Category: Reading

Another day! Another one! Aren't I supposed to be doing something? Shouldn't something be drawing these minutes and hours together? Read that, write that. But read what? Only The Kindly Ones is left on the office desk.

How far am I in? 750 pages. My God, 750! It's too much, too vast. There are too many horrors, and too few reprieves from horror. At least there is the girl he's seeing. At least there is what he calls her grace. But all around him, horror. Bombed Berlin. The concentration camps.

Why go on reading? Why, page after page? Because there's nothing else to bind the minutes and hours together. Because at least there is narrative, the power of narrative. A kind of necessity. The task – which is a sign of there being no other tasks – of finishing the book.

And when I finish it? When I stare up through the office windows? I will want another kind of book. A shorter one. A narrative I could imagine extrapolating upon, carrying on in my own way. A narrative that says, write your own narrative rather than exhaust narratives, burning them up like The Kindly Ones.

It's unbearable, really. That book – that monumental book – open on the desk. It takes up too much space. It's too much itself. And who am I beside it? Unequal to it, less than it, but at it least it's there. It is my constant as one day passes, then another.

One day! And then another! How does it go on? What is it that is going on. That passage in Rosenzweig: not an event that moves in time, but time itself moving. Time itself in movement. But what does that mean? Finish the book, I tell myself. See it through to the end. That's the answer. On, on, on through the unbearable pages.

… And continuing from the last post, since I have a few minutes free. Exposure … open on all sides. I've wanted to write about my unease with Mark Kozelek's voice. Unease – at The Finally, but above all with April. April – so massive, so one-paced (that is not a criticism).

April like a massif central, a plateau high above everything. The Finally's only in the foothills, but April – April … it's impossible, it's too much to be out in the open like that. Open on all sides, light streaming through you. But April nonetheless. I can't listen to it. I haven't been able to in a while. But go on – listen to it.

'Lost Verses' – it's there right away, isn't it? There: the plateau, the plain below the sky. Mark Kozelek's in no hurry. The song's as long as he wants it to be. It's long – he's taking his time, and mine is stretching out. Mine is stretched out taut to the corners of the earth …

April's too much. Song after sprawling song. These massive one-placed songs … I've turned it off. Stone Breath instead. Folk. Folk for the office now it's all quiet …

The Loop on the bookshelf. The Loop, Roubaud's Loop – should I have begun it by now? How long have I had it? It was a pre-release copy. I had it as early as anyone. Why not begin it, then? Because I opened the page and thought … I'm not up to this; I'm not worthy of it. Read something else first. Read a few other things, build up to it.

Because you'll need a kind of training for Roubaud's Loop, Le Boucle. The Loop, The Buckle … some of it in bold, some of it in normal font. There's a good reason for that, I found it, I searched on the net. I thought: now that's interesting. And thought, I really ought to begin. And thought: I really can't begin.

In truth, I did everything but begin … it was too much! I could have taken it on holiday, but didn't. Could have squeezed in it easily enough, but wouldn't it have been too much. The Loop, on the bedside table. The Loop on the window sill. The Loop on the bed, just as, over Christmas, 2666 had been on the bed.

How did I get through The Part With All The Murders? What horrors! What boredoms! I wailed and moaned, I bored everyone … but what about The Loop? Where is it? Did I bring it with me? No! I left it at home. I left it in the office, on top of the other books. The Loop, stranded … The Loop, a pre-release copy, left beached in the office …!

Three big books this year, I tell myself. Three of them, and you got through the first: 2666. You read that, you came through it, I tell myself, and you read a whole pile of other Bolanos, as should be done. You made yourself a ramp of smaller Bolanos and then revved up for the big one. And over you went, over the five parts like five buses parked lengthwise. And you were the Evel Knievel of reading …

Three big books, the second The Loop and the third The Kindly Ones. Unless it was the other way around for the last two. I think it was. I think I'd meant to read The Kindly Ones first. I think that was top of my list of excuses: I should read The Kindly Ones before The Loop. And at least I'd read 2666! At least I'd got through that and, before it, The Savage Detectives! That was already something! It was already a great deal!

But The Loop, my accuser, says nothing.

I haven't read anything in … how long? It's been weeks since a narrative was able to stitch together my days. From this side of the page, nothing else could stitch them together. So I take down a book about Sebald from my shelf, read half an essay, then a book about Handke. I read the prefatory remarks in a book of Bernhard's poetry.

But there's no reading, not really. You need be buried somewhere to read, that's what I tell myself. Need a kind of pit. But the new house is open on all sides, it seems. Light streams through it, and there can be no secrets, and hence no reading.

Before we moved, I'd thought the bay window would be right for that big book of Arbus. Read it there. Look at it there. And then the big Bergman book – read that on the chaise longue. But when it came to it? Too much light through the window. Too much exposure, as though the sun was taking a picture of me over the days and weeks. A five week exposure.

The new house. No damp, for one thing. No rats. We moved in on the 31st March. It's now … the 5th May. Should I take home the three volumes of Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries? Bought them on the honeymoon. Is it the kind of house in which you can read history?

I admit I reread Bernhard's The Loser recently. I reread Yes before that. I thought I needed a rat's tunnel to run through. But that wasn't real reading, there in the second bedroom (more than one bedroom now). Didn't I try a Schklovsky book yesterday? Zoo? But it was too weak for me, or I for it. The pages weren't strung together enough for me. Too much fuss; too much niggling. I wanted something to drive me through the days and nights.

What about The Kindly Ones, then? I shudder. Too big – too big for the time being. Another day. That'd be a real committment, The Kindly Ones. You'd have to carry it with you when you travelled, for one thing. You couldn't leave it behind. And if you're travelling often?

I took Trio by Pinget to Ireland, but that didn't work for me. Too loose. It drove to me to the study bookshelves instead. I read children's history books. I read bits of Patrick Kavanagh's autobiography. I read books about Native Americans. I read a very bad book by a prominent critic and complained about it at length. I read a study guide to the Bible. I read Thomas Merton and was disappointed by Thomas Merton as I always am.

And then I eyed up books in Cork Waterstones to buy. Which one, which one, and with Ireland so expensive? Should I really try Post Office, as W. suggested? Is it time for The Master and the Margharita? Then there's that new critical guide/ biography to Coltrane …

In the end, what I needed, I decided, was a biography. I needed the certainty of a linearly told life, beginning at birth, ending with death and the aftermath. Or at least a chunk of a life: think of Stach's Kafka, for example. Stach's magnificent Kafka. Should I try the V. S. Naipaul biography then? It's been so well received. Look at those blurbs on the cover. And it's a nice cover. There's V.S. Naipaul himself, young and dapper … But then I should at least read Mr Biswas first, shouldn't I? Or finish The Enigma of Arrival?

My Cork dilemma, as usual. My Cork Dilemma: call it that, Bernhardianly. And my stand-by in the bookshop in Rory Gallagher Square had gone too – a book by Butor about Manchester, how unlikely! I never thought it would sell! Who bought it? Who bought my stand-by?

No real reading, then, and in how long? Five weeks or so. Light from all sides streaming into the house (not really; it's one of a terrace). And now there's the allotment, and the small front garden. Outdoor work. Labour in the fresh air, digging and planting, all that. In the sun, the sun streaming everywhere. I'm quite brown, you can't hide from it.

