with her. It was, to her, a symbol of the control of life that she had lost.
At the end of the program, a woman psychiatrist leaped onto the stage, elegantly coiffed, wearing a violet blazer and a black miniskirt. She glowed with vitality and belief in life. She hugged them all immediately, the cheats, the cheated, the disappointed. Here was the media Jesus Christ, who redeemed everything without sacrificing anything.
Håkan, who had never been married, undressed, leaving only his undershirt. He was used to sleeping like this, ever since his childhood.
He turned out the light and, in the dark of night, remembered his cowardly reports, his cold heart, and his hatred of people. He thought: If the human race ever dies out, it will choke on its own words. Wrong and unnecessary words, unclean and insincere words. God forgive me, forget that I too have added to them.
Håkan turned onto his back and saw on the ceiling the faint glow of the Christmas star. Staring at it, he fell, as do the righteous, into the silence of his own heart, where poetry and prayer still lived.
Those Were the Days
Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen
Translated by Liisa Rantalaiho
Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen is an author, a Finnish language and literature teacher, and the father of three sons. After winning several of Finland’s speculative fiction contests, Jääskeläinen decided to become a writer. To date, he’s published two novels and two short story collections. His debut
novel, The Rabbit Back Literature Society(2006), will be available in English for the first time this year. In “Those Were The Days” Jääskeläinen draws on meta-fictional techniques—a mock autobiography, trimmed to Sunday-reading lengths—to explore the true nature of time, dreams, and predestined love . . .
READERS’ DIGEST – SOMETIME A.C.A. (AFTER CALENDAR ABANDONMENT)
BOOK OF THE MONTH
THOSE WERE THE DAYS:
MY LIFE WITH THE LADY LIBRARIAN
FROM “THOSE WERE THE DAYS” © OSWALD MORROW.
PUBLISHER: D. DIETRICH & COM INC., BONN.
Oswald Morrow was a successful information ferryman and family man who gave up his former life for the woman of his dreams, Ms. Boumgarden, whom he had known for years as a librarian. Together they developed the Weekday Theory that shook their contemporaries to the core, a theory with dizzying loops which they explain in their book Is Every Day Indeed A Tuesday? Immediately after its publication the book rocketed to the top of bestseller lists. The theory, questioning the conventional patterns of thought of its era, quickly made the couple multimillionaires.
“Since my childhood I hated the idea that in every one of life’s choices I’d have to be satisfied with just one of many alternatives—I found it altogether intolerable that choosing one alternative automatically meant forsaking all the others. I was always the ‘Hesitant Henry’ who wanted to both eat his cake and save it. And yet; when I finally realized it was indeed possible, I still chose the same alternative every time—a life with my Lady Librarian!”
After the publication of this bestseller, the readership of People magazine voted Oswald Morrow the Romantic of the Year. Now Morrow, one of the world’s most famous time-speculators, has written a new book. In his autobiographical work Those Were The Days he tells his amazing story, exposing the events and fates behind the sensational Weekday Theory.
Encounters in the Library
All those years there among the books—we never actually talked, me and that aging lady with whom I’d become infatuated, as I already realized at an early stage. She wasn’t beautiful, but youth trembled on her skin in a way that implored you to have a past with her. I cannot express it any better than this. Whoever has experienced a similar feeling will understand; others shouldn’t even try. I went to the Library on Tuesdays now and then, to read papers or to borrow a book that appeared intellectual. All this I did only to catch sight of the Lady Librarian sitting there, behind her hardwood desk, old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses on her nose.
Sometimes when I walked past the desk, she’d glance up at me from behind her reading glasses, as if she’d recognized me. Sometimes I felt she was about to say something intimate, surprising, and meaningful to me. Something beyond the limits of conventionality. For those moments I lived. Those condensed seconds turned up to revive me during the days when the weariness of life assailed me. They kept me awake during the many nights when my wife was already asleep and I still waited for my six-phased dream period to start.
The woman behind the desk never said anything to me, nor I to her. Yet I was sure she was considering it. Just as I was. While I waited, I lived with her in my dreams.
Sometimes we passed each other amongst the shelves, and then we couldn’t help getting close to each other. We even touched each other. It’s useless to even try describing the effect her nearness had on me. “Excuse me, would you please let me through here, I have to reach the Ibsen there beyond you,” the woman would say quietly, and I would always answer with something like: “Oh, I beg your pardon, I’m in your way again. There, can you get past now? By no means would I wish to put myself between you and Mr. Ibsen.”
I do not want to insult my ex-wife Hannelore, but even disguised in platitudes those seemingly absentminded encounters were more erotic than anything I’d ever done between the sheets.
