I've lost my taste for the major bookshops that sell new or second books, for the shops to which anyone can go and in which you might run into into someone you know, who has become, just like you, no one in particular, a customer or a client and whom, when you meet him, coalesces from this no one without however leaving him behind, like a waking up still thick with the enchanted world of dreams. And I've given up heading straight for such bookshops, as though they were destinations in themselves as opposed to how I like them to be now: surprises unlooked-for and unanticipated, half-forgotten places that it suddenly occurs to me to visit, as on a whim - that when I have a little slack time I might wander there just to look, but browsing idly, carelessly and without a thought for what I might find, looking for nothing, and then leaving behind those books I might want to buy and forgetting them almost at once; saying to myself: too heavy to cart around, or another time, or I've got too many books.
But yesterday I found, nonetheless, two volumes of Canetti's autobiography in a large format paperback, and a bilingual volume of German poetry edited and translated by Michael Hamburger, who's just died, and whom Sebald (or the narrator in The Rings of Saturn) remembers visiting in his messy house. Reading Trakl on the underground, it was as though I'd popped my eyes out into something soothing: they felt cooled as soon as I read the name 'Elis' and of the blues and purples of which that poet likes to write. And I found myself, reading Brecht, wishing I'd brought that big bilingual book of his poems I saw a few years ago. There was a poem by Handke, too, from a collection that has been translated, I notice: I should hunt that down, too.
These books bought in a slack hour, when I thought I'd let an hour open up like a sail to be blown along up the street that opens off the high street. A modest shop in a suburb, and the more welcome for that. I hesitated over two hardbacked Naipauls - should I, shouldn't I; and over a handsome In Patagonia for £6 - too heavy, I thought, what with everything else, and it took an age to decide on the volume of poetry, marked at £9.95 - would I read it? did I want it now only because I would have wanted it years ago? - nothing worse than a book unread on a shelf, stranded there, a book unread and therefore alone, washed up from some great shipwreck of culture and to my bookshelf - unlikely place - mine, on the other side of that sure and certain kingdom of taste and cultivation to which it once belonged.
Books because I have them must be lost, I think to myself. I live on the other side of the collapse, I think, and that I have this or that volume is testament to the great breakup, the shattered arctic ice sheet that sets icebergs wandering off. They could only have found me as shipwrack, I think, and I look through bookshops like a beachcomber. But then, happily, I opened the Hamburger edition and bathed my eyes in Trakl, and read again a few poems by Celan, and surprised myself with Rilke and hollowed out an 'intense inwardness' at King's Cross station, waiting under the timetables for my train to be announced. Inwardness, Innigkeit, where I was first of all the rebound of my reading, that space of resonance where the poem looked beyond me for its reader and thereby held itself open, maintaining the opening that it essentially was. And holding me likewise open, inwardness opening outward, and the names Rilke and Trakl indices of a hope that let eternity flash across my landscape.
Rilke, Trakl, and perhaps Hamburger too - and Sebald: names that owed themselves entirely to poetry, stones smoothed by the waters perfectly round.