from 'The Browser's Ecstasy' (Geoffrey O'Brien)
LAND WITHOUT SEASONS
My universe is reduced to an island of abandoned furniture and tools, darts, hinges, crushed ping pong balls, broken phonograph records, frames from which the photographs have been removed, and the boxes and loose stacks of old books set adrift in a storm. In a short while they too will be removed, since putting things in storage is generally a prelude to destroying them altogether. It's a kind of trial separation to see if it is possible to live without them. That will leave the building entirely empty except for the ghosts of those who might once actually have read these books, ghosts whose whispering is drowned out by the concert of the winds.
I will open a book in a moment. Not quite yet. I want to savor the hiatus between catching sight of and catching hold of, between opening the eyes and seeing. After all, it is a terrible thing to open a book. Who knows what might fly in my face, what private quarrel I might interrupt, or what battlefield casualties I might stumble over?
A palsied gypsy woman will hurl threats across the page. A vengeful sea dog will pass me the Black Spot. I will be compelled to look at some sacrificial Olmec ritual or misguided episode of seventeenth-century jurisprudence, images which can never thereafter be erased. A thought will be planted with whose harvest I will henceforth have to live on intimate terms. I will wonder, years later, if my life would have been quite different if I had not, on such and such a day, opened a certain book to a certain page.
If there were a narrative which could clarify my situation to me, how might it go? A man finds his way back to a room in which are sequestered all the books he has ever read and all he ever wanted to read and all whose possibility he ever imagined. (He had attempted systematically to imagine all possible books in the hope of stumbling by chance across an impossible one.) His task-imposed he cannot know quite by whom, or toward what end-is to sort through what's in the room; to steep himself in whatever he can, as long as he can, as in an occult bath. How it is to be gauged at what point he will have attained optimum absorption is a problem yet to be worked out. He feels indeed as if he were still laying groundwork, still making rough notes toward the terms in which that problem might be formulated. The time available for making such a formulation is not indefinite. This is one of those places where you are not permitted to abide forever. They close it on you when you least expect it.
Light leaks from the sky, but has not yet been replaced entirely by the blackness biding its time. As for other conventional signs of the natural world-cicada chirps or the creaking of icicles suspended from roof gutters or dry leaves blown scraping along the pavement or the competitive croaks of bullfrogs in chorus along the pond's edge-not a hint. No season lives here. This space has quite successfully shut out any such interference. The cunning designer saw to it that there is not even a mirror in which the reader might contemplate his own appearance or anxiously search for the marks of age. The climate is grammatical. Nothing here but books, as if I were swaddled in them, as if the porous walls of books were by now almost a second skin. Or as if they provided a padding like the walls of madhouses, a cushion constructed of the language of the dead.
LUMBER ROOM
"Language of the dead": technically this is not quite accurate, since some of the authors of some of the books are of course still living. But whether they are living or not is beside the point. Once a book exists it takes its place indistinguishably among the writings of the dead. The words have been fixed, never to move again except in the mind of a reader. Readers, on the other hand, unlike authors, must be alive in order to fulfill their function.
In the presence of so much yellowing printed matter I feel not only alive but refreshed. A fathomless appetite stirs. I almost literally crawl among the books as if crawling around the storeroom off the garage attached to a house where I stayed once. It's a space the way spaces used to be, before the first encounter with the letters of the alphabet. I remember now how space tumbled open at every step and by virtue of that memory it continues to do so. In that cobwebbed kingdom the rows of books were like rows of cupboards with rusty handles, each to be tried in turn: what's in this one, or this one?
It was a ramshackle lumber room where odd tools were to be found, sawed-off fragments of carpentry, rags and sandpaper, bolts and nails buried in sawdust, sheets of yellowed newspaper lining shelves: Truman to intervene in labor dispute, father tells why he killed daughter's husband, waiter fined five dollars in restaurant brawl. A moldy treasury came piecemeal to the surface, by the light of a crudely rigged bare bulb. Here it was, the hidden book, the lost book, the discarded book, its cover rotted, its pages loose, crammed in a supply closet or fallen behind a heavy table: Basic Principles of Electricity, Our Singing World, Janet Hardy in Hollywood, You Must Relax!
