I thought art would make me a better human being, but I also thought it would make me better than you.
Better? Yo, la peor de todas.
Oh, the sad vanity of flesh and blood called mankind,
Can’t you see, you’re not the slightest bit important?
Poetry brought me great pleasure, music immense solace, but I had to train myself to appreciate, train and train. It didn’t come naturally to me. When I first heard Wagner, Messiaen, or Ligeti, the noise was unbearable, but like a child with her first sip of wine, I recognized something that I could love with practice, and practice I most certainly did.
It’s not as if you’re born with the ability to love António Lobo Antunes.
I know. You think you love art because you have a sensitive soul.
Isn’t a sensitive soul simply a means of transforming a deficiency into proud disdain?
You think art has meaning. You think you’re not like me.
You think that art can save the world. I used to.
Why didn’t I train myself to be a better cook?
What was it all for? What good did it do me?
What good is a personal skylight if I’m the only one who sees its light?
How special!
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I’m not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can live inside Alice Munro’s skin. But I can’t relate to my own mother. My body is full of sentences and moments, my heart resplendent with lovely turns of phrases, but neither is able to be touched by another.
I have my writers’ neuroses but not their talents.
In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles describes his character as possessing Byronic ennui. Let me paraphrase:
I am filled with Byronic loneliness but have neither of the poet’s outlets: genius and adultery.
All I am is lonely.
Before I go to bed, I must put away Sebald, both The Emigrants and Austerlitz. I can’t read him now, not in this state. He’s much too honest. I will read something else.
I must prepare for my next project. January first arrives soon.
In the wire rack next to the sink, the dishes dry, slowly dripping water upon the gray stone countertop. A winter wind starts a low moan outside my kitchen window. Rain comes.
I must sleep. Forget the Aaliya revival. I need the Aaliya asleep.
Of course, my mother’s visit delivers a night of anguish. I am unable to sleep. Tumbling thoughts of why, how, and what occupy my mind. I raise myself out of bed rather quickly, hoping to banish the worries from the mists of my head. The cool early temperature is a feathery hand tickling my spine. I put on my robe. My nightgown, darkened with moisture, sticks to my torso like the skin of an onion. I glance back, notice that I’ve left two damp bulbs on the sheet.
As I boil water for my tea in the unlit kitchen, I try to clear my thoughts, to sift out the dark morning dregs. It’s drizzling outside my window, and the street’s one functioning lamp, my familiar, emits weak light, lonely light, a diffuse conical beam to the asphalt. I’m weary. I don’t wish to think about my mother this morning. I don’t wish to think about my life. I want to be lost in someone else’s. An easy, effortless morning is what I need.
I walk myself back to my bedroom, back to the stack of books on my mirrorless vanity, unread books that I intend to read, a large stack. Choosing which book isn’t difficult. The choice is typically the last one I brought home. I acquire books constantly and place them in the to-read pile. When I finish with whatever book I’m reading, I begin the last book I bought, the one that caught my attention last. Of course, the pile grows and grows until I decide that I’m not going to buy a single book until I read my stack. Sometimes that works.
The top book on the pile is Microcosms by Claudio Magris. I’ve only read one other book of his, Danube, from which, among his many impeccable sentences, one wrapped its octopus arms around my frenetically feeble mind for months. It goes like this: “Kafka and Pessoa journey not to the end of a dark night, but of a night of a colourless mediocrity that is even more disturbing, and in which one becomes aware of being only a peg to hang life on, and that at the bottom of that life, thanks to this awareness, there may be sought some last-ditch residue of truth.”
If Kafka, if Gregor Samsa, can resign himself to being a cockroach, if he can accept being the blade of grass upon which the stormtrooper’s boot stomps, is it immoral for someone like me to want to be more?
Ah, splendid Microcosms, the deliciousness of discovering a masterwork. The beauty of the first sentences, the “what is this?” the “how can this be?” the first crush all over again, the smile of the soul. My heart begins to lift. I can see myself sitting all day in my chair, immersed in lives, plots, and sentences, intoxicated by words and chimeras, paralyzed by satisfaction and contentment, reading until the deepening twilight, until I can no longer make out the words, until my mind begins to wander, until my aching muscles are no longer able to keep the book aloft. Joy is the anticipation of joy. Reading a fine book for the first time is as sumptuous as the first sip of orange juice that breaks the fast in Ramadan.
Now, I haven’t fasted since I was forced to as a child. I just remember what it was like.
I adjust myself in the reading chair, pull my legs up. It’s going to be a long, voluptuous ride.
I flip delicate pages with an unhurried and measured beat, a lazy metronome timing. I lose myself in the book’s languorous territories. I’m transported to a café in Trieste, become intimately acquainted with its idiosyncratic patrons. I travel along the book’s meandering paths — breakfast with a young man in one village, lunch with a crone in another — salivate over beautiful sentences, celebrate holidays I’d never heard of. I read and read until I am abruptly bashed over the head by the full weight of Esperia’s story, a throwaway of no more than four pages in a three-hundred-page tome. Esperia, an incidental character indelibly rendered in a few phrases, a bit player in life, mirrors Hannah.
I’m not allowed an escape.
The story induces a state of disequilibrium: dizziness and a slight nausea. In my ear a ringing commences, a small hyperactive church bell. I’m no longer able to see what is before me, I’m no longer able to hear what is around me, I’m no longer able to recall who I am. I lay the book facedown upon my chest, steal a long breath. Shudders course through my body, electric shocks through my vertebrae. I feel cold. Steady breathing can’t warm me.
First my mother barges back into my life, then Hannah. What is this?
I don’t believe in coincidence.
“Hunger is what I remember of my childhood — hunger, insatiable, voracious, devouring.” Hannah wrote that sentence in one of her middle-years journals. She began registering her thoughts in diaries at an early age; the first recorded birthday was her tenth. I inherited all of them, of course. She gave them to me — well, left them to me, my name on a little piece of paper.
The early diaries are barely legible, childish script in pencil in spiral-bound notebooks. The wires have rusted and stiffened. The fold-around orange cover has faded, the manufacturer’s logo (Clairefontaine, I believe) is almost unrecognizable. The paper is aged and warped and frayed and discolored, or not discolored but multihued — aging births new colors, variations of yellow and burnt orange in this case, the colors of a dying fire. Reading the childhood diaries is like deciphering ancient papyrus. The post-teen journals are better preserved, in indelible ink on pristine white paper, her handwriting flawless and arabesque formal.