The Library stands by a green-bordered river in the northern part of my hometown, close to the famous Maple Bridge, once visited by hordes of photographing and wondering tourists. By that time, the first detected time turbulences still ran neatly and safely along the river’s channel, through the river water. Tourists used to toss coins and handkerchiefs off the bridge, trying to hit the turbulences. Time decelerations were called back-vortexes. When tourists hit a back-vortex, they’d marvel at how the falling object suddenly stopped some distance above the river’s surface and, from the viewpoint of the people standing on the bridge, remained floating in the air. Actually, the coin was just transferred into a different, much slower time current than the one on the bridge. Seen from inside this slower time current, the coin would have continued falling at a completely normal speed, whereas the people on the bridge would have seemed to be moving super-fast, like insects in an extremely sped-up film. The time accelerations were called time torrents. An object hitting a time torrent vanished from sight in an instant, as if greedily snatched away by an invisible hand.
And, of course, there were always some madcaps wanting to experience the change in time personally, without a thought of the possible consequences before it was too late. The time torrents weren’t particularly dangerous; the jumper just seemed to scramble up the bank the same moment he hit the water. But the slowing time back-vortexes were considerably more problematic. Few of the daredevils jumping into a back-vortex completely understood beforehand what the leap meant for their social life—afterwards the matter would, however, become abundantly clear. When the foolhardy divers climbed out of the river, after what seemed to them a short swim, for the rest of the world a much longer time period would have passed—generally a few days, or in the worst cases, years. The jump could cost the daredevil a girlfriend or boyfriend, spouse and employment, or student residency. They eventually had to organize a special support group for back-vortex swimmers. When warning signs seemed to have no effect, an electric fence was finally constructed along the river’s banks.
At that time, before the Great Time Flood and the disastrous riot, the Time Research Institute loomed on the riverbank opposite the Library. The Institute was devoid of any outer charm. Its appearance brought to mind a clumsy, callous child or a grey-faced bureaucrat who seemed a nonentity but kept plotting and scheming in his twisted mind. Unlike the infamous Time Research Institute, blown up in the riot, the Library fortunately is not one of those new soulless buildings constructed with orders to save costs, but an old venerable stone building rich in atmosphere, instead. On its façade, obviously finished at a leisurely pace, one can still see the dreamy touch of an artist’s chisel. But for a few blackened licks of soot, the Library’s outward aspect remained as it was before the violence.
On the first floor were sanitary facilities and several small lecture and meeting rooms; downstairs one would sometimes bump into the grey-suited city bureaucrats who probably never had any business on the upper floors—literature being something their kind couldn’t understand. On the second floor was the children’s department, in spite of its large windows always a shadowy place, where I sometimes sought books for my son to read before my divorce. The third floor featured a large festival hall, and once you climbed up to the fourth floor, you finally found the adult department and reading hall—and the wonderful lady, my spectacled Lady Librarian. The Library had a lift, too, but for some reason that only became clear later, I preferred the stairs.
The Library steps were broad and stony. Whenever I reached the top, I felt, besides sweaty and oddly humbled, like a child who’d slipped into one of those places where only adults are allowed. And yet I was already a grownup man, husband to my wife and father to a small boy. But in the moments I spent near the Lady Librarian, I again turned into that thirteen-year-old boy I’d been when I first saw her. Infatuation had boiled up inside me quickly and fiercely, like a kettle of milk forgotten on the stove. By that time, to be sure, she’d only been a library assistant in the children’s department, from where she was transferred upstairs four years later. At the very same time I also left the world of children’s books an
d began to get acquainted with adult literature in the Lady Librarian’s charming sphere of influence.
As far as I could remember, the Lady Librarian had simultaneously felt extremely dear and familiar to me, and extremely unattainable. She was about fifteen years older than I. Although the gap between us had strangely narrowed with the passage of time, I still felt too shy from old habits to even consider crossing it.
“I’ve Had Dreams About You”
Whenever I put a book chosen from the shelves on the lending desk, I observed the Lady Librarian’s reactions. I wanted to find out what kind of books she appreciated. She wasn’t easy to gauge, her expressions were always strictly controlled, but practice made me a master.
In a certain light one could see pretty furrows under her dark eyes. Some of my choices amused her, such as the Tropic of Cancer, which I borrowed at the age of fourteen; then the furrows under her eyes seemed to get laughingly deeper. Anna Karenina made her brows jerk, revealing amazement. At that time I was fifteen and trying to appear more mature in her eyes than I was. I suppose she saw right through me. A couple of years later, Thomas Mann, Umberto Eco, and Tolkien finally earned me a nod of approval, though it was so minute that nobody except a practiced observer such as me would have noticed it.
Then, twenty-two years after our first meeting, while I was in the middle of all the fuss and hurry of organizing a move to another city with my family, I suddenly fancied dropping by the Library once more. I approached her and dropped the book I’d picked up from a shelf at random into her lap, and to my complete surprise all the dreams where I was living with her tumbled out.
It was as if someone else was speaking with my mouth. When my outburst was over, she glanced at the book I’d brought, took off her spectacles, and then stared at me a long while without visible surprise. My stomach hurt and my ears buzzed. The situation felt unreal. I actually had, on impulse, gone and revealed to her my dreams like some obsessive idiot. I believed I had at last crossed the limit; on one side of which there are sane persons who might have some obsession, a bit original but firmly controlled, and on the other side those basket-cases whose removal into rubber-walled homes was just a matter of time.
It Came from the North Page 22
