I never liked hoarders of books: old men and women who would never lend or give me, when I was young, what I wanted from their bookshelves. Hoarders, collectors, saving books - from what? for what? - and hence depriving them from me. How unreasonable I was (and am), but now I must turn my prejudice on myself. Have I not replaced old editions of my books with new, hardbacked ones? Am I not able to afford 3 or 4 pounds to buy a book out of curiosity? Have I not a row of unread books and that I might not read for many years - editions of Gaddis, Canetti, Milosz, Perec; and even Lydia Davis' Swann's Way, in the American edition? How deplorable!
I wonder whether I buy these books, and replace order ones in order to satisfy the victim of literary deprivation I once thought I was - and whether I've missed out on that kind of reading where a book can really be everything. But this, too, is absurd: how foolish to look for a Reading behind reading, and to think it lay there when I was young. I was as foolish a reader then as I am today - as distracted, as frivolous: then and now I felt I never really read a book, but only grazed its surface: that beneath, say, the printed pages of The Sleepwalkers, in that old, handsome Quartet Encounters edition, there was an experience of reading that I'd missed, as though the real book lurked there like a kraken.
I read it again, The Sleepwalkers - or almost all of it, and felt I'd missed it yet, and that I'd always missed my appointment with this, and other books. Maybe there was a time when reading was possible, I told myself, when my readerly ancestors in an older Europe were able to give such books the total attention they deserved. A Europe in which books were rarer, perhaps; a stiller Europe, without television and films and computer games. The Europe, perhaps, of the old Chamberlain who dies in Rilke's Malte Lauridds Brigge, and from whom the narrator of that poem-novel feels himself to be cut off.
And then reassurance: perhaps the books that I treasure because I want to treasure something - because I want to protect, if only my dream of a reading that was once and might be again possible - are those deprived of that unitary culture in which they might have been read. The books are on my side, and old Europe is on another, and both of us dream of the reading they might have welcomed, had they been written by those who lived more deeply in the nineteenth century and the centuries before them. But I think this, too is a dream, and Cervantes' was already a book written in the wake of a disappearance: this time of a world of heroes, of knights and quests and grails.
There is a tradition that says art, the creative is a sign of what is missing from our lives, and that we might fight to find it again, that old unity where life and creation are one. But when was that time, and how might it be refound? I think of the Greeks for the Romantic Germans. And I think of Hoelderlin dreaming of throwing down his pen to fight for some cause or another. Life is always on the other side of art. That's so for Kafka too - for him above all, with his dreams of Palestine, of becoming a manual labourer and forgetting the world of books. Art is only counter-life, its shadow ... but that, too is a myth.
Just as reading was never Reading, so life was never Life. All readings only graze the surface of their books. Every reading is a tangent, a way of touching. And every reading is complete, adequate to itself. There is nothing beneath the surface of the text ... Is this why there is something disgusting about the collector, the one who is surrounded by the substantiality of a library? Reading is light. It is inconsequential. What is less important than fiction, and especially that fiction that wants to be more than fiction, or that wants to speak fictionally of something greater, but of what it can only touch as fiction?
I would like to brush the books from my table. Or to put them outside, neglect them, until, water-damaged, sun-faded, they assume the modesty of rocks and lichen. Or I would like to lose each one of my books, as I left one behind on a plane the other day, in the pocket in front of me, along with a notebook and some in-flight magazines and entertainment guides. I had Swann's Way with me on that flight, but I watched Juno instead, and then No Country For Old Men. It was too dark to read, I told myself, and my neighbour didn't want to be awakened.
Hadn't I spent an hour in Barbara's bookshop at Chicago O'Hear, looking for a book? An hour ... there was Bataille, Accursed Share vols. 2 and 3 and The Tears of Eros in the Inspiration section. There was popular science, books of history. Novels ... including the newly translated Bolano, in a big, American edition. But I wanted a book written in the first person, I told myself. A book I imagined speaking softly to itself between its covers. I wanted to surprise, by reading, a kind of intimacy, a relation the book had to itself and that it would keep, like a secret.
Was it speaking, there in the pocket in front of me, between the safety card and the sickbag? Could I hear it beneath Juno and the Coen Brothers' film? Swann's Way now sits on the window sill in my living room, its pages being slowly beached by the sun. Swann's Way, with its floral spine, puce, and its fake cut pages. Haven't I read it before? The train from Guildford to ... where? And when? I was training as a teacher - wasn't it then?
I had the Moncrieff translation, amended by someone or another. I still have it, a pale green Penguin Modern Classic, now twisted out of shape. It's in the cupboard, back there. In the darkness, half forgotten. I should throw it away. There's something disgusting about it, like a half-crushed insect. I read it, I loved long passages of it, I put it aside, let its spine become twisted - when? how? - but I know, too, that I failed the book as I've failed every book. As I will fail the new Swann's Way on my sill, a book that will keep its secret as its surface, the fake cut pages I may never turn.
In my living room, I let my Beloved's books mingle with mine carelessly on the bookshelf she bought. There's no order on the shelves - only books I've read or will read soon; books on the Blues, books of philosophy and commentaries on philosophy. Novels - by V. S. Naipaul (my own edition of The Enigma of Arrival, I having only read the first third of the library edition), Janet Frame's Scented Gardens For The Blind (two pounds in our new secondhand shop. A Women's Press edition, an ironing board on the spine) ... my hardback The Last Man by Blanchot ... a few more.
My Beloved has her Austens and Trollopes in tiny, close printed editions - what, the whole of the Last Chronicle of Barset in there? - the little Dickens Christmas books ... I've an Everyman hardback of Rabelais, too - like my hardback Sentimental Journey I keep in the office (I'll never line them up, these Everymans, I promise myself that). Expensive enough (four pounds each) to demand I read them. Substantial enough to mock me for not having read them, and I feel the ghost of these books, and all the books I have read or wanted to read.
And now I imagine it is I who am too substantial, too real, and that, like Blanchot's narrator, their margins will widen when I disappear. Aren't they waiting for my body to become sun-bleached and broken-spined? - foxed as they say on secondhand book websites ... Foxed, what a word, a handsome edition, what a phrase, a reading copy, what horror! And now I want every line in my books to be part of an exorcism. How are we to disappear?, says Blanchot in the quotation that begins Montano's Malady. How indeed? How are we to allow our books to dazzle all along their surfaces, to join up into a great sphere like a planet of ice? How to let reading read only itself, turning in itself, obscure star?
Good Friday, afternoon. Weather changeable. I've written a long, stupid post. Instead of what? And for what? To find new words to same the same, and the Same of the same. What am I missing on the other side of writing? Life? Is that it? And what is lived if I press on with writing (but I'll finish this post soon; I'm running out of wind)? What do I want, and by way of reading, of writing? To give up reading, to give up writing, but only by way of reading, of writing.
