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Sunday, February 22nd, 2009
Mariana Eça's office in the Alfama quarter was half an hour's walk. It took him four hours. It began with him sitting down whenever he found a bench, sitting and changing his glasses. With the new glasses the world was bigger and for the first time, space really had three dimensions where things could extend unhindered. The Tagus was no longer a vague brownish surface, but a river, and the Castelo de São Jorge projected into the sky in three directions, like a real citadel.... In a little park, he took out Prado's notes and tried out the new glasses.O verdadeiro encenador da nossa vida é acaso -- um encenador cheio de crueldade, misericórdia e encanto cativante. Gregorius didn't believe his eyes: he hadn't understood any of Prado's sentences so easily: The real director of our life is accident -- a director full of cruelty, compassion and bewitching charm. Reading Night Train to Lisbon last night, I realized I was moving my lips to sound out the words -- this surprised me as I have not done such a thing in many years, since grade school. And then I realized oh, I was just reading Borges oral, where I have to move my lips to sound out the foreign words; and it made me wonder how much this new drive to learn Spanish is affecting my relationship with my mother tongue.I definitely experience the book differently when I am focusing on the sound of the words, rather than primarily on their meaning. I think there is something of value in this type of reading.
posted afternoon of February 22nd, 2009: Respond
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A fun passage from the beginning of Borges' lecture "Immortality":
Without understanding [William James'] joke, don Miguel de Unamuno repeats it word for word in his The Tragic Sense of Life*: God is the provider of immortality, but he repeats many times that he wants to go on being don Miguel de Unamuno. Here I don't understand Miguel de Unamuno; I do not want to go on being Jorge Luis Borges, I want to be another person. I hope that my death will be total, I hope to die in body and soul.I do not know if it's ambitious or modest, or at all justifiable, my pretension of speaking about personal immortality, about a soul which preserves a memory of that which was on earth and which already in the other world corresponds to the previous one. I remember that my sister, Norah, was at my house the other day and said: I'm going to paint a picture called "Nostalgia for Earth", having as its content that which an angel feels in heaven, thinking of earth. I'm going to make it up of elements from Buenos Aires when I was a girl.
It's just really nice to see Borges, whom I've always pictured as a sort of forbidding presence, talking in this down-to-earth manner, having a house and a sister...
 Update: fixed a blunder in my translation, after referring to Eliot Weinberger's translation of the lecture in Selected Non-Fictions. * Jaime Nubiola and Izaskun MartÃnez of the Universidad de Navarra have written a paper on Unamuno's Reading of The Varieties of Religious Experience and its Context. Nubiola also has an interesting note in Streams of William James, vol. I, #3 (pdf), on "Jorge Luis Borges and WJ", and in vol. III, #3 (pdf), on "WJ and Borges Again: the Riddle of the Correspondence with Macedonio Fernández". Professor Nubiola has confirmed to me by e-mail that as he understands it, "Unamuno is a deep believer and William James is -- at the end of the day -- a non believer, who understands the belief in God as the other side of the belief of immortality."
posted afternoon of February 22nd, 2009: 4 responses
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Friday, February 20th, 2009
I was reading the author's preface to Borges oral just now, in which he explains how he chose each of his topics -- of "The Book," he says it is the tool "without which I could not imagine my life, and which is no less intimate to me than my hands or my eyes." I was very taken with Borges' humble description of his role as a teacher: Thanks to the listener, who gives me his indulgent hospitality, my classes achieved a success which I had not hoped for, and which I certainly did not merit.As a lecture, the class is a collaborative work, and those who listen are no less important than he who speaks. This book contains my personal portion of these sessions. I hope the reader may enrich them as much as they were enriched by the listeners.
posted evening of February 20th, 2009: Respond
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Sylvia and I read Chapter 18 of The Amber Spyglass tonight, in which Lyra and Will enter the world of the dead; and I found myself utterly blown away by Pullman's creativity. There has been a lot to love about this series of books; but I think the transition here from the multiple universes of living reality to the world of the dead might be the single greatest bit of genius so far. It's believable and elegant and not kitsch, it seems like Dante writing science fiction. -- Wait no, that's not quite what I mean; I mean something more like "a great science fiction author writing the Inferno." Sylvia impressed me last night when we were reading about Mary Malone among the mulefa, by picking up on the fact that what Mary was building was going to be "the amber spyglass" -- she figured this out before I did.
posted evening of February 20th, 2009: 2 responses
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Of all the diverse tools of man, the most astonishing is, without a doubt, the book.