And what picture's being exposed? What picture's forming? From this side of the page, there's no one pictured; for who am I without something to read? But from the other side, reading and writing belong to phantoms …

In Portugal, I took pictures in the bookshop – of the covers of Lispector volumes, for a start, with her made-up aqualine face, very striking, and then of the recommended section, with Broch and Musil there, and plenty of Pessoa (the Pessoa museum, by the way, was a tremendous disappointment), and then, as I passed, of the readers’ room, long and narrow, and completely full of book browsers sitting in two long rows with their prizes. But then I got told off by a shop assistant, first of all in indignant Portuguese, and then, when I said I couldn’t understand, in English. No pictures were to be taken unless I asked the security guard’s permission. I felt rueful. I couldn’t take pictures? Why not?

The Portuguese are booklovers, I could tell that. Books are expensive there. I rather wanted an original Livre du Dissassego. I saw one in a pavement store. How much? 24 Euro! 24 Euro! But in the bookshops – and it was only a paperback – it cost 36. Madness. No original for me. In the flat, I read parts of Zenith’s Penguin Book of Disquiet. I don’t own a copy – it wasn’t mine. I like my Quartet Encounters edition more, underlined and annotated as it is. It bears the marks of my reading (and rereading). At one time, it was an essential book for me. Reading it now, with the Bridge of 25th April visible from the 6th floor, I remembered that first flush of readings. How old was I then? 22, I thought, or 23. Terrible years, and in which my taste in reading changed altogether. The Book was at the heart of it, I remembered. Everyting turned around the Book (but weren’t there other books, too – Kierkegaard, for example? Stages on Life’s Way? Guilty/ Not Guilty?) 

I was in Pessoa’s Lisbon, had had my photograph taken next to his sculpture in the cafe, and hadn’t I bought a Pessoa teeshirt (too small, alas, though it was marked ‘L’. A child’s size, I said, giving it to my Beloved)? Pessoa! I wondered whether the name was for me only an index of a time when reading was essential, when it was at the heart of things. Zenith’s edition seemed as cool as our air-conditioned bedroom. Black covers. Many, many pages, with numbered sections. Appendices in which I would wander for hours. And a fine introduction, too, from this most admirable of Pessoa scholars. But I remembered by Quartet edition, and finding it in Manchester, in Waterstones, and reading it puzzedly, then compulsively, over and over again. The Book of Disquiet, which fell, engimatic stone, into the heart of my reading, drawing everything around it.

The Pessoa museum, as I said, was insignificant; there was nothing there. Happily, we had had a marvellous lunch in a nearby cafe – marvellous because we ate alongside office workers and ladies-who-lunch, their hair solid with hairspray, because we ate from a small menu almost identical to that of every other cafe – marvellous because it was any-cafe-whatever. We were already content, slightly drunk from the wine, well fed – fish, marvellous fish. These long lunch hours! These three hours stretched like a hammock from the poles of morning and evening!: the Portuguese knew how to live, we thought. They ate and drank a full meal at lunchtime. They met and ate and talked and drank and all of this on Pessoa’s street, on the street where he lived in his last years, when he wrote so much of his book.

On the way back to our apartment, we stopped for several hours in a park, and I looked through my photographs. Lispector! And a whole display of Pessoa’s books! What they meant to me! Or rather, what they had meant – what they meant then such that they could mean anything now, such that what reached me on the pages of a borrowed Penguin Disquiet still glowed from an older, higher reading! I was nearer the Source, I thought. Higher up, by the mountain streams, where Literature began and still begins. Why then, why there? Because of the misery of those years when my reading changed, when it changed direction – when, for all the reading I did before, what I read took on the shape of my life. Who would I be? Didn’t I learn of it then, aged 22, aged 23 …?

I was an office worker, of course. No long lunch hours dangled across the day. Work and more work – data entry, filing. What was Pessoa in all this? The opposite of ‘all this’, but whereas Bernardo Soares was imaginable in Lisbon, he was not so in Bracknell, or in Winnersh Triangle. The Book was the opposite of that world, as it might still belong in Lisbon. The opposite, and this is why Literature with a capital ‘L’, and I should say Modernism, was never a part of our lives (‘our’ because there were other readers, scattered around). Never part of it, away from it, impossibly far, but for all that, impossibly important.

Everything I read since then has been a reading of Pessoa. Everything that search for a kind of hammock in the day – not for reading, but for living of a type that was not allowed anymore. Pessoa lived on a street near the cafe. He belonged there; even Bernardo Soares had his two feet on the ground in Lisbon; he was no ghost: that’s what I tell myself this morning, however foolishly. Or he was a ghost who still belonged to a place, haunting it to show that another life was possible, that you might live in another way. But here, now? No ghosts, no possibilities; no high place to reach by way of reading.

There are books you have to stoop to read; you can't stand up straight. Kafka's aphorisms, say. Late Mandelstam poems. Tsvetayeva 's long poems. Books that are their own law, their own religion. That seem to press further into themselves, and all the same to have reached something – a solitary point, burning alone in the sky. A star that burns into itself, falling endlessly into its own idiom. And separated from us in so many ways, not least the great, burning catastrophes of the twentieth century. But it is not as if you have to part veil after veil to find them – learning German, learning Russian, learning the history of Prague, or the history of St. Petersburg. They burn through all veils and that is the point. They reach us somehow, and as themselves, absolutely themselves. 

Laughter. What nonsense! As though you could gather the 'treasures of world literature' around you like gems. As though that gathering, the act of looking for 'literature' – or the pretense that it actually came to find you, shining through all the veils - was not a horrible kind of acquisitiveness. Some books you have to lose to find. Some books will not tolerate being placed alongside others on the shelves. Nothing worse than a collector of books, than a sniffer after old editions. Nothing worse than the literary fantasist who dreams the classics burn around him like the toy stars on a child's bedroom ceiling.

Toy stars, real stars. I'm not sure what kind of constellation my bookshelf collects. Fake or real? What am I looking for as I read? What do I want to find?

It is not very companionable to read – for a couple to be reading separate books side by side on the sofa, say, or lying on the bed. I read Gombrowicz’s A Kind of Testimony – at first engaging, with a marvellous voice – a voice that I would have thought has been selected from a slew of voices; a voice – this voice – that is fitted to the task of the laughing defiance of the opening chapters; but becoming drearily self-same, displacing the other voices the book might have called for, until it becomes reedy and narcissistic.

But how can I pay it attention, really – how to listen out for those other, occluded voices as I lie side by side with my Beloved, or sitting alongside her? There’s nothing worse than reading couples, I tell myself. A reading couple – what an absurdity! Ignoring each other – to read! Or pretending to ignore each other, and not being able really to ignore each other! It’s the worst of images: the reading couple, or worse, the scholarly couple, a couple who each have a separate study, who study alongside one another in separate rooms – what horror! The scholarly couple who agree to do a couple of hours’ work on a Saturday morning and then meet for lunch in the living room!

Perhaps reading requires for more solitude than that, and to read must be to read alone, drawing the night around you turning pages in a cone of light before the drawn curtains. You would read as Kafka said he would write: in a room underground, far below the earth and the everyday to which he might be occasionally brought meals, but in which he was alone, essentially alone. To read – really to read! But it would be as impossible as what Kafka called writing. In the end, reading is always on the way to Reading, whether sitting alongside another or reading alone (and at the end, didn’t Kafka write in the same room as Dora Diamant, alongside her? Only at the end – what cruelty!). Reading – impossible; but still there is reading, and if there is another alongside whom you can read – all the better …

Perhaps this all seems absurd. Why read? Who reads, and who, really, looks for Reading in reading? Perhaps Reading is never about the books themselves, but of what it means to read when no one reads, when reading is losing importance, and a vast world of culture is slowly retreating from our reach.

