Reading, Not-Reading
It is true I do not want to disappoint the book; I am reading it slowly, and even reading other books when I think I am not quite able to attend to the first book. Yes, on my trip down to London, I took other books with me, in part because the first book was too large for my rucksack, and would weigh me down on my cycle trips through the parks of London, but also because I knew that a long train ride would give me too much time with the book.
Too much time: I would read too greedily; I would not pause when the book paused and rest when the book rested. I would not, in short, allow the book to bear me according to its own rhythm, which is to say, its own wisdom, in the time it allotted me for reading and for non-reading. I took another book to read on the train; I finished it quickly. It was done in four hours, in the four hours of my journey and I knew I had read it too quickly.
Fortunate that I didn't bring the first book! For that, too, would have been finished too quickly. Then, leaving London, I bought another book in a secondhand shop; it was by an author I had long wanted to read: Gombrowicz. Sarraute on the way down to London, and Gombrowicz on the way back up. I read half of Pornografia on the train. I was tired; sometimes I dozed. I coughed and sucked Tunes for my cough. I spilt tea across the table and on my jumper, but Gombrowicz was with me, and when I awoke from dozing, I read on.
This, too, was not reading. There must be a kind of strength for reading, a preparedness, and I knew, even though I was not rushing Gombrowicz, I was failing it by my tiredness. Was I reading closely enough? Was I sufficiently alert to remember what happened in early chapters to follow what was happening in later ones? My worry was that I would later have to read a summary of the book in order to understand what had happened. Betrayal: I would have missed the book I was reading. And what of the first book, which I was not reading? What of the book open in my flat, open, still at page 80?
Constellations
This morning, stuffy with cold, I began to read it in the early hours. What use was getting up? What use was writing? I would read instead, although Gombrowicz was only half read. I would return to the ur-book, to the first book whose coming was an advent I had awaited in the late summer and the autumn. It had come; I would not read too quickly, I said to myself, but let the reading guide me just as sailors once were guided by the constellations.
Book beneath which I would pass! Book by which I would know my passage! I read, this morning, as workmen hammered next door. I read; the day was mild. I read a few pages; I passed from page 80 to page 90. And that is where I am now, page 90. The book is open on the mattress on the floor of my bedroom (the bed is still dismantled from when the floor was sanded and varnished; so too the wardrobe). I read, but was I borne by reading? Had I not let too much time elapse from when I last read this book? Yes, I was a little lost; I was disoriented, for what, after all, was happening? Who were these characters? And the narrator, who was he?
I read, and annotated in pencil passages to which I thought I might return. I read, and put little marks in the margins to pages to which I thought it necessary to return. By these marks I will have known my passage through the book, I thought. Yes, I will have known I passed once through this book, and by way of this book. But by what mark would I know how this book steered me through the world? I'd waited for this book by this author for I knew his work would steer me through the world. I would be steered; the book, covers closed, would nevertheless be the constellations by which I navigated; my wandering would find orientation; where I drifted, the book was firm and clear above me. Yes, the book would watch over me. The book was the night, above me.
But it was not a stifling intimacy I sought; the book, I thought, should give me freedom. I would be oriented, yes, but the path I made was a wandering. There would be guidance, but only that which would allow my wandering to be propitious. I would pass through the parks of London; I would cycle through the roads of London, but still there was the book as there was the sky, distant from me, but present. Still the sky and the hard, clear stars, just as we saw them on Saturday night, when we left London for the country.
The stars! I steered by them even as I wandered. Chance was propitious; what happened was not blind, but fateful. The random was itself fateful; by chance I let myself be led towards my future. The book watched. This morning, returning to it, I thought: but is this the book I was reading? Is this the book for which I waited? Or is it a proxy, a substitute for another book and another reading? I thought: there are those for whom Heraclitus or John, Thucydides or Dante wrote the book that surrounded them. And who was I, who wanted such a book, who wanted to be surrounded?
In the Meantime
This book, an attempt, perhaps, at an epic, was not the book I sought - how could it be? For the age of trust has passed and the age of suspicion is here. Yes, trust has passed, and this is a suspicious age, and age without belief. How I distrust permanency and enrootedness! How I dislike the bookshelf and the CD shelf! I took the CDs from their cases and put them in big folders. I moved the books, the tools of my trade, to the office, and dispersed the others. Now the flat is bare. The bed and the wardrobe are still dismantled, but this is appropriate. All must be transitory.
And the stars, what are they? The firm, clear stars, which I can barely see for the orange street lights, what are they, in their permanence? I am reading my book in the mild day. Yesterday, rain, and today, mildness. Sunlight rests on the walls of the houses opposite. Above the little yard, the blue sky. And above that? Darkness and the stars which were once icons of order. I read. The book book speaks of voyages and movement. This is appropriate. The book speaks of relationships made and broken; this, too, is appropriate. Movement is all. Migrancy is all. And I know that this epic is the opposite of an epic, that what it gathers it does so only in order to disperse.
Then what do I seek from it, the book in the flat, the book that is now open on the mattress? To be watched? But only as I passed from one place to another. To be steered? But only as I wandered. Sometimes philosophers dream of the ones to come, those who will live with the new god or with the new earth. That will be life: to come, to come, nor here, not today, but at another time. And today? And today, in the meantime? A mild day; I read ten pages of the book cross-legged on the mattress on the floor of my bedroom. Curtains closed, and I read a few of the big, close-lined pages. Of what do I read? Of the meantime, of the stretch of time before the gods return and before the return of the earth. Meantime, between times, after the gods and before them.
Second Innocence
Why do I read you, book? Because you, like me, are stranded. How many days did I spend unemployed? A million. And how is it that I am still borne by that same unemployment? It is as though I've waited for something, but for what? The day is coming, but for what? As I read, I know this mild day is the way the coming day hides itself. Reading, I know of the day behind the day, of the coming around which all days are turning. Non-event, incompletion, these words, like the word unemployment, allow me to speak only by way of privation. How to speak without the 'non-', the 'in-' and the 'un-'? How to affirm what will not let itself be affirmed?
Read, and by this book affirm what has happened. Read this book, in which nothing happens, and affirm the non-happening of your life. Who is going to live? Who are the ones to come, that will live for us? But perhaps the meantime is all time, perhaps every day will be today, mild day that turns in the greater day, mild day that wears itself away to reveal the night without consolation. Perhaps it is that the stars have fallen, and there is only darkness. Perhaps it is that the array of stars are scattered without meaning, and offer no guidance. But isn't this 'no guidance' already enough?
The three metamorphoses: there is the one who works and who passes in the desert to work. There is the one who falls outside of work, and says 'no' to work. And then there is the child who knows nothing, and knows nothing of work. Second innocence: the reading-child I would like to be. Second innocence: the child who reads beneath the sky and stars.