Late afternoon, a day off, and I am looking for something on my bookshelf at home, but for what? Very few books here - no need for many, the office can store the others, and more. A few books - important ones, essential ones, and ones I keep here without knowing why. But for what am I looking?
Three Sebalds in a row, the page edges yellowed, though they are not old. When did I first read them? Last year, the year before ... And one of them my second copy, after losing the first on a train. I lost my annotations, I was sorry about that. Marks as an explorer leaves after the fact that others can follow, and in this case myself. For who else would follow these marks, or would understand why I'd marked them. Though in truth even I do not so understand - why this passage? why not that one?
Ah, I should read it again, the second copy of Vertigo. Or lose it and buy a third copy of the same book, beginning all over again, making marks for the other that I am to one day wonder at. And next to them a hardback Herzog, imposing, promising. My own copy having read the library's last year. Fresh to read again, its memory already fading. I remember: an arrest, a hammock in the garden. A splendid beginning - a man near fallen, and a splendid end, following the story of the fall.
Didn't I read chunks of it in the gym, on the cross-trainer? And here's my copy, blue spined, hardbacked, though not expensive, kept as a promise to myself. You can read me again, it says. Read me when you memory of me is blurred, it says. And so I shall, after I finish the next book on the shelf - Humboldt's Gift. How is it I made my way only halfway through the library copy?
Anyway, I bought my own, in Modern Classics, and feel a bad conscience about it there on the shelf. My reading sagged, it snapped like a telegraph cable - I didn't finish it, though for many months, it, too accompanied me on the cross-trainer, though I've long since stopped the habit of writing a date and the amount of calories expended on the blank back page of the books I read there (pencilled numbers on the back of Bernhard's Gathering Evidence, Correction ...)
The Loser next, the funniest Bernhard and I think my favourite. I have had a Bernhard in reserve for a couple of years now - always one more to break out in case of emergency. But I'm deep into Frost now, and don't own Cutting Timber - when will that be reissued? You have to keep a Bernhard close to you at all times, I tell myself, even if you've read it. And isn't Wittgenstein's Nephew fading happily from my memory?
Beckett next - Company, with those three late texts one after another. This and How It Is keep their secrets from me, which is why they are close. Books whose eyes are turned in another direction. Do I want to catch their eye? Or am I happy that they are turned away. I should have the Complete Shorter Prose here too, but it's lost in the office. And besides, the edition is too crowded, there's too much in it. I'd rather like the box set of prose from Calder - wasn't there a copy at Waterstones in Exeter? Shouldn't I hunt one down?
But I haven't found what I want. Late afternoon, a time I've never liked; I'd be in the office but that I wanted a day away. In the office, with other books around me, and turned satisfyingly to one task or another. Here instead, stranded, my Visitor having gone our running; shouldn't I take the time to play some Jandek for myself, seeing as she cannot bear it, and even the thought of it, or my listening to it or even liking it? Shouldn't I ...
But no time for that. Search instead. Through 'The Postulates of Linguistics' in A Thousand Plateaus. Through Celan's prose, in Waldrop's edition (and what about her, shouldn't I print out that etext I have, shouldn't I interlibrary loan one of her two novels mentioned in the author's note?) A few pages of Frost, but I'm not up to it, not high enough; I'm on the floor ...
Gene Wolfe's Peace, which I know very well, every movement of the book. An old edition, but my third copy in fact - what happened to the others? I remember the first, buying it in the town bookshop, meeting friends in the pub on a summer day, reading its yellow pages in the shade of a tree ... what happened to it? And the second, bought in large format, a trade paperback, slightly monstrous. That, too disappeared (I must have given it away, and the first ...); I have the third, along with the two volumes that collected The Book of the New Sun, a series of books I've bought before and gave away to a friend's husband (they divorced. He was a friend too, and I don't mind that he has a pile of my science fiction, Charles L. Harness and Bob Shaw and the rest ...)
How It Was, the glossy paged memoir of Beckett by Anne Atik, expensive (though I found it second hand), but wonderful; would that there were other books like it, detailing the loves musical and literary of favourite writers (Schubert, Johnson, the Psalms, lots of reciting ...). Next, a volume from Stach's biography of Kafka. I keep it close, remembering the closing pages, when the refugees enter Prague, filling it. And Handke's No-Man's Bay, a boring book, an essential one ... why keep it here? why in this room by the bed? Because I am waiting for the next translation to come out, and in the meantime, this book through which I can turn now and again to remind myself of the power of prose, its thickness, its relentlessness.
Prose - so much of it, and in a single tone. So much - and what does it take for such a book to spin itself out, page after page? By what strength is such narration possible? And I remember the green pool towards the end where the narrator sits with his notebook, and the fallen in tree trunks, covered in algae and waterplants. And I remember the troops who pass him, and that it is set, that book, a few years in the future, at the edge of the new millennium (when was it written - in the early 90s?).
But I want something else, I'm searching ... through a printed etext of The Last Man. And then - is this the book - through Thomas Wall's Radical Passivity, until I find an underlined passage: 'The entire récit [he's writing about Blanchot's Death Sentence] remains at the threshold of a story. The narrator stops short of presenting some It that the story would be about'.
And yet, Wall notes, everything that can be told is told; there's nothing missing. As though the récit hollows itself out. As though that was all it was, that hollowing that occurs on pages thick with prose ... And isn't it for that same hollow for which I am looking - that work of reading that would core the book, voiding it, or turn it inside out like a glove, so that the prose runs darkly down the finger holes?
A book that would turn me with it as it turned inside out, hollowing a kind of interiority - that is really a way of being exposed on all sides, but in darkness, in secrecy, an inner space blooming into an outer one, a hollowing that would hollow my reading with it, until it occurs as on the inside surface of a Dyson Sphere, inside, but in a space so vast it englobes the sun ...
Or a writing written as a living index, that points upward as a shoot to sunlight - but to what kind of sun? One that burns in an enclosed space, in a vastness within interiority: that space into which I would like to be brought and by reading on this most bland of afternoons ...