Laughter. Is that it – the sense of a vanishing culture, of an Old Europe or an Old America? The sense that to keep reading is to protect it, to watch over it, carrying it along like the holy of holies, as it would watch over you? The great names of Europe! The great poets! The arch novelists! To carry it all on your back, like Nietzsche’s camel! – poor you! …

What a sham! As though you had any essential relation to Proust, whom you only read in translation! Or Musil – or Broch! Or Woolf, say, or Green – or Conrad! You came to late for any of them, you tell yourself. Too late – and these are already late books, books of the end. The last of a wave that broke upon old Europe – no, that was old Europe, or what we imagine Europe, from our distance, might have been. Those names now shaken free of their contemporaries, separate from the others, detached from their constellations and shining like remote, solitary stars, each seemingly sufficient unto themselves … what have they to do with you? What connection do they have to you, who were born long after their writers died?

Old Europe – isn’t this the most laughable of fantasies? Perhaps this is why I liked Montano’s Malady, a book written after the end of the end, when literature – absurd word – became a kind of sickness, a sickness of literature, a fantasy sickness of a world that seems to have withdrawn but that never held the unity of a world, and never belonged to Old Europe.

Too many books. You should give them away, neglect them. Bag them up and leave them in an old cupboard. Leave them for someone else to find – as I found, once, a novel by Lawrence, not knowing who he was or what he wrote. A novel by Lawrence, read when I’d finished all my other novels (McIntyre’s Dreamsnake, Kiteworld by Keith Roberts), read before I knew who he was. Was it the ‘bright book of life’? Something like that. And I remember reading The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man my back against the warmed wood at Winnerish Triangle station, just after I’d finished the Mammoth Book of Fantasy. And The Magic Mountain, ordered after I saw a section dramatised by Malcolm Bradbury on TV – The Modern World, was that it? – The Magic Mountain, pompous and overblown, and yet, and yet …

They’d found their way to me, these books – is that it? The classics selected me and called me forward? I think almost any of those bright books of Life would have done back then. Any book – anything of modernism, any questioning book that questioned style and itself and wrote in a new way and asked for writing in a new way. As though you could continue the experiment on the pages of your own life. As though art could cross over to life – no wonder there was a great politics mingled with the great gesture of writing. And wasn’t it that that I sought and that that I wanted? A new life, or a life counterposed to the company where I worked and to the hi-tech computer park to which I commuted every day?

Soon, I’d discovered the Surrealists, the Situationists … and it would be Life itself that I dreamed of – Life as it lay in the depths of Reading. Wasn’t it there like a fish – Another Life, Another Way of Living? And isn’t this why I like to like reading still – in memory of the Life that flashed at the bottom of reading – a Life that I could have reared myself up to want back then, when I was young? Life as the opposite of the everyday of the company and the hi tech park?

There is always something egoistic about couples – a withdrawal, a separation from the business of life but also for the hope of a great politics and a great overturning. The egoism of two – how is a reading possible that lets Life quiver at its base? It is enclosed by domesticity, by the happy familiarity of a way of living insulated from jobs and companies. Reading is another way of inhabiting a home, of enclosing what lives outside and flashes with the hope of another life, another way of living.

A page has been turned – or is it the last page that has turned. The last one – already turned, then when you didn’t know it was the last, when it became the least important page of all. As in that Abba song, ‘The Day Before You Came’ that lists the last, insignificant actions before the Beloved arrives. The day before – old Europe. Or the last modernist Europe that you know only by its withdrawal, when the great conjoining of Life and Art has vanished into the air.

My Beloved is reading Nina Simone’s autobiography. I read it too, on the train going South. Of the Civil Rights movement, and of a life Simone recalls that was lived in common, that had no room for privacy. A Life that tolerated no domestic enclosure – that threw wide every house, every dinner party. That’s what Duras’s house on the rue Saint Benoit became too, in the campaign against French colonialism in Algeria. Where Blanchot and others drafted the ‘Manifesto of the 121’; where Schuster and Mascolo put together the periodical le 14 Julliet.

Has reading – but I’m not reading much – become a retreat? Has reading lost Reading by losing Life, and the dancing promise of another world? But I wonder from my new domesticity whether I can encounter books as what they only ever were: books, fictions and non-fictions and poems. Books to be boxed up and given away – just books, books and only books, and no longer part of the great dream, of a great politics? As they only ever were …

Now I think of Smog’s ‘Held’, used for an advert for one car or another. ‘Held’ and Bob Dylan driving along. Why did Dylan do the advert? Why did Bill Callahan sell the song? Because a song is only a song … is that it? A song is just a song, and he’s a jobbing song writer, and Dylan a jobbing icon who needs to make a buck? A car driving along needs a song, and why not this one, which nestles next to ‘River Guard’ on Knock Knock? And didn’t Dylan long sell ‘The Times They Are a-Changing’ for the adverts for some accountancy firm?

As they only ever were … but literature, old Europe could never be anything other than a promise, another life. A promise … for whom? For us – but who were we? The few who read, and for whom reading was – what? A colleague read Genet: wasn’t that something? I lent him Breton: wasn’t that something? Breton in the corridors of Digital Electronics? Genet in the open plan offices of Hewlett Packard? Who were we? The few who read, and for whom Reading was always more than reading (and weren’t there Listeners, too – and Seers? but we were Seers and Listeners too).

A page is turning – or it has already turned. Turned and the book is closed, the book that was never open. There was no old Europe. Reading looked for what it could not find. Life was never but what it was here, in the open plan offices, in the carparks of Winnersh Triangle – is that it? Life was never elsewhere, but here, and nowhere else but here – is that it?

I never liked hoarders of books: old men and women who would never lend or give me, when I was young, what I wanted from their bookshelves. Hoarders, collectors, saving books – from what? for what? – and hence depriving them from me. How unreasonable I was (and am), but now I must turn my prejudice on myself. Have I not replaced old editions of my books with new, hardbacked ones? Am I not able to afford 3 or 4 pounds to buy a book out of curiosity? Have I not a row of unread books and that I might not read for many years – editions of Gaddis, Canetti, Milosz, Perec; and even Lydia Davis’ Swann’s Way, in the American edition? How deplorable!

I wonder whether I buy these books, and replace order ones in order to satisfy the victim of literary deprivation I once thought I was – and whether I’ve missed out on that kind of reading where a book can really be everything. But this, too, is absurd: how foolish to look for a Reading behind reading, and to think it lay there when I was young. I was as foolish a reader then as I am today – as distracted, as frivolous: then and now I felt I never really read a book, but only grazed its surface: that beneath, say, the printed pages of The Sleepwalkers, in that old, handsome Quartet Encounters edition, there was an experience of reading that I’d missed, as though the real book lurked there like a kraken.

I read it again, The Sleepwalkers – or almost all of it, and felt I’d missed it yet, and that I’d always missed my appointment with this, and other books. Maybe there was a time when reading was possible, I told myself, when my readerly ancestors in an older Europe were able to give such books the total attention they deserved. A Europe in which books were rarer, perhaps; a stiller Europe, without television and films and computer games. The Europe, perhaps, of the old Chamberlain who dies in Rilke’s Malte Lauridds Brigge, and from whom the narrator of that poem-novel feels himself to be cut off.