At the library today I found a lovely little book by Jorge Luis Borges -- it is called Borges oral and is the texts of five lectures Borges gave at the Universidad Belgrano, in Buenos Aires, in the 70's. The topics are "The Book", "Immortality", "Emmanuel Swedenborg", "The Detective Story", and "Time" -- Borges says he "chose topics with which I have occupied my time."The first lesson is very engaging and fun -- he's talking about how people have looked at the book throughout history, what space it has occupied in cultures, with reference to classical philosophy and to the Old Testament; and to Spengler's Decline of the West. Some of this is over my head but Borges has composed it in such a way as to welcome inquiry -- he is not assuming his students will understand the references but rather that they will be prompted to investigate further. Very nice to think about the aged author (in his 70s at the time he delivered these lectures) addressing the class. I am wondering now whether these lectures were ever recorded...
posted evening of February 20th, 2009: 3 responses
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Thursday, February 19th, 2009
Saramago writes today about Paco Ibáñez, and links to his web site --
Tomorrow, Saturday, Paco Ibáñez will sing at Argelès-sur-mer, on the coast of Provence, in homage to the memory of the Spanish republicans, among others his father, who there suffered torments, humiliations, evil treatment of all kinds, in the concentration camp erected by the French authorities.
Argelès-sur-mer is a village very close to the Pyrenees (about 10 miles north of Cerbère); in the final years of the Spanish Civil War, tens of thousands of republicans were interned there.
posted evening of February 19th, 2009: Respond
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Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness.Fernando Pessoa, Book of Disquiet
It makes me kind of happy, as Gregorius is browsing through Simões' bookshop (in Chapter 8 of Night Train to Lisbon), to see how many of the titles and authors I recognize -- this is starting from slightly more than a year ago, when José Saramago was broadly speaking, the first Portuguese author I had ever heard of. The amount of reading I've done in this literature is still pretty sparse; but I've gotten a chance to familiarize myself with the names and identities of a lot of the important touchstones, it looks like.
I said before that I was not really identifying with Gregorius, and that's still true -- I was thinking tonight though, it's funny I don't -- some aspects of his situation have parallels to aspects of my own life, I think; seems like if I tried, I ought to be able to put myself in his shoes. And curious -- in the last book I read, Elizabeth Costello, I also found that I was not "relating" to the text that way. My feeling about this is that both Coetzee and Mercier have a very different type of voice -- at a first approximation, "more cerebral" -- than much of what I've been reading in the last few years. It could also be that I'm moving in a different direction as a reader. This is difficult to quantify; I'm just going to leave it out there for the time being.
posted evening of February 19th, 2009: Respond
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For some reason I had been operating under the assumption that Night Train to Lisbon was Pascal Mercier's first novel. That is not true, it's his third (following Perlmann's Silence and The Piano Tuner; and he has a fourth novel, Lea) -- however it's his first and so far only work to appear in English translation.  Writing under his real name, Peter Bieri also has two philosophical texts, Time and Experience of Time and The Handicraft of Freedom, and a paper "What Remains of Analytical Philosophy?" I've been sort of keeping in mind, as I read this book, that the author is a philosopher. That is making me look for philosophical argument underlying the text -- I'm not sure how valid this is as an approach to the book, it could quite possibly make me miss the forest for the trees.
posted afternoon of February 19th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Robyn Hitchcock was on BBC Radio 4's Material World last Thursday, on Darwin's birthday -- the show does not usually feature live music, but they marked the occasion with Robyn singing "We Evolve". What you call God
I call evolution.
What you call fate
I call mum and dad.
They drive you mad... Download the podcast from the BBC -- music begins about 15 minutes in.
posted evening of February 18th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
Of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance and without the care it deserves. Buried under all the mute experiences are those unseen ones that give our life its form, its color, its melody. Then, when we turn to these treasures, as archæologists of the soul, we discover how confusing they are. The object of contemplation refuses to stand still, the words bounce off the experience and in the end, pure contradictions stand on the paper. For a long time, I thought it was a defect, something to be overcome. Today I think it is different: that recognition of the confusion is the ideal path to understanding these intimate yet enigmatic experiences. That sounds strange, even bizarre, I know. But ever since I have seen the issue in this light, I have the feeling of being really awake and alive for the first time."That's the introduction," said the bookdealer and started leafing through it. "And now he seems to begin, passage after passage, to dig for all the buried experiences. To be the archæologist of himself. Some passages are several pages long and others are quite short. Here, for example, is a fragment that consists of only one sentence." He translated: Given that we live only a small part of what there is in us -- what happens with the rest?
Aha! No wonder Night Train to Lisbon has been seeming familiar in structure to me -- it is built on a similar foundation to The White Castle. It is going to be way less cryptic though, a third-person narration and we have access to the Book that Gregorius is reading. (I wonder how it is going to work out, for Gregorius not to understand Portuguese?)* This is going to be fun...
 * Ah: he is buying a Portuguese textbook.
posted evening of February 17th, 2009: Respond
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