The impoverished mythology of our time seems afraid to go beneath the surface. We distrust profundity, we make fun of dilatory reflection. Images of horror flick across our screens, big or small, but we don’t want them slowed down by commentary: we want to watch Gloucester’s eyes plucked out but not to have to sit through the rest of Lear. One night, some time ago, I was watching television in a hotel room, zapping from channel to channel. Perhaps by chance, every image that held the screen for a few seconds showed someone being killed or beaten, a face contorted in anguish, a car or a building exploding. Suddenly I realized that one of the scenes I had flicked past did not belong to a drama series but to a newscast on war in the Balkans. Among the other images which cumulatively diluted the horror of violence, I had watched, unmoved, a real person being hit by a real bullet.
George Steiner suggested that the Holocaust translated the horrors of our imagined hells into a reality of charred flesh and bone; it may be that this translation marked the beginning of our modern inability to imagine another person’s pain. In the Middle Ages, for instance, the horrible torments of martyrs depicted in countless paintings were never viewed simply as images of horror: they were illumined by the theology (however dogmatic, however catechistic) that bred and defined them, and their representation was meant to help the viewer reflect on the world’s ongoing suffering. Not every viewer would necessarily see beyond the mere prurience of the scene, but the possibility for deeper reflection was always present. After all, an image or a text can only offer the choice of reading further or more profoundly; this choice the reader or viewer can reject since in themselves text and image are nothing but dabs on paper, stains on wood or canvas.
The images I watched that night were, I believe, nothing but surface; like pornographic texts (political slogans, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, advertising pap), they offered nothing but what the senses could apprehend immediately, all at once, fleetingly, without space or time for reflection.
Alice’s Looking-Glass Wood is not made up of such images: it has depth, it requires thought, even if (for the time of its passing) it offers no vocabulary to name its proper elements. True experience and true art (however uncomfortable the adjective has become) have this in common: they are always greater than our comprehension, even than our capabilities of comprehension. Their outer limit is always a little past our reach, as the Argentinean poet Alejandra Pizarnik once described:
And if the soul were to ask, Is it still far? you must answer:
On the other side of the river, not this one, the one just beyond.
To come even this far, I have had many and marvelous guides. Some overwhelming, others more intimate, many vastly entertaining, a few illuminating more than I could hope to see. Their writing keeps changing in the library of my memory, where circumstances of all sorts — age and impatience, different skies and different voices, new and old commentaries — keep shifting the volumes, crossing out passages, adding notes in the margins, switching jackets, inventing titles. The furtive activity of such anarchic librarians expands my limited library almost to infinity: I can now reread a book as if I were reading one I had never read before.
In Bush, his house in Concord, the seventy-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson began suffering from what was probably Alzheimer’s disease. According to his biographer Carlos Baker: “Bush became a palace of forgetting…. [But] reading, he said, was still an ‘unbroken pleasure.’ More and more the study at Bush became his retreat. He clung to the comforting routine of solitude, reading in his study till noon and returning again in the afternoon until it was time for his walk. Gradually he lost his recollection of his own writings, and was delighted at rediscovering his own essays: ‘Why, these things are really very good,’ he told his daughter.”
Something like Emerson’s rediscovery happens now when I take down The Man Who Was Thursday or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and meet them like Adam greeting his first giraffe.
Is this all?
Sometimes it seems enough. In the midst of uncertainty and many kinds of fear, threatened by loss, change, and the welling of pain within and without for which one can offer no comfort, readers know that at least there are, here and there, a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink, to grant us roof and board in our passage through the dark and nameless wood.
Room for the Shadow
“That’s very important,” the King said, turning to the jury.
They were just beginning to write this down on their slates, when the White Rabbit interrupted: “Unimportant, your Majesty means of course,” he said, in a very respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke.
“Unimportant, of course, I meant,” the King hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone, “important—unimportant — unimportant—important—” as if he were trying which word sounded best.
Some of the jury wrote down “important,” and some “unimportant.” Alice could see this, as she was near enough to look over their slates; “but it doesn’t matter a bit,” she thought to herself.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 12
For Connie Rooke
I WASN’T GOING TO WRITE. For years the temptation kept itself at bay, invisible. Books had the solid presence of the real world and filled my every possible need, whether read out loud to me at first, or later read silently on my own, but always repeating their assurance that what they told me would not change, unlike the rooms in which I slept and the voices heard outside the door. We traveled much, my nurse and I, because my father was in the Argentinean diplomatic service, and the various hotel rooms, and even the embassy house in Tel Aviv, lacked the familiarity of certain pages into which I slipped night after night.
After I learned to read, this story-land homecoming no longer depended on my nurse’s availability, weariness, or mood, but on my own whim alone, and I would return to the books I knew by heart whenever the fancy or the urge took me, following on the page the words recited in my head. In the morning, under one of four palm trees set in a square in the walled embassy garden; during the car drive to the large wild park where wild tortoises crept along the dunes planted with oleander bushes; especially at night, while my nurse, thinking I was asleep, sat at her electric knitting machine and, suffering from mysterious stomach pains that kept her agonizingly awake, worked until well past midnight, I read. To the metronomic rasp of her machine, as she rolled the handle back and forth, in the dim yellow light that she kept on to work by, I would turn to the wall with my open book and follow an Aladdinlike hero called Kleine Muck, the adventurous dog Crusoe, the robber bridegroom who drugged his victims with three-colored wine, the ill-fated Kay and Gerda, and the wicked Snow Queen.
It never occurred to me that I might add something of my own to the books on my shelf. Everything I wanted was already there, at arm’s reach, and I knew that if I wished for a new story, the bookshop only a short walk from the house had countless more to add to my stock. To invent a story, impossible as the task then seemed to me, would have felt like trying to create another palm tree for the garden or model another tortoise to struggle across the sand. What hope of success? Above all, what need?