And then reassurance: perhaps the books that I treasure because I want to treasure something – because I want to protect, if only my dream of a reading that was once and might be again possible – are those deprived of that unitary culture in which they might have been read. The books are on my side, and old Europe is on another, and both of us dream of the reading they might have welcomed, had they been written by those who lived more deeply in the nineteenth century and the centuries before them. But I think this, too is a dream, and Cervantes’ was already a book written in the wake of a disappearance: this time of a world of heroes, of knights and quests and grails.

There is a tradition that says art, the creative is a sign of what is missing from our lives, and that we might fight to find it again, that old unity where life and creation are one. But when was that time, and how might it be refound? I think of the Greeks for the Romantic Germans. And I think of Hoelderlin dreaming of throwing down his pen to fight for some cause or another. Life is always on the other side of art. That’s so for Kafka too – for him above all, with his dreams of Palestine, of becoming a manual labourer and forgetting the world of books. Art is only counter-life, its shadow … but that, too is a myth.

Just as reading was never Reading, so life was never Life. All readings only graze the surface of their books. Every reading is a tangent, a way of touching. And every reading is complete, adequate to itself. There is nothing beneath the surface of the text … Is this why there is something disgusting about the collector, the one who is surrounded by the substantiality of a library? Reading is light. It is inconsequential. What is less important than fiction, and especially that fiction that wants to be more than fiction, or that wants to speak fictionally of something greater, but of what it can only touch as fiction?

I would like to brush the books from my table. Or to put them outside, neglect them, until, water-damaged, sun-faded, they assume the modesty of rocks and lichen. Or I would like to lose each one of my books, as I left one behind on a plane the other day, in the pocket in front of me, along with a notebook and some in-flight magazines and entertainment guides. I had Swann’s Way with me on that flight, but I watched Juno instead, and then No Country For Old Men. It was too dark to read, I told myself, and my neighbour didn’t want to be awakened.

Hadn’t I spent an hour in Barbara’s bookshop at Chicago O’Hear, looking for a book? An hour … there was Bataille, Accursed Share vols. 2 and 3 and The Tears of Eros in the Inspiration section. There was popular science, books of history. Novels … including the newly translated Bolano, in a big, American edition. But I wanted a book written in the first person, I told myself. A book I imagined speaking softly to itself between its covers. I wanted to surprise, by reading, a kind of intimacy, a relation the book had to itself and that it would keep, like a secret.

Was it speaking, there in the pocket in front of me, between the safety card and the sickbag? Could I hear it beneath Juno and the Coen Brothers’ film? Swann’s Way now sits on the window sill in my living room, its pages being slowly beached by the sun. Swann’s Way, with its floral spine, puce, and its fake cut pages. Haven’t I read it before? The train from Guildford to … where? And when? I was training as a teacher – wasn’t it then?

I had the Moncrieff translation, amended by someone or another. I still have it, a pale green Penguin Modern Classic, now twisted out of shape. It’s in the cupboard, back there. In the darkness, half forgotten. I should throw it away. There’s something disgusting about it, like a half-crushed insect. I read it, I loved long passages of it, I put it aside, let its spine become twisted – when? how? – but I know, too, that I failed the book as I’ve failed every book. As I will fail the new Swann’s Way on my sill, a book that will keep its secret as its surface, the fake cut pages I may never turn.

In my living room, I let my Beloved’s books mingle with mine carelessly on the bookshelf she bought. There’s no order on the shelves – only books I’ve read or will read soon; books on the Blues, books of philosophy and commentaries on philosophy. Novels – by V. S. Naipaul (my own edition of The Enigma of Arrival, I having only read the first third of the library edition), Janet Frame’s Scented Gardens For The Blind (two pounds in our new secondhand shop. A Women’s Press edition, an ironing board on the spine) … my hardback The Last Man by Blanchot … a few more.

My Beloved has her Austens and Trollopes in tiny, close printed editions – what, the whole of the Last Chronicle of Barset in there? – the little Dickens Christmas books … I’ve an Everyman hardback of Rabelais, too – like my hardback Sentimental Journey I keep in the office (I’ll never line them up, these Everymans, I promise myself that). Expensive enough (four pounds each) to demand I read them. Substantial enough to mock me for not having read them, and I feel the ghost of these books, and all the books I have read or wanted to read.

And now I imagine it is I who am too substantial, too real, and that, like Blanchot’s narrator, their margins will widen when I disappear. Aren’t they waiting for my body to become sun-bleached and broken-spined? – foxed as they say on secondhand book websites … Foxed, what a word, a handsome edition, what a phrase, a reading copy, what horror! And now I want every line in my books to be part of an exorcism. How are we to disappear?, says Blanchot in the quotation that begins Montano’s Malady. How indeed? How are we to allow our books to dazzle all along their surfaces, to join up into a great sphere like a planet of ice? How to let reading read only itself, turning in itself, obscure star?

Good Friday, afternoon. Weather changeable. I’ve written a long, stupid post. Instead of what? And for what? To find new words to same the same, and the Same of the same. What am I missing on the other side of writing? Life? Is that it? And what is lived if I press on with writing (but I’ll finish this post soon; I’m running out of wind)? What do I want, and by way of reading, of writing? To give up reading, to give up writing, but only by way of reading, of writing.

There are necessary writers, closer to you in some way than yourself. That you confront them in your solitude, there where only you should be. And that you cannot speak of, not ordinarily. You lack the means. How can you speak of what allows you to speak? How to separate their rhythm from your own – their style from what passes as your own (your own and what is least your own. Nietzsche knew this when he signed his work Dionysos, or the Crucified. Because to write, to speak, is to do so with a million voices.)

Style – and that is the word. Style, stylus – written across you. Within you, so that what you find in your solitude belongs outside of you. Written within the writing that you are. There, on the bookshelf – there in that author, or that one. Or in that book which you bought – when?; which was given to you … by whom? Here is Tsvetayeva: ‘It is always the same me that does not come toward the same self that is waiting for it, always’. Marina Tsvetayeva: one of the necessary writers for me.

Laughter: but you can’t read Russian. Laughter: you only have her work as it’s quoted by others. And it is her letters – scraps of letters, quoted – that you love, and not her poems. Isn’t it? Isn’t it? It is as if I want first of all the evidence of writing in a life. A writing that evidences writing, that testifies to what it has meant, to its risks, its dangers.

Tsvetayeva abandoned herself to writing, I want to write that. In some way, she abandoned herself to it. And now I remember the anecdote from quotation Mandelstam about M.T.’s rudeness … she was a tyrant, wasn’t she? She was half-mad, wasn’t she? M.T.: but when I abbreviate her name thus there’s something else I discover: that she is also more than the one Nadezhda Mandelstam met. More and other, beyond. As though, to remember the quotation again, one only meets her above, looking upward …

I do not like meetings in real life. Foreheads knocking together. Two walls. You just cannot penetrate. A meeting should be an arch. Then the meeting is above. Foreheads tilted back!

However I would tell it, my ‘reading biography’ would lead only to the point where reading fell into itself like a waterfall: where I met books whose surface lacked the left-right and top-down direction that drew the eye across the pages. It was not that my eyes stopped scanning, or that the pages stopped turning, but rather that reading was in some vital sense suspended – that meaning, as it would be born from the page, was turned into a kind of wandering, across the same pages that drew my eyes across them.

