Glimpse of a beautiful mind
A few months ago, in Harvard bookstore, I picked up a thin pocket-sized volume titled This Craft of Verse by Jorge Luis Borges. It waited in my bag for a proper moment since about two weeks ago and I finished it just today. For a book of mere 121 pages it certainly took me a long time to get through – and the reason was not it being tedious or difficult to read, quite to the contrary. The book is actually a transcript of six lectures that Borges delivered at Harvard in 1967, recordings of which were only recently discovered in an archive. In his talk, Borges masterfully strikes this elusive balance between simplicity and sophistication – in fact he shows convincingly that it is not at all necessary to compromise between the two.
However, there is one thing that makes those otherwise quite remarkable lectures on poetry (and literature in general) truly amazing. Borges had been gradually losing his eyesight and by 1960 he was almost completely blind. This means that those six lectures were delivered without notes, simply by walking up to the stage and starting to talk. And reading them one cannot but marvel at how Borges picks up a thread and then effortlessly follows it, without ever losing his bearings or repeating himself. While doing so, he often quotes lines poetry and entire passages by Shakespeare, Homer, Joyce, Milton, Tennyson, Rossetti, Frost, Cummings, Chesterton, Manrique, Omar Khayyám, Yeats, Coleridge, Whitman, Quevedo and countless others in English, Spanish, German, Arabic, German and Old English. The only comparable feat of erudition and command of the subject I can think of must be Auerbach’s tour de force and magnum opus “Mimesis” that was written in Istanbul, where the author was in exile without access to library – and thereby the veritable study of Western literature from Tacitus to Proust and Woolf was written similarly “blind” and out of memory, without taking a look at source texts or anything else that had been written on them. Giants such as Borges and Auerbach stand as towering monuments to the art of reading and imbuing, immersing oneself in literature with a seriousness and dedication that almost scares me.
Borges concludes his series with a deeply personal and intimate creed, by looking back to a long life lived with, in and by literature. He opens his last lecture by saying:
I think of myself as being essentially a reader. As you are aware, I have ventured into writing; but I think what I have read is far more important than what I have written. For one reads what one likes – yet one writes not what one would like to write, but what one is able to write.
He reminisces a scene from his childhood, when he first heard his father reading “Ode to a Nightingale”, a poem by Keats, and describes an effect that this experience had on him:
I have toyed with an idea – the idea that although a man’s life is compounded of thousands and thousands of moments and days, those many instants and many days may be reduced to a single one: the moment when a man knows who he is, when he sees himself face to face. I suppose when Judas kissed Jesus (if he indeed did so), he felt at that moment that he was a traitor, that to be a traitor was his destiny, and that he was being loyal to that evil destiny. /…/ When I heard those lines of Keats’s, I suddenly felt that that was a great experience. I have been feeling it ever since. And perhaps from that moment I thought myself as being “literary”.
I don’t think I’ve had a moment like this, and I probably never will. I suppose most of us never will. And maybe this is the thing that ultimately separates us mere mortals from those few that are truly great.
Full circle
This morning I boarded the plane at Tegel, switched flights in rainy Riga and landed in Helsinki around 2pm. Ferry schedules between Helsinki and Tallinn look a lot less busy nowadays than what they used to be, but I suppose I’ll find something around 6pm, and this would bring me back to Tallinn before the nightfall – precisely 8 months after I left on January 14th.
Given that I have long had somewhat irrational but nonetheless rather strong aversion towards most things German, Berlin was a whole lot more pleasant than I expected it to be. It is a very mellow place with friendly and easy-going people who keep their voices down and move around in an organised way. Berlin’s many parks were especially nice with people sitting on lawns, reading books, drinking beer from bottles (after half a year in the US I still need to get over of this not being an offense one can get detained for) and simply having a good time.
Being in Berlin reminded me of one beautiful short story by Nabokov, titled “A Letter That Never Reached Russia”. You can read it in its entirety here (highly recommended, never mind all the typoes), but it is the last melancholic and hauntingly beautiful paragraph that has lingered in my mind for many years now:
Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal’s black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so gernerously surrounds human loneliness.
Good Old World
It is three days shy of exactly five months since I few from London to NY – and it is great to be back in a place where cars are small, Starbucks is considered bad rather than good coffee, people treat you indifferently without trying to fake otherwise, and the word “historic” means at least several centuries.
This morning I had a brief stopover and change of planes in Dublin and then landed in Paris a couple of hours later. I took a metro to St. Michel, valiantly ignored Gilbert Jeune (probably my favourite bookstore in Paris) for the moment, and got myself a small room with a tiny balcony in a hotel right next to College de France along Rue des Écoles. I’ve got quite a few friends in Paris right now so it will probably be some rather busy time for the next couple of days catching up with all of them.
However, I do have one specific memory regarding Paris – from the first time ever I was here, what must now be about 17 years ago. I was in Paris only for one day, from sunrise to midnight, having snuck in without a visa from Netherlands. I ended up walking the whole day. By nightfall I was resting my sore feet somewhere along the Boulevard des Capucines and then suddenly saw an older man with gray hair and in a red sweater sitting in a restaurant across the street. He was alone, reading a book that looked like poetry, and on his table there was a big bowl of mussels and a bottle of champagne in a cooler. That sight really struck me, as on the one hand, drinking champagne alone at night in a restaurant in Paris somehow feels an incredibly lonely thing to do. At the same time this man didn’t look that way at all to me – he was alone, but not lonely. I have had that picture very vividly in my mind and although I don’t have a red sweater (or hair quite as gray yet), I DO have a nice book of Lorca in my bag and it somehow feels just right to put it in my pocket, walk over to the Boulevard des Capucines, find a table and order a bottle of prosecco for the night.