Reading matter. Catalogues, children's encyclopedias, religious pamphlets, government-issued health and safety manuals. Calendars on which a beautiful girl held up a stein of beer or an elk stooped to drink from a mountain stream or a Biblical prophet cast angry glances in the direction of a gem-encrusted idol. A price guide for rock collectors, the rules for a lost board game, a book club bulletin announcing a historical novel set during the era of Reconstruction. Mildewed copies of magazines with names like Pep and Zip. A quiz book called What Do You Know? full of questions about Knute Rockne and "Wrong Way" Corrigan, the Herman Rosenthal murder and the Teapot Dome Scandal and the Shenandoah dirigible disaster. A foldout collection of postcards from the Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936, featuring a moonlit view of the Tower of Religion. A cluster of blue-covered booklets on sex hygiene, social revolution, the lives of Balzac and Jack London, and the agnostic doctrines of Robert Ingersoll. The complete blank verse text of a pageant staged in Central Park on the quadricentennial of America's discovery. A nineteenth-century manual of diseases and abnormalities of the hair and scalp, full of meticulous and unspeakable engravings. A military phrasebook teaching how to say "Throw down your weapon" in every major European language. Finally a handful of outmoded books on current affairs-You Can't Do Business with Hitler, One World, Victory Through Air Power-roughly wedged in place to prop up a wobbly work bench.
LEGACY FROM SPACE
From the memory of those surroundings I can reconstruct clearly how it felt to have just grasped what the alphabet was. The moment of apprehending that the mark spoke-that the letter represented a sound-was unspeakable. It was the birth of an intimacy. The child who learns to read is a master of voices-or is he mastered by voices? A privacy (never once thought of as such until the instant it ended) was irrevocably broken in upon. Now that the books on the shelf were known to hum with thought, thought could never again be solitary, if it ever had been.
Once upon a time I began where I will end, at a moment probably quite like this one, in a room lined with books. Four walls marked the four cardinal directions, certifying that this was a sealed world harboring all necessary coordinates. That original book-room is now an idea that I can summon up ef fortlessly, but it was once just a physical location; in the same way that letters were once black marks instead of ideas. Have I been trying ever since to reverse the process, and turn the words and ideas back into marks and spaces? I caught a glimmer of how irrevocable those transformations were at the moment when I had just learned to decipher the titles on the shelves. The logic was immutable: If there are books, then there must be a room in which the books exist. This is a book, and therefore it exists in a room, this room; the room is in a house; I live in the house; the house is in the world, therefore there is a world which, arguing by extension, I inhabit.
How evident it was, in the first childish survey of the shelves, that space creatures had come and abandoned their works behind them. No reading could ever surpass for sheer strangeness that first encounter with the names of books: to make out the names of doors into the unknown, with no hint of their meaning. They could have been anything. The outer space visitors had left as a token of their visit only this wall of spines, of road signs. Any one of them might as well have borne the title of one of the Agatha Christie paperbacks: Destination Unknown.
The fundamental shock of reading was the initial deciphering. The power of the titles lay in their pristine, uncompromised mysteriousness: The Cream of the Jest. The Crock of Gold. Shining Trumpets. Hot Countries. Blood In the Streets. Apples and Madonnas. The Fall of a Titan. The Touch of Nutmeg Makes It. The Tribe That Lost Its Head. The Bible as History. The Idea of a Theatre. With Malice Toward Some. The End of All Men. When the Mountain Fell. The Descent of Man. A Family of Engineers. Generation of Vipers. Burning Bright. A Pin to See the Peepshow. Good Night, Sweet Prince. Try and Stop Me. The Sun Is My Undoing. The Sea and the Jungle. A Crystal World. The Purple Land. The titles could be read but not understood; the purpose of reading the book, when it came time for that, would be to understand at last what the title meant. But could any book live up to the infinite suggestiveness of those arcane tags?
Unlike toothbrushes or bugles or vacuum cleaners, these objects had no obvious use. The neutral observer stood contemplating how and for what end the marks were made. Why would a particular slant go one way rather than another? On a foreign highway, at an obviously crucial crossroads, the traveler comes upon a sign in an unknown alphabet. Perhaps the sign is there to warn him of danger, or to direct him toward food and shelter, or to provide him with a choice between two antithetical nations along whose border he is unwittingly wandering, or to inform him that beyond a certain point no road exists.
Before any possibility of meaning, there was a brutal faceto-face meeting. Eyes and letters stared each other down in an otherwise empty world. Limit encountered limit. In the space between, the birth of desire occurred. What other choice was there than to breach the apparent barrier and walk into the new country? The reader let his eyes wander over the illegible complexity of the signs with the impatient curiosity of a famished traveler suddenly catching sight of a tavern sign creaking above hedgerows, or of a pirate surveying the harbor and skyline of the city he is preparing to sack.
