For Christ’s sake, we would notice if it died.
39.
And again back to the shelves of books, to convince myself that the world is bound and ordered. Here is WWI, wrapped up in twelve identical red volumes of some encyclopedia. Here is the Cold War, forever buried between the covers of these three big volumes, gray. Neither the Spanish Civil War (sleeping on the top shelf) nor the Second World War, with its two whole bookcases, is frightening anymore. Everything sooner or later ends up in a book, as Mallarmé put it in that quote so beloved by Borges. Which, when you think about it, is not such a bad result.
I stand in the Main Rose Reading Room beneath the Veronese-style suspended and frescoed heavens. I’m sitting close to the shelves of historical books. I’ve taken down, more as an alibi, the first volume in an Encyclopedia of the Cold War, published in 2008, letters A–D. I realize that I can tell stories from the front about this war, we fought in it even as children. I page through it, like a spy tossing secret glances at the people around me. Whatever you read is what you shall become. At the table in front of me there’s a person whom I immediately recognize as homeless. I have always felt an inexplicable closeness to them. He’s wearing a puffy winter jacket, quite large (I have a similar one) and a hat with earflaps sticking out on the sides. It’s warm in the reading room, but it’s better for him this way, all packed up, ready to leave immediately if they chase him out. I know that feeling of anticipatory guilt quite well.
He has placed a pile of books to his left. Actually, he is one of the few around me who is actually reading. The rest are staring at their phones, sending text messages, waiting for the rain outside to stop. The library is a shelter, a warm and dry place open to all. Years ago an attempt was made to prevent the homeless from coming in, but the management gave up on it. I am dying with curiosity to see what exactly he is reading, so I get up and pretend to be looking for something on the nearby shelves and turn around slightly. In front of him is a thick dog-eared Chronicles of the Barbarians. Beneath it I manage to make the title on the spine: A Short History of India. And on the very top of his pile . . . it can’t be, Gaustine’s Selected Writings. I involuntarily reach for it, the homeless man lifts his eyes, and only then do I read the cover correctly—Augustine, of course. (I could have sworn that the author was Gaustine just a short while ago.) I apologize, he stares at me, then hunches over the book he is holding again, an album with enormous Spanish houses from the nineteenth century.
40.
A few years ago I started slowly losing my hearing. A subtle hearing aid, prescribed to me with the promise that it would bring back the blackbirds in the morning and the crickets on summer nights, but it hardly helped at all. Through it I heard everything as if recorded on an old gramophone record, with a faint metallic echo and crackling here and there. A feeling of mechanical reproduction, as Walter Benjamin would put it. The soundtrack of yesterday’s world, recorded and played back on an infinite loop.
Birds sang even during the war. I turn this phrase in my head while listening to Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, written and performed for the first time in January 1941 in a French prisoner-of-war camp. I’ve turned up the volume to the max. In the beginning of the quartet, Messiaen has put those words from the Apocalypse—about the angel who announces the end of time. A cold rain fell that afternoon, the concert was outside in the open, but none of the four hundred prisoners or guards left. An unexpected combination of piano, clarinet, violin, and cello—those were the musicians available among the prisoners . . . The first movement, “Crystal Liturgy,” opens with the awakening of the birds, the clarinet imitates a blackbird in a marvelous solo, and the violin follows after it—a nightingale, endless, repetitious, oblivious, mellifluous, and alarmed, at one and the same time calm and anxious.
Birds sang even during the war. Therein lies the whole horror . . . and consolation.
41.
Even though Ecclesiastes teaches us that there is a time for everything, a time for this and a time for that, all of a sudden in the last book of the Book they announce to us the end of time. This is what the angel in Revelation proclaims, with one foot in the sea and the other on land, holding a scroll in his hands. The scroll John has to eat. When we say, “I absolutely devoured that book,” somewhere an echo of that voice can also be heard.
Take it and eat it, says the angel, handing the book to John. It will be bitter in your stomach, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey. (As a young and devoted reader I once ate a page, I don’t remember which book now, I think it was a poetry chapbook, they use the least ink. It was already bitter in my mouth.)
And right at that moment in Revelation the angel announces that there shall be no more time. That’s it. He doesn’t proclaim the end of the world, but the end of time.
The cages of the days shall be opened and all times will gather as one.
. . . And God will call back the past.
42.
. . . My whole life is sewn together from other people’s lives. Even the one I’m living is some other life, I can’t know whose. I feel like a monster cobbled together from different times. I sit in an unfamiliar city constantly filled with fire-truck sirens, as if it is always engulfed in flames. I spend all my days at its library, in the cold hall under a painted sky, surrounded by the encyclopedias of the world, red covers and gold letters. I read old newspapers and look at people’s faces. I am afraid that at any moment someone will turn up, will look around, and will head straight for me . . .
I sit in a library, the library of the world. Every morning I read papers from one and the same day in 1939. Everything is familiar to me, I have been there, I have had drinks in a dive on Fifty-Second, the rains of that autumn have fallen on me. The newspaper is merely a doorway. Into the petty and insignificant, isn’t that how the saying goes, there hides the past with its clockwork that must be defused. Somewhere there amid the last sales of the season and the article about gas masks in German schools with a large photo on page three in the New York Times (all the students from a high school standing in front of the building, holding hands with their gas masks on, with no faces). I’ll peruse offers from the movie theaters and nightclubs, I’ll sit in the Cinzano bar on page thirty-seven, I’ll switch on my new Emerson wireless and antenna-free radio set for only $19.95, I’ll hear the latest news from abroad, I’ll spend the night in the little ads for rooms for rent in Lower Manhattan, and I’ll look at the faces of the people who have come out toward evening in the gossip columns. I can’t miss anything, the trigger is there somewhere, in one of the final August evenings . . . Yours, G.
I stand at the window with a letter in my hand, both sender and receiver, I read and think that the world is always a little before September 1, at the end of summer, with ads in the paper and the distant roar of a just-started war . . . The afternoon of the world, in which our shadows grow long under the waning sun, before evening falls.
43.
The less memory, the more past.