Conversational Reading

Swann's Way

It is true that the people concerned in them [books] were not what Francoise would have called "real people." But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a "real" person arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the image was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of "real" people would be a decided improvement. A "real" person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. The novelist's happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable to the human soul, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which one's soul can assimilate. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of the creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, as we feverishly turn over the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes.

The Following Story

A teacher of Dutch--well, if you wanted to draw a cartoon of the type, you could take him as your model. Teaching children the language they were already hearing in the echo chamber of the womb long before they were born, and stunting the natural growth of that language with tedious drivel about ordinal numbers, double possessives, split infinitives, predicate nouns, and prepositional phrases is bad enough, but to look like an underdone cutlet and pontificate about poetry, that's too much. And not only did he lay down the law about poetry, he wrote it too. Every few years he would spawn yet another anemic assembly of messages from the lukewarm provinces of his soul: toothless lines, strings of words casting aimlessly about on the page. If they ever happened to brush against a single line of Horace, they would disintegrate without a trace.

Galatea 2.2

I read then, everything I could lay hands on. Reading was my virgin continent. I read instantly upon awakening, and was still at it well past the hour that consciousness shut down. I read for nothing, for a pleasure difficult to describe and impossible afterwards to recover.

The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick

The Shekina fund-raiser was held in one of those mazy Upper West Side apartments where it is impossible to find the bathroom. You wander from corridor to corridor, tentatively entering bedrooms still redolent of their night odors, where the bedspreads have lain folded and unused on chairs for months. Sometimes on these journeys there will be a bewildered young child standing fearfully in your path, or else an unexpected small animal, but mostly you will encounter nothing but the stale mixed smells of an aging building. Such apartments are like demoralized old women shrouded in wrinkles, who, mourning their lost complexions, assert the dignity and importance of their prime. The bathroom sink, if you should happen to locate it in the dark (the light switch will be permanently hidden), is embroidered with the brown grime of its ancient cracks, like the lines of an astrological map; the base of the toilet, when you flush it, will trickle out a niggardly rusty stream. And then you will know how privileged you are: you have been touched by History.

Golem Song by Marc Estrin

The walls were floor-to-ceilinged with books--the great works of all periods. No less-than-literature volumes here. The exalted Germans and towering Russians took eye-level pride of place. And there were shrines, little face-out areas of shelving, sometimes decorated with statuettes or postcards--Buddha and Beethoven, Jarry and Rabelais, Einstein and Dostoevsky, George Steiner and Samuel Beckett, Shakespeare, Joyce, and Dylan Thomas, Wittgenstein and Spengler, Heidegger, Schopenhauer, and Clock--and the mysterious cover of Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat. And music galore. Old vinyls, cassettes, and CDs, arranged by composer, from Adam de la Halle to Zelenka. The complete works of every major composer except Brahms, multiple versions of favorite pieces, all three completions of Mahler's Tenth, closely compared--and his pride and joy, a 1922 edition of Grove Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians in six volumes. His "reference section" included a 1911 Britannica, read through up to J, and a 1945 twenty-volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, whose volumes he would often take to bed with him to read, caress, and smell.

The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick

There, at any rate, Puttermesser would sit, in Eden, under a middle-sized tree, in the solid blaze of an infinite heart-of-summer July green, green, green everywhere, green above and green below, herself gleaming and made glorious by sweat, every inch annihilated, fecundity dismissed. And there Puttermesser would, as she imagined it, take in. Ready to her left hand, the box of fudge (rather like the fudge sold to the lower school by the eighth-grade cooking class in P.S. 74, the Bronx, circa 1942); ready to her right hand, a borrowed steeple of library books . . .

Here Puttermesser sits. Day after celestial day, perfection of desire upon perfection of contemplation, into the exaltations of an uninterrupted forever, she eats fudge in human shape (once known--no use covering this up--as nigger babies0, or fudge in square shapes (and in Eden there is no tooth decay); and she reads.

Golem Song

Alan gawked at the lipstick kiss on his shoulder, and gazed back at the poster he had been leaning on. A blonde male model, shot head-first, recumbent in his briefs, foreshortened, looking for all the world like a god on a slab, featuring a pudendal mountain under pesticide-free cotton. At the peak of the mount, as if planted by Sir Edmund Hilary's wife herself, a full-mouthed press of lipstick, yum. This was the attestation that had transferred itself (less passionately) to Alan's shoulder. Sex in the age of mechanical reproduction.