Reading and non-reading, both at once – I read, now, in response to what fascinated me in the interval into which reading, meaning seemed to plunge. It was books in which I’d find that same plunging that I sought – books as they were ringed around a waterfall, the fall of reading into itself. A reading-adventure that has continued to this day, with sudden openings – the discovery of the work of an author new to me (Ford, McCarthy) and blockages – say, my recent reading of Handke’s Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, about which I wholly concur with Steve, or the bloated circus-tent of Sebald’s Austerlitz: books gone wrong somehow – in each case, an author parodies himself; he has become grand, indulged, a prominent man of letters writing his magnum opus … What boredom! Bernhard, say always had the sense never to fall into that trap, and Blanchot never relaxed his vigilance. And think of Duras, writing all the way up to death …

Still, there is the surprise that I would never involve myself in the clash between what is called literary and what is called genre fiction (I was always a reader of science fiction) – or feel a proud vindication, seeing Ballard revered, or Dick; or Crowley receiving his due, or Wolfe (the early Wolfe, up to 1983 or so …) But also a kind of reassurance – a reading-confidence that allows me to pick up and put down a book forever whose first page I find disagreeable. Do I know what I want? I know, rather what I don’t want and can happily lead myself by my own hand past the walls of books in a bookshop.

Still, there is no question but that I should have abandoned the Handke earlier – and have given up Austerlitz almost at once. Misplaced faith – an author can go wrong, can take a wrong turn, and the worst one is into the magnum opus, the massive book, the authoratitive book, that would draw all the strands of an authorship together. Laughter: Mishima was right to make his magnum opus, if that was what it was, from four separate novels; or perhaps he’d learnt his lesson from Kyoto’s House, as I understand that book from his biographer’s accounts.

Many of my admired authors have a small pallette of concerns, of moods, of characterisation, of plot. A small palette, painting dark grey on black – but that is enough, for it is in the wearing away of plot, of character, in the exacerbation of mood that I find I can discover that kind of non-reading, the inward waterfall that draws me to its edge.

Bergman complained Tarkovsky came to make Tarkovsky films – but then the same can be said of Bergman, whose characters often have the same surname and run uneasily into one another. Bernhard writes Bernhard books, and Duras, and Blanchot … they may seem to concentrate themselves into an idiom, making themselves dense, but it is rather a wearing away that they accomplish and that is their accomplishment: idioms worn out, idioms stretched finely over nothing.

Duras characters, say, weep too much; Bernhard’s intellectuals are all exactly the same, and write the same way; and with Blanchot – like Beckett – the sense that the books, lined up, constitute one long line of research, an exercise – but in a kind of authorial disappearance. To say, ‘I’m not here’; to let writing be present, to present itself; to let language thicken and congeal there where plot and characterisation seem to wear themselves away to nothing.

A reader’s biography. Regret as I read Kundera’s The Curtain, and know the books he commends are too rich for my tastes; they show too much, these epics, these big narratives. I want the door of fiction to open only a chink; I do not want a fictional world, but only a portion thereof. Green’s Concluding, say. Echinoz’s Ravel. I don’t think much of my taste, which seems to have become obsessional. How did I lead myself into this dead end?, I ask myself. How did I come up against this closed door? But then I am glad for my obsessive’s confidence – that a bookshop, a library, is something I can navigate, that I have a faculty of judgement by which I can claim or dismiss a book, even it sometimes goes awry.

What am I looking for as I read?, I ask myself. The opposite of a mirror. A surface that refuses me. A page written as though under glass. Can I read? Am I reading? But sentences, nevertheless, that draw me with them – a kind of suspense even in the absence of intrigue. A suspended reading – not boredom, but – what? A wandering of reading in itself. A kind of plunge, Niagra’s horseshoe of water plunging, roaring. 

To give life to a book – to render it vivid, exciting; to let reading rush quickly over its pages, and run breathless to its end. A book is made of words, dead things, or things that depend on a kind of death – negation, the departure from its referents. Then its life is only a simulacrum of living; its vivacity is borrowed.

The writer-virtuoso can let a fictional world quiver into life. Above the book like a hologram: a world, a plot, characters. But what of the non-virtuoso for whom nothing quivers up? What of the writer who would plunge death into a dying that never permits of the making of a fictional world?

Dying lays down in death. The words no longer speak of the world, and the book is a surface. You can read, but what is it that you read? You eyes pass over a surface, but what is it over which they pass? A frozen space; a glass. Reading suspended in reading. Reading lost in reading. Where has your attention wandered? Over what blind surface is it lost?

The page as a doorway. The page the gate that swings the book open. Walk with me, says the book. A rich and fleshed-out fictional world is conjured; a plot that excites you; characters about whom you care. The book is a path.

But what, now, when the doorway opens onto another door? Or is it the door that you read – the page as the door, that forbids you access? And now imagine the narrative, a fictional world, a plot, characters, that are written as against that door, who are only as real as your bright room reflected in a night-black mirror: turn off the light, and they are gone. Turn it off, and there is only the night.

A sentence wants to be written. Which sentence? ‘A sentence wants to be written’. What does it mean to invoke the wanting-to-say of words? ‘I would like you to write me’, say that. ‘I would like to be written’ – who speaks? Language – but as it turns from what you would want it to say. Language, now, without the ‘I’ at its centre. Unoccupied, murmuring, concerned with itself – but it asks, still to be written.

‘Write me. Let me be written, so that I can return to myself on the page’. Why does language ask for this detour? Why must it exist in order to suspend itself from existence? ‘I want to disappear. Write me so that I can disappear’.

Disappearance – there are words, to be sure. One sentence, another, that you can read, and that make sense. But is there a way of letting their meaning fall from itself? A way of turning meaning aside, of sending it on a detour? Then reading and not-reading would exist both at once.

‘Read me; but you cannot read me. Draw close to me, and I will retreat’. I would like to come close to you, say that. I would like to be able to read you. Why is it, as I read, that the page seems to turn its face away from me? Why does the page turn, gazing only into itself? ‘I am not here’, says the page. I am here and not here, both at once.

Intimate writing. The small bound book, a cool blue – Swedish blue rather than porcelain – that I took because of its smallness, its colour as much as its title: Solitude and Communion, written by a nun in an enclosed order. I imagined it as the quintessence of a life; ten thousand days compacted. The secrets of all these days lying down like the skeletons of sea creatures that give us coral. Day after day, sheet after sheet until something was made. Or like the rarest of whiskies, distilled and double- and tripled distilled. Or like a paneer pushed through muslin and pushed over and again through muslin. Until there was nothing left – or just that, itself. Itself – the spirit of ten thousand days.

I excuse my own taste in public. Ah, it’s not so interesting, I’ll say of this or that book. He’s a writer in whose works almost nothing happens, I’ll say, and by doing so keep his work more deeply in its own secrecy, in the distance it seems to draw to itself and maintain. And it’s true – I wonder at the journey that led me here that is scarcely a journey, but a kind of slowing down, a walking in place, until I discovered – what? A narrative that does not move; a telling that catches everything up and nothing.

Books in which telling seems to summon itself from a lost darkness. That seems to recall the epic form – even the parody of the epic, its becoming comic as in Handke’s rewriting of Cervantes in Crossing the Sierra des Gredos as he allows his protagonist journey back to the village from which Don Quixote set out. Recalls it but by halting it, drawing on that breath upon which Homer drew. Drawing deep on that power of inspiration granted by the Muses. And speaking from them – from the gods, the half-gods, from that darkness the gods conceal. As if that were enough, the wind from another time, the divine afflatus. From another time, but as it fills the sails of a modern story, a contemporary one.