The desire was to climb as literally as possible up into those syllables, as into a house among the trees. The Forest of Arden is made of words and there was never a better forest, nor was there ever a better purple, a better jungle, a better fall, a better theater. Written language was a plank extending from the shore where they make planks, the distant city of the word-founders.
The plank, a path over a void, leads toward the next part of the plank. One word opens the way for the next word: handholds in a rock face. The mind clambers among them, looking first for a toehold, then for the serious ledge that will allow it to get up and over. At any given moment a single word may have to bear the full load of someone digging his toe or heel into it for dear life. I come to know them by leaning and gripping. Each word forms part of an intimate relief map of traction and slippage. This one you can safely press against; over yonder the ground is apt to give way unexpectedly. There are trails that ice over undetectably at the first frost.
That the clambering is never completed, the opening never altogether cleared, is its charm. It always leaves some ground still to be crossed. The reader, in his mortal vanity, will not deign to recognize a cut-off point. No arrival: the valley simply extends and thickens, and I proceed, I become part of it or it becomes part of me. The text will persist, and by reading it I become part of the text in a way that curiously evades the imprisonment of past or future.
THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE
In childhood-somebody's childhood-there had been The Book of Knowledge, a monument in twenty-odd red-covered volumes of late imperial upbringing, preserving intact the world undone by the Great War. Here was kept alive, as if in some sealed attic, that long and ponderous peace in which knowledge consisted of juxtaposed episodes from Roman history, exercises in French conversation, beloved scenes from Dickens, playlets for schoolchildren, lessons in knitting and penmanship and map-reading, magic tricks, secrets of nature and the body, resumes of the history and geography of the great countries and cities. Here, if anywhere, was the paradise of randomness. Everything made sense, in any order whatsoever. The world was a loose assembly of coherences: silkworms, goldmines, eclipses, thermometers, viaducts. And there were worlds within worlds: "We should almost think of the soap-bubble as made of millions and millions of tiny little creatures, each with its arms all around it, and all these arms holding on to the arms round them."
No book ever asked more profound questions. They were scattered throughout its volumes in bold black type, each time waking the reader to some fresh apprehension: Why Can We Not Walk Straight With Our Eyes Shut? Are There More People Coming Into the World Than Going Out of It? Will the World's Food Supply Ever Run Short? Could We Live Without Rain? How Are Burglars Caught by Fingerprints? Why Does a Stick Hold Together? Can a Fish Hear? What Brings Life Out of Dried Seeds? Where Does Music Come From? Why Do Some Faces in Pictures Seem to Follow Us? Do We See What Is Not There? How Big Is the World?
And in the place where the answers were supposed to beunder, say, the rubric The Meaning of Words-were more questions: "Have you ever wondered why one word means one thing, and another word means something quite different? Isn't it funny that BREAD never means CHEESE? Why doesn't it? Why was bread called bread, and cheese called cheese?" Yet the question could hardly trouble, since so many answers were lying around. Anything the eye fell on was an answer merely by virtue of existing: the medicine dance of the Winnebago Indians, the most beautiful library in the world, the five hundred kinds of hummingbirds, the stream of water constantly flowing through the body.
The surest answer was the past, spread out in luxurious invitation. How busy they were in the past! Peter the little Dutch boy shoring up the leak in the dike and Mutius Scaevola holding his hand in the flame, Sir Walter Raleigh spreading his cloak to prevent Queen Elizabeth from stepping into a mud puddle, Robert the Bruce watching the spider spin its web, Alfred the Great letting the farm woman's cakes burn, Pope Leo eyeing the British barbarians being sold into slavery and exclaiming "they are not Angles but Angels," a German monk inventing gunfire, Joan of Arc urging on the French troops at Orleans, Saint Patrick driving the snakes from Ireland, William Tell taking aim at the apple on his son's head, the Swiss Guards massacred holding off the revolutionary mob at the Tuileries, Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys overrunning Fort Ticonderoga, Pickett leading his last mad charge at Gettysburg. You may fire when ready, Gridley-don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes-damn the torpedoes-I have not yet begun to fight. Catherine the Great is in the room, President Garfield is in the room. There is only the one instant, in which knowledge occurs.