The Gold Bug Variations

What he had done, how he had chosen to spend his energies, really was science. A way of looking, reverencing. And the purpose of all science, like living, which amounts ot the same thing, was not the accumulations of Gnostic power, fixing of formulas for the names of God, stockpiling brutal efficiency, accomplishing the sadistic myth of progress. the purpose of science was to revive and cultivate a perpetual state of wonder. For nothing deserved wonder so much as our capacity to feel it. (611)

The Gold Bug Variations

I cannot say the same thing twice. The first time through, invention; the second, allusion; a third promotes it to motif, then theme, keepsake, baggage, small consolation. Brought back after years, it evokes a lost twinge never harbored in the original. Perhaps, with everything between us changed beyond recognition, one more reprise might make it invention again. (514)

The Immoralist

Our happiness, during this last part of the trip, was so untroubled, so calm, that I have nothing to tell about it. The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told. (68)

The Gold Bug Variations

"You see the problem," he said. "You've followed the cult of originality since autographed toilets? the straitjacketing Neo-ist canvases full of original black paint? The original razor blade and follow-up hot bath?" I didn't catch his references, but he seemed to mean that we'd reached a moment in out visual lives when innovation was itself derivative. (301)

The Gold Bug Variations

"Information is not meaning, but can be used to reveal it. It has, as Todd's favorite living novelist notes, replaced cigarettes as the universal medium of exchange." (468)

I love the way these two sentences entwine around one another. The first one puts forth a postulate: "Information is not meaning, but can be used to reveal it." Then the next sentence demonstrates that postulate. "Todd's favorite living novelist . . ." This is information without meaning, information encrypted--this sentence contains the name of the novelist, but only if we can find the key to reveal it. They key is another person who can guess the answer, a Google search, or whatever can tell us, based on the given information, who this novelist is.

Information without meaning. Consider The Gold Bug Variations as a book that looks into the way systems transform information into meaning.

Lectures on Russian Literature -- Vladimir Nabokov

The flaw, the crack in it, which in my opinion causes the whole edifice to crumble ethically and esthetically may be found in part ten, chapter 4. It is in the beginning of the redemption scene when Raskolnikov, the killer, discovers through the girl Sonya the New Testament. She has been reading to him about Jesus and the raising of Lazarus. So far so good. But then comes this singular sentence that for sheer stupidity has hardly the equal in world-famous literature: "The candle was flickering out, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had been reading together the eternal book." "The murderer and the harlot" and "the eternal book"-- what a triangle. This is a crucial phrase, of a typical Dostoevskian rhetorical twist. Now what is so dreadfully wrong about it? Why is it so crude and so inartistic?

I suggest that neither a true artist not a true moralist-- neither a true Christian not a good philosopher--neither a poet nor a sociologist--should have placed side by side, in one breath, in one gust of false eloquence, a killer together with whom?--a poor streetwalker, bending their completely different heads over that holy book. . . . The two are on completely different levels.

The Moviegoer -- Walker Percy

The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place--but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.

What do you seek--God? you ask with a smile.

I hesitate to answer, since all other Americans have settled the matter for themselves and to give such an answer would amount to setting myself a goal which everyone has already reached--and therefore raising a question in which no one has the slightest interest. Who wants to rank dead last among one hundred and ninety eight million Americans? For, as everyone knows, the polls report that 98% of American believe in God and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics--which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker. For myself, I enjoy answering polls as much as anyone and take pleasure in giving intelligent replies to all questions.

Krzysztof Kieslowski

"Art[," Dorer says "]reveals something not only about the subjectivity of experience but about the experienced world itself, something that is not accessible to conceptual understanding." He elaborates: "Since in our normal experience qualities like color, shape, and sound are 'absorbed' into the images of perceived things, they are experienced only derivatively--not in themselves but as submerged in the object. . . . Art, however, can make the qualities of color, shape, sound, duration, weight, etc., stand alone as images themselves rather than as mere features of normal physical things. Thus it can give us a framework within which to see these qualities in their own terms. . . . In this way art can reveal truth about the world by making conspicious the primitive qualities of which our experience is composed but which are mornally submerged in that experience."
pg. 51

Hopscotch 5

He would like to sketch certain ideas, but he is incapable of doing so. The designs which appear in the margins of his notes are terrible. The obsessive repetition of a tremulous spiral, with a rhythm similar to the ones adorning Sanchi's stupa.

