I’ve passed through its seasons and its climates, passed through its speeds and its slownesses, passed through the slow pages of the end when the narrative broadened like a great river – broadened, and flowed more slowly as the whole of what had gone before gathered mightily behind it. Slow river of the end, passing through everything and nothing; slow river of the day to day: there was no detail too small to be passed over; nothing that could not be borne by your great streaming.
What happened? Nothing happened; it was the story of the narrator’s days, those only. What happened? The narrator wrote of his days; he became the chronicler of days. And what was learnt by way of this chronicling? As reader, I learnt of the pulse of time, the return, each day, of the beginning. I knew, with the passing of each paragraph, how his days turned, the narrator of the no man’s bay. And I knew how my days turned in the reading of the book.
It is true, I struggled with these pages; I fell behind them; I thought: there is nothing to make me read further, and even though I want to read slowly, I am not as slow as this chronicle asks me to be, and how can anyone be that slow? I even resented the chronicle and its slownesses, saying to myself: the narrator has too much time and too many luxuries – how can I sympathise with him, he who already has a house, who is able to walk out in the world each morning; what has he to do with me and the world I live in? What does he know of administration and bureaucracy? What does he know of red-tape and resentment?
He is a man of leisure and he writes for men of leisure; his is the luxury of time without projects and without tasks. As chronicler, he sets down what happens in non-time, of his passage through the day. The rest of us do not pass; we cannot. For the rest of us, there is no passage. For the rest of us in our offices, the day is a series of obstacles and frustrations. What need have I of his Olympianism? What need have I to learn of a day which is not mine and cannot be mine?
Or is it for this reason his chronicle should be read? Is it because he passes through that which I cannot pass that I must read him? And it is true that my reading engendered a kind of writing. It’s true that by reading I learnt to write of a time beneath time, of truancy and unemployment, my favourite themes. Yes, perhaps this is what I was taught: to write a chronicle like the one I was reading.
But this is what I already knew – why else would I be chronicling my reading here, at the blog? Perhaps it was that I was taught anew what it was to write of the day, and the passing of days. Wasn’t this the reason why I picked this book, by this author? Wasn’t this why I ordered it from the USA and awaited its arrival from the USA? I knew it would watch over my writing. I knew, by my reading that my writing would be watched over.
Yes, it was that which I wanted: for the book to accompany me in every line that I wrote. To be accompanied – isn’t this a way of overcoming the loneliness of writing? To write is to do so before readers have come, even as I am one of those readers. They are to come; they belong to the future, but I do not yet know their proximity. But to write as I read, after I have come, as a reader, to a book that waited for me, is to write with, not alone. Or it is to write as a forebear, as one who inherits and is seized by writing just as the broad river bears all things? This is where I am, at the edge of the delta. Here I am, at the delta’s edge as the river broadens to become as wide as the sea.
Book, you have fallen behind me. Or is it, book, that you burn on the river like a funeral barge? Ashes are scattered across the water; so too are your ashes scattered. Reading’s beginning and reading’s end – all this is carried by writing; all this does the river carry in suspension. That is what it means to write with the whole of one’s life. In truth, mourning is with us always; there is not a day without it, and when death comes, it will already have been announced by a thousand other deaths. Finishing this book, I will have known death again, but by the detour of writing, I will know life.
Lars Iyer's Blog 