I excuse my own taste – nothing happens in the books I like I will say. Dwelling, my Visitor calls it, and laughs. She is amused by my films in which nothing happens and my books in which nothing happens over again. She makes the daft gestures of Pocahontas from The New World and laughs. And I wonder whether the power of telling that I want is not a kind of kitsch and what remains of the epic, as Handke presents it, has not hollowed itself out to nothing. Or that its repetition is a postmodern gesture, without commitment, without depth, in the flashing impermanence of the present. And who are the gods, anyway!

Sometimes I shrug, ‘it’s just my taste …’, or ‘reading … what does it matter, anyway?’ And laugh at the idea that to read a modern work – a book for which narration itself is a problem (but then Cervantes is already a modern …) – is to find oneself in the position of its author: without a model. I am struck reading Anne Atik’s exceptional memoir of Beckett, How It Was at the depth of his acquaintance with an older, ‘classical’ culture – with Schubert, say, with Dr Johnson …

Beckett had stars to steer by, I tell myself. And Handke too, with his translations from ancient Greek. Stars to steer by – but isn’t a book like Crossing the Sierra des Gredos what the Greeks (how laughable – to write ‘the Greeks’; to be able to write serenely and all at once: ‘the Greeks’ …) would call a wandering star?

We call them planets, those errant stars the Greeks identified, and know they only seem to wander across our skies. They, too, are in orbit just as surely as the disparate matter that makes up the asteroid belt. Even a comet moves in orbit of the sun. By what, then, is my reading steered? By the fantasy I project back as the Greeks, as old India … and by the fantasy of the origin from which the gods would come and disappear: the starless darkness from which nothing shines. 

Sometimes I think I lack a vital faculty – that my taste has failed (perhaps it fails because I can still speak of taste, of the unity of taste) in some central way, and I’m drawn to books at the end of something rather than at the beginning. That Crossing the Sierra des Gredos is also an aberration of a book, a wandering that is not a planet, but that cuts across all orbits and will lose itself in the darkness beyond the last planets.

Who would read such a book? Who would have waited for it, advance-ordered it? Who would keep it book-marked beside his bed? Who would think of it as an anchor, who return to it in search of something, of some lost power of telling, or some power that never manifested itself, that the Greeks could not find, nor the Indians. The power of telling, of narrative that gives itself only now, when history seems to have ended, a million rivers spilling into the same indifferent sea?

What would Bourdieu say? What kind of distinction am I trying to establish? From what would the book protect me? What spell does it cast, by what ward does it prevent others crossing its threshold (my threshold)? What private space does it keep ring-fenced? What measure of time does it preserve even as it sits there, the book – lies there, heavy, 400-paged and patient?

No stars to steer by. Only the uncertainty of this body (science fiction readers call them Big Dumb Objects: Vejur of the first Star Trek film, Rama of Clarke’s novel …): what’s it for, what does it do? As it reaches me without context, wrapping itself spuriously in a whole history of the epic, of telling? How can you actually like this book?, I ask myself. Because you are a reader without culture, I tell myself. Because you read without history and without understanding.

Vejur was of course Voyager – the first probe to leave the Solar System (as a child, I would know where it was, waiting for 1986, say, for it to reach Jupiter, 1990 to reach Saturn, 1995 to leave the orbit of Pluto behind …) Rama was a spaceship sent by another civilisation towards our own sun. But what sent Crossing the Sierra des Gredos to me? How could I receive it as something sent? Who are you, unqualified for modernism?

Perhaps it is only in reading the book that I know certainty and a kind of repose. I am at home in this book. The sentences bear me along. It doesn’t get better than this, I tell myself. Relish it, I tell myself. Read more slowly. And then, invasively: who could like such a book? who are you, without culture, to like it?

Can you be unworthy of a book? Halfway through Bernhard’s Frost I thought I was – and now, 60 pages into the new Handke, I wonder again. I began instead Coetzee’s Slow Man – a quick read, pages turning rapidly, plenty of white space on the page, each exchange in a conversation taking a new line; I’m 150 pages in; I’ll finish it today.

But Crossing the Sierra del Gredos with its small font, its large pages, its bulk sits beside my bed, a pencil keeping my place on page 60. I’m unworthy of it, I think to myself, I cannot give it enough time – cannot, that it is, let the time of reading find me, the time of the book, its time, as it changes the time of my days. Cannot give it my time then, offering myself up to the strong arms of a book, or to the pages that turn as if it were the sky turning, of events that slowly change like the weather.

And beyond that, before that, Frost – I’m halfway through. Halfway, and – stalled? No, not that. But I felt my reading could not press deeply enough into its pages; that the gorge I should cut was but a furrow. Oh to open a valley by my reading! To tear open the closed earth of the book! And Slow Man? Coetzee-by-the-numbers to start with, as if he could hardly be bothered. And then the interposition of Elizabeth Costello and the book becomes an exercise.

I need it to finish. To close the book so as not to be closed by it. And in the meantime the halfread Frost – ghostly book, begun months ago, unfinished, calmly blue in its duskjacket – stetches me across the sky. And Crossing the Sierra del Gredos … is the earth upon which I look down.

Late afternoon, a day off, and I am looking for something on my bookshelf at home, but for what? Very few books here – no need for many, the office can store the others, and more. A few books – important ones, essential ones, and ones I keep here without knowing why. But for what am I looking?

Three Sebalds in a row, the page edges yellowed, though they are not old. When did I first read them? Last year, the year before … And one of them my second copy, after losing the first on a train. I lost my annotations, I was sorry about that. Marks as an explorer leaves after the fact that others can follow, and in this case myself. For who else would follow these marks, or would understand why I’d marked them. Though in truth even I do not so understand – why this passage? why not that one?

Ah, I should read it again, the second copy of Vertigo. Or lose it and buy a third copy of the same book, beginning all over again, making marks for the other that I am to one day wonder at. And next to them a hardback Herzog, imposing, promising. My own copy having read the library’s last year. Fresh to read again, its memory already fading. I remember: an arrest, a hammock in the garden. A splendid beginning – a man near fallen, and a splendid end, following the story of the fall.

Didn’t I read chunks of it in the gym, on the cross-trainer? And here’s my copy, blue spined, hardbacked, though not expensive, kept as a promise to myself. You can read me again, it says. Read me when you memory of me is blurred, it says. And so I shall, after I finish the next book on the shelf – Humboldt’s Gift. How is it I made my way only halfway through the library copy?

Anyway, I bought my own, in Modern Classics, and feel a bad conscience about it there on the shelf. My reading sagged, it snapped like a telegraph cable – I didn’t finish it, though for many months, it, too accompanied me on the cross-trainer, though I’ve long since stopped the habit of writing a date and the amount of calories expended on the blank back page of the books I read there (pencilled numbers on the back of Bernhard’s Gathering Evidence, Correction …)

The Loser next, the funniest Bernhard and I think my favourite. I have had a Bernhard in reserve for a couple of years now – always one more to break out in case of emergency. But I’m deep into Frost now, and don’t own Cutting Timber – when will that be reissued? You have to keep a Bernhard close to you at all times, I tell myself, even if you’ve read it. And isn’t Wittgenstein’s Nephew fading happily from my memory?

Beckett next – Company, with those three late texts one after another. This and How It Is keep their secrets from me, which is why they are close. Books whose eyes are turned in another direction. Do I want to catch their eye? Or am I happy that they are turned away. I should have the Complete Shorter Prose here too, but it’s lost in the office. And besides, the edition is too crowded, there’s too much in it. I’d rather like the box set of prose from Calder – wasn’t there a copy at Waterstones in Exeter? Shouldn’t I hunt one down?