He plans one of the many endings to his unifinished book, and he leaves a mockup. The page contains a single sentence: "Underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because there isn't any." The sentence is repeated over and over for the whole length of the page, giving the impression of a wall, of an impediment. There are no periods or commas or margins. A wall, in fact, of words that illustrate the meaning of the sentence, the collision with a wall behind which there is nothing. But towards the bottom and on the right, in one of the sentences the word any is missing. A sensitive eye can discover the hole among the bricks, the light that shows through.
pg. 370

The dream was composed like a tower of layers without end, rising upward and losing themselves in the infinite, or layers coiling downward, losing themselves in the bowels of the earth. When it swooped me in its undulations, the spiraling begin, and this spiral was a labyrinth. There was no vault and no bottom, no walls and no return. But there were themes repeating themselves with exactitude.
Anais Nin, Winter of artifice
pg. 470

Hopscotch 4

A third possibility: that of making an accomplice of the reader, a traveling companion. Simultaneanize him, provided that the reading will abolish reader's time and substitute author's time. Thus the reader would be able to become a coparticipant and cosufferer of the experience through which the novelist is passing, at the same moment in the same form. . . .

For that reader, mon semblable, mon frere the comic novel (and what is Ulysses?) will have to take place like those dreams where in the margin of some trivial happening we have a presentimentof a more serious anxiety that we do not always manage to decipher. In this sense the comic novel must have an exemplary sense of decorum; not deceive the reader, not mount him astride any emotion or intention at all, but give him rather something like meaningful clay, the beginning of a prototype , with traces of someting that may be collective perhaps, human and not individual.

Hopscotch 3

"Wong says that Jung was all excited about the Bardo," Ronald was saying. "It's easy to see why, and the existentialists should give it a careful reading too. Look, at the moment of judgment for a dead person, the King puts a mirror to his face, but this mirror is Karma. The summation of all of the dead person's acts, you see. And the dead person sees all his actions reflected, good and bad, but the reflection doesn't correspond to any reality, it's the projection of mental images . . . Tell me why old Jung shouldn't have been a little amazed. The King of the Dead looks into the mirror, but he is really looking into your memory. Can you think of a better desctiption of psychoanalysis? And what's even more extraordinaty, my dear, is that the judgment the King pronounces is not his but your own. You judge yourself without knowing it. Don't you think that Sartre really ought to go live inLhasa?"

Hopscotch 2

"Not us," Etienne said. "We've already shot them down and as just the right moment, and all I ask is for someone to do the same for me when my time is up."

"Just at the right moment? You're not asking for much, kiddo," said Olivera, yawning. "But you're right, we have given them the coup de grace already. With a rose instead of a bullet, if you want to think of it that way. What's left is habit and carbon paper. To think that Armstrong has just now gone to Buenos Aires for the first time and you can imagine the thousands of booBs who will think they're listening to something great while Satchmo, with more tricks than an old fighter, bobbing and weaving, tired and amortized and without giving a damn what he does, strictly routine, while some of my friends whom I respect and who twenty years ago would cover their ears if you put on Mahogany Hall Stomp now pay God knows how much for an orchestra seat to listen to that warmed-over stuff. Of course, my country itself is warmed-over too, with all my patriotic love I'm forced to admit it." (52)

Hopscotch 1

Convinced that memory keeps everything, not just the Albertines and the great journals of the heart and kidneys, I persisted in reconstructing the contents of my desk in Floresta, the face of a girl impossible to remember named Gekrepten,the number of drawing pens in my pencil box in the fifth grade, and I ended up trembling and desperate (because I had never been able to remember those pens; I know that they were in the pencil box, in a special compartment, but I cannot remember how many they were, nor the precise moment when there were two or six), until La Maga, kissing me and blowing smoke and her hot breath into my face, brought me back and we laughed, and we began to walk around again among the piles of rubbish, looking for the members of the Club. It was about that time I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses. (7)