Given Time
I've read it, but when? I've read it before, but when did I read it? I can't remember, but it is as though I've always read it and always spoken as it speaks. Essential book, which gave me my own past! Essential reading which gave me my past!
I read. The reading bears me. I read, and it is as though everything I live is borne by that reading. The book is open in my office. My life is lived against that book, its backdrop. The book, a heavy hardback, is open in my office, and what I live it gives me again. The power of living is mine, but that power now reveals itself against the backdrop of non-power, of what I cannot do, but what the book gives me. Now, with the book, I see the world anew.
Now, because of the book, my eyes rest on the world in a new way. What do I see? What do I hear? Or is it that the book sees and hears for me? Is it that the book gives me what I cannot give myself: a second sight, a second hearing, a second way to know the world.
Book, I prop you up beside my monitor. Prodigal book that cradles my life! Prodigious book that opens my life as I open your spine! By your pages will I know what I've lived. By your sentences will I have known what I am. You, book, give me the future. You give me the future in which I can know what I've lived.
After the Book, Before the Book
What was my life before I read this book? But there was no 'before'; it is as though this book ran back upstream to the source of my life, and what I lived was always lived within this book. What I lived was already enclosed by the book. Wise book who knows what I have known! Wisdom of a book that lived in advance of me, waiting for me! How did you know I was coming, book? How was it you waited for me at the moment of my conception?
After I read you, there was no before. After I read you, there was no before the book. You were there at the beginning, watching over me. You made the appointment I would keep by reading you. And as soon as I began to read, I knew. By reading I knew another knew me, benign deity!
It is there on my office desk, although I am at home. It is there, just begun and waiting for me, and I am here, at home. I did not bring it with me, because I know it is with me. I did not bring it back to read last night, because I knew it would be with me less time by my reading: knew that to read will have been to have spent less time with it than I could have spent. Knew that by spending time, I was given time, and that to be given time was to be given a future in which to read the book.
Rather than read greedily, finishing it in a single, breathless day, I will read slowly and slowly will the future come to me. Slowly will it come, the future and the dreams the future allows. Slowly, then, comes the open space for dreaming in which the book dreams beside me. I will rest my head on this book, and it will dream with me. I will sleep alongside its sleep and the dreams will come.
I will not name you, book, I will not give your title. And your author, book, I will not speak of your author. Just that it is a late book, a rarefied book, which speaks by way of its author's early work, which speaks as though that early work had gathered the single wave that bore it. Speaks as though by the pressure of the forward-movement of those early books. Reward for the reader who has traced the course of an oeuvre! Reward of the reader who waited for the late books by reading the early books, and now receives his reading again!
The 11th Page
500 page book, you wait for me at the office. Hardbacked, 500 page book, freshly arrived from America, I have propped you by my monitor. I am 11 pages in. 11 pages, and the book opens its great doors. 11 pages, and already the book is opening great doors to me. Let me pause for a while at the threshold. I want to pause, knowing that the books which follow this one have not yet been translated. Will pause and look around me, at the world behind me and the darkness of the book. The great doors have opened, doors of a new earth and sky, doors of a whole world, which will soon shut and enclose me.
Soon, the 12th page, and then the 13th. And when will I reach the 250th? I know when I read it that it will have been I had read it long before. Know when I reach page 500, I will have known that page since my most distant childhood. You waited for me book, you were patient. You waited for me book, first, latent in the author who wrote the book, and then in a language I do not know how to read. You waited for me, in the translator who turned the book into English, and then in the foreign country from which you would reach me.
And then, one morning, you were in the package in my mail; there you were, imposingly thick, freshly arrived from overseas, in my office. You waited for me; you were there in my office, still waiting for me. As I read page 11, I knew the book was waiting for me, just ahead of me, as it will have always been waiting. Knew that by page 250, it will be waiting yet father ahead, and when one unimaginable day, I finish the book, it will be waiting further ahead than ever, waiting, now, to fill my dreams, to dream with me. To dream and give me the future by its dreaming, and then to give me my past, too - that life I will have lived in anticipation of the book.