But I haven’t found what I want. Late afternoon, a time I’ve never liked; I’d be in the office but that I wanted a day away. In the office, with other books around me, and turned satisfyingly to one task or another. Here instead, stranded, my Visitor having gone our running; shouldn’t I take the time to play some Jandek for myself, seeing as she cannot bear it, and even the thought of it, or my listening to it or even liking it? Shouldn’t I …

But no time for that. Search instead. Through ‘The Postulates of Linguistics’ in A Thousand Plateaus. Through Celan’s prose, in Waldrop’s edition (and what about her, shouldn’t I print out that etext I have, shouldn’t I interlibrary loan one of her two novels mentioned in the author’s note?) A few pages of Frost, but I’m not up to it, not high enough; I’m on the floor …

Gene Wolfe’s Peace, which I know very well, every movement of the book. An old edition, but my third copy in fact – what happened to the others? I remember the first, buying it in the town bookshop, meeting friends in the pub on a summer day, reading its yellow pages in the shade of a tree … what happened to it? And the second, bought in large format, a trade paperback, slightly monstrous. That, too disappeared (I must have given it away, and the first …); I have the third, along with the two volumes that collected The Book of the New Sun, a series of books I’ve bought before and gave away to a friend’s husband (they divorced. He was a friend too, and I don’t mind that he has a pile of my science fiction, Charles L. Harness and Bob Shaw and the rest …)

How It Was, the glossy paged memoir of Beckett by Anne Atik, expensive (though I found it second hand), but wonderful; would that there were other books like it, detailing the loves musical and literary of favourite writers (Schubert, Johnson, the Psalms, lots of reciting …). Next, a volume from Stach’s biography of Kafka. I keep it close, remembering the closing pages, when the refugees enter Prague, filling it. And Handke’s No-Man’s Bay, a boring book, an essential one … why keep it here? why in this room by the bed? Because I am waiting for the next translation to come out, and in the meantime, this book through which I can turn now and again to remind myself of the power of prose, its thickness, its relentlessness.

Prose – so much of it, and in a single tone. So much – and what does it take for such a book to spin itself out, page after page? By what strength is such narration possible? And I remember the green pool towards the end where the narrator sits with his notebook, and the fallen in tree trunks, covered in algae and waterplants. And I remember the troops who pass him, and that it is set, that book, a few years in the future, at the edge of the new millennium (when was it written – in the early 90s?).

But I want something else, I’m searching … through a printed etext of The Last Man. And then – is this the book – through Thomas Wall’s Radical Passivity, until I find an underlined passage: ‘The entire récit [he’s writing about Blanchot’s Death Sentence] remains at the threshold of a story. The narrator stops short of presenting some It that the story would be about’.

And yet, Wall notes, everything that can be told is told; there’s nothing missing. As though the récit hollows itself out. As though that was all it was, that hollowing that occurs on pages thick with prose … And isn’t it for that same hollow for which I am looking – that work of reading that would core the book, voiding it, or turn it inside out like a glove, so that the prose runs darkly down the finger holes?

A book that would turn me with it as it turned inside out, hollowing a kind of interiority – that is really a way of being exposed on all sides, but in darkness, in secrecy, an inner space blooming into an outer one, a hollowing that would hollow my reading with it, until it occurs as on the inside surface of a Dyson Sphere, inside, but in a space so vast it englobes the sun …

Or a writing written as a living index, that points upward as a shoot to sunlight – but to what kind of sun? One that burns in an enclosed space, in a vastness within interiority: that space into which I would like to be brought and by reading on this most bland of afternoons …

On the office bookshelves, by chance my fingers, running along the book tops, finds one an old friend, now dead gave me because he saw I liked it. It must have been bought secondhand, for it has a name other than his on the inside cover: Helen Mills 1965, it reads. A long introduction by a famous poet, then the epigraph, which my friend, reading this book perhaps in the late 1960s, has boxed with his pen: ‘Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.’ Eckhardt, of course. And a pages later, a star by a sentence which reads: ‘We carry our nemesis within us: yesterday’s self-admiration is the legitimate father of today’s feeling of guilt’. And by a star at the bottom of the page -written as paraphrase or commentary? – ‘Everyone carries within him the seeds of his own undoing’.

A couple of pages later, in ‘The Middle Years’ of the diarist-poet, ‘What is necessary? – to wrestle with your problem until its emotional discomfort is clearly conceived in an intellectual form – and then act accordingly’, and the words ‘God! Yes!’ written emphatically in the margins. ‘God! Yes’: then my friend the annotator must have recognised himself in these underlined lines (and from the same page, also underlined: ‘And only he who listens can speak’. A few pages later, and we find my friend in dialogue with the author of Markings. The commentary is vigorous, and occupies half of each page (since the editors of the volume have set out the text quite sparingly, and make room for this).

‘At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self?’ That’s how the author’s reflections begin. ‘No – he is wrong’, writes the annotator, and I can remember the vigorous turn of his thought in our many dialogues. Dialogues in which I was always comfortable, never liking the give and take of intellectual conversation. Preferable simply to listen, to take notes, to mull on what was said and then to respond in time. I had always suspected my friend never quite read books through, and so it is with this volume.

After a few more pages of passionate commetary, the text around the printed verse and prose is blank again. My friend’s footprints vanished, and I am reading farther in the text than he, and unaccompanied. ‘We never reach out towards the other. In vain – because we have never dared to give ourselves’, reads the text, and the last comment, on page 53: ‘Fear of emotional commitment. Result – Dry and arid desert of a man’. And then a little further down, ‘Poor man!’ Of course my friend was the opposite of a dry and arid desert, and he feared no such commitment. But what of the one who reads?

Reading on, I discovered I must have read it before. My own handwriting, so different from my friend’s. No flourishes, I discover. The trace of a few pencilled underlinings, I discover, remaining after my efforts to erase them. Underlining what? Sentences I now find banal. Did I ever admire this book? Perhaps only because of its form, and of what seemed possible in the aim of writing not a book of excerpts from a diary – kept through a lifetime, that seem to attest to a spiritual development, the ripening of a life – but of one made purposely as the text is presented here, in fragments.

The penultimate lines I underlined are quoted from Faulkner: ‘Our final wish is to have scribbled on the wall our "Kilroy was here"’. Was that what was intended in the markings of my friend? And what did I intend in rubbing mine away?

Back, relieved, after the last conference of the season. The silver sheen of my sink, which I scrubbed clean before I left; the plants, still alive despite the heatwave, and my computer, with my new broadband connection, gateway to Youtube welcome me home. But the thread I’d been following here has broken. What had I been intending to write?

Luckily, I brought Vertigo home with me, having opened it to read only two or three pages in the last few days (the narrator is in Vienna; his dining companion shouts ‘See in you in Jerusalem’, first in Italian, then in German as he is borne away by on a gondola into the night – but that was all I had time to read.) A prayer to reading: make a bridge through these moments, make a bridge across through the night and into the morning. But why the second prayer: help me write the sentences that will continue even after I close the book?

To sleep within the book. And then to wake up as though I had been given by the book into the world. Given: is it reading that gives writing? Or is it writing that gives itself through the gift of reading? I read to write. No: writing calls for reading in order to return to itself. To return as gift, as giving. And the book burns. Vertigo burns itself down like a candle.