FAMILY ROMANCE
I begin to remember how a child reads, as if the characters were his family, and the settings his home town. Every tree and every stick of furniture is supplied from those around him. My brother discovered Venezuela! My sister poisoned the Pope! My uncle was the president of the Nebraska Cattlemen's Association! All my cousins lived on a remote plantation on the steppes and their lives were interrupted by edicts and rebellions.
For the child, every description leads back toward what is in front of his senses. The novel is a history of his attention span. He sits in the room where the scene takes place, inhabits the baron or the traitor like a wandering demon. Then, having peopled the book with his family, he recasts the family as a book. The family acts out the story of the book within which the story of the family is inscribed. With eyes closed or open, book open or shut, he reads and reads.
To read like the child would be to approach the book once again with fear. A new chapter is dangerous. There is no protection from the shock of the characters' speech, the bare outrageousness of their curses, their sorrow. The sentence is larger than life, almost as big as the mind of the person reading it. The least pronouncement resounds universally.
The eyelash of the girl in the Pushkin poem is gigantic. The phrases are enormous chunks of sculpture, weightlessly penetrating space. In the Henry James novel the tiny tremblings of sensibility rear up ponderous and ungainly, suspended as if over an abyss, in a corner of the sitting room. A year passes in the interval since she tilted her head away from the lamp, perhaps to conceal a fleeting look of anxiety. The description of space, in Dickens or James, seems to dilate in order to admit shifting quantities of light and shadow, to expose a hidden three-dimensionality To look into the words is to look into a literal space. He chooses a book as he would choose a room to hole up in: or cave, or mesa, or hidden vantage point among the giddy crisscrossing alleys of the modern city.
― cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 16 June 2004 11:14 (twenty-one years ago)
London is peculiarly fertile in this sort of phrases, which spring up suddenly, no one knows exactly in what spot, and pervade the whole population in a few hours, no one knows how. Many years ago the favourite phrase (for, though but a monosyllable, it was a phrase in itself) was QUOZ. This odd word took the fancy of the multitude in an extraordinary degree, and very soon acquired an almost boundless meaning. When vulgar wit wished to mark its incredulity and raise a laugh at the same time, there was no resource so sure as this popular piece of slang. When a man was asked a favour which he did not choose to grant, he marked his sense of the suitor's unparalleled presumption by exclaiming Quoz! When a mischievous urchin wished to annoy a passenger, and create mirth for his chums, he looked him in the face, and cried out Quoz! and the exclamation never failed in its object. When a disputant was desirous of throwing a doubt upon the veracity of his opponent, and getting summarily rid of an argument which he could not overturn, he uttered the word Quoz, with a contemptuous curl of his lip and an impatient shrug of his shoulders. The universal monosyllable conveyed all his meaning, and not only told his opponent that he lied, but that he erred egregiously if he thought that any one was such a nincompoop as to believe him. Every alehouse resounded with Quoz; every street corner was noisy with it, and every wall for miles around was chalked with it.
13.4
But, like all other earthly things, Quoz had its season, and passed away as suddenly as it arose, never again to be the pet and the idol of the populace. A new claimant drove it from its place, and held undisputed sway till, in its turn, it was hurled from its pre-eminence, and a successor appointed in its stead.
13.5
"What a shocking bad hat!" was the phrase that was next in vogue. No sooner had it become universal, than thousands of idle but sharp eyes were on the watch for the passenger whose hat showed any signs, however slight, of ancient service. Immediately the cry arose, and, like the what-whoop of the Indians, was repeated by a hundred discordant throats. He was a wise man who, finding himself under these circumstances “the observed of all observers,” bore his honours meekly. He who showed symptoms of ill-feeling at the imputations cast upon his hat, only brought upon himself redoubled notice. The mob soon perceive whether a man is irritable, and, if of their own class, they love to make sport of him. When such a man, and with such a hat, passed in those days through a crowded neighbourhood, he might think himself fortunate if his annoyances were confined to the shouts and cries of the populace. The obnoxious hat was often snatched from his head, and thrown into the gutter by some practical joker, and then raised, covered with mud, upon the end of a stick, for the admiration of the spectators, who held their sides with laughter, and exclaimed in the pauses of their mirth, “Oh! what a shocking bad hat!” “What a shocking bad hat!” Many a nervous, poor man, whose purse could but ill spare the outlay, doubtless purchased a new hat before the time, in order to avoid exposure in this manner.
(from Charles Mackay, "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", read more here.)
― Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 18 June 2004 04:23 (twenty-one years ago)
one month passes...