But that is not it either. Doesn’t writing want to consume my life, too? Doesn’t it ask for narratives, for events? To pause before writing this story is to prevent writing from fulfilling this desire. And not because I want to save my life in its simple immediacy (as if that were possible). How to indicate writing as writing – writing as the threshold where it reveals its desire to set fire to the world?

No autobiography. No narratives, through which the wick of writing would run. Above the threshold, lights burning in the sky. Writing, aurora borealis. Writing that has nothing to consume, and burns only itself. But that doesn’t have itself to burn.

Then think of it as not yet arrived, or as arriving from the future. Think of it as waiting to be given a body and to come toward you like a living thing. And all the while knowing it cannot be embodied, and, like the faces the father scientist steals for his disfigured daughter in Eyes Without A Face, it must seek fresh stories, even as it knows they must wither and die.

How then to tell of writing that is without a face, without itself? How to let narrative seize on its condition, on the story that will not tell itself? To say: writing, I would like you to face me. But then to see it’s face is yours become no one’s; void without stars.

And isn’t that why I love Vertigo? For its moving forward, for the strength that pushes each sentence forward, that lets the narrative travel as the author travels. But a strength that runs into nothing like a river into sand: for what is vertigo itself, that state into which Sebald’s narrator succumbs from time to time, but the withering of the strength to narrate?

Then the book trembles with what it cannot contain. Writing looks for a new face; writing loses its face. Eyes without a face: how to meet this faceless book? But it is already that it sees from our own eyes, there where we are blind.

Morning, but it is like night; the day ended before it began. What was I writing? I’ve forgotten. Something on tragedy? And what was I reading? Another badly translated Appelfeld? To fall below the level of writing, of reading, and to wonder: how was either ever possible?

I need a stronger book to live beside, I tell myself. Something like Sebald’s Vertigo to bear me through the days and nights. Event, non-event: how to separate, in me, day from night?

These poor translations! And my own poor writing! I need a stronger book, so that it can be certain for me, so it can dream inside me. So will I be hollowed out; so it will it become what I am not.

Be grateful, says the day, you’ve stayed six days; you are a normal person again. That’s true: after the stresses of the last few weeks, open, bright days and reading; no longer rising with first light and working before I have to be in the office. Am I reading? Remembering reading more than reading. Letting my memory reread books that are locked inside me.

Locked: like the ice that locks itself in the earth all winter. Then comes the spring and the thaw, and the earth starts to breathe. What was it called, in geography, when the whole surface of the unfrozen earth starts to move? Solifluction? Then there are those who are locked in, who are unable to move anything but their eyes. What is the name for the awakening from that state, if it comes?

Unlocked: I imagine the sprawling of a house so large that it lets the inside becomes outside. In one room, it rains, in another, there is a desert over which birds vanish (Mirror), or a forest in which wolves  run (A Company of Wolves). Memories of reading, of viewing: the thread of Ariadne leads me into the labyrinth, not out of it. But this is not nostalgia – or, if it is, it is that nostalghia (with an ‘h’) about which Tarkovsky made a film.

Memory, non-memory, it is the exposure of the past to what did not occur: not to what would have been possible, then; not to the path untaken or the door handles untried, but to a kind of retaking of what occurred, where the whole of time moves. Solifluction, the unlocked earth: everything is in movement: to remember, now, is to receive everything anew, my past come again.

It is the same with nearly every book I read: to tell a story, to narrate, means to pass over a more primordial struggle. What would it be to narrate the way in which the event struggles with the non-event? In sense, the beginning is already the end, like the river which spreads its distributaries into a great delta. The end: for what is actualised, what hardens itself as event out of a more general haze comes after the struggle, after the succesful wrenching of what begins from what does not begin.

Reading Auster, say, is pure pleasure, but it is indulgence, too – the swiftness of his narratives, the lack of extraneous detail and those musing passages in other writers I so enjoy, bears me joyfully along; I am a happy reader. But with Kafka, who likewise never permits himself to muse, for whom nothing must be illustrative, I am brought back to the haze; what seems to speak keenly, clearly sets itself against the arrhythmia of the non-beginning, the Word which will never pronounce itself.

(For that is what the Castle is: coextensive with the village, nothing other than it, but also everything that is other, all that sets itself against the bustle of the day. Do not seek recognition from the officials of the Castle; do not seek to know your role. K. falls down exhausted when he tries to approach it, but by this exhaustion does he know it, as when, later, he falls asleep when he is told of the Castle’s secret. Castle, Word, you speak only to the weary and asleep.)

Word, non-Word, I think I discover something of you in Sebald, too – that the narrative detours of The Rings of Saturn, which are like so many ox-bow lakes alongside the streaming of the main story, are what prevents the book from being devoured in one gulp. Extraneousness. Detail. Ventriloquy: sentences which may or may not be quotations. Indirect speech: these are no mere techniques, but arise out of the non-beginning to which the book is tied.

Disributaries spread in a great fan, eventually disappearing into indefinite swampland, where fresh water meets sea water. In the end, like an old junky’s arm, there are no veins of water left, only general sludge. Sebald’s East Anglia is that sludge; human history spreads itself indifferently across his pages. Everything has happened; nothing has happened.

But here is the wonder: that nothing-is-happening is allowed to speak of itself. Not the Word, but the counter-Word, which undoes what is made, or rather shows how the present is redoubled by an indeterminate past. Anything could happen. Anything could have happened: the surface across which his narrator walks remakes itself as he does so. He is the last awakened of the ghosts; the youngest one. The world of the dead is still wondrous to him.

Reading (I am almost at the end), I remember the soldiers who cross the marshland in Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Crossing, trudging, they no longer belong to history. One of them, his cap-brim bobbing up and down, walks more quickly than the others. No matter: he will still miss his appointment with time. The young girl in another sequence, being evacuated because of the Spanish civil war, turns suddenly to the camera. What does she see? The melting ice-plane, the expanse in which all the dead are buried and from which all the dead will arise.

In truth, there was always genre fiction. The Sages knew that to approach the Supreme Being, the true, many paths were necessary. So were the puranas – fantastic tales, alive in the villages of India – claimed to be part of the great revelation of the divine.

As a child, the puranas (as well as epics), reborn as comics, guided my reading. The first was Surya, a story of the god who was his sun (and to whom, according to the comic, death, Yama was born). The next, Beeshma, which made me wonder why the gods would deign to rain flowers upon the one who proclaimed he would remain a bachelor. Beeshma was granted the moment to choose his death; so it was on the battlefield pierced by a hundred arrows that he consented to die only after discoursing for many hours (A speech which was passed over in the comic but runs for hundreds of pages in the Mahabharta, or so a friend tells me).

The third was Krishna, with a picture of a blue skinned child on the front, stealing milk (was it milk?) Was it Krishna who shot an arrow into the earth so a jet of water sprang up to meet Beeshma’s lips on the last day of his life? I think so. The old man had asked to drink and so he drank. Of course it was that same battle, where uncle lined up against nephew, friend against friend that saw Krishina reveal himself to Arjuna. The comic was bought for me: The Bhagavad Gita, which presented in simple form the lesson that was granted to Arjuna, who was reluctant to fight. Krishna, Arjuna’s charioteer, revealed himself at that moment to be an avatar of Vishnu. He taught Arjuna what would allow him to steel himself for battle, showing him his actions were part of the great unfolding of the divine.

They made a comic of Shankara, too – the young philosopher who went willingly to his death, according to the story, having composed treatise after treatise (Ramanuja, the philosopher who would criticise Shankara in turn was said to be as old as Shankara was young). That comic was bought for me; I read it, but preferred the story of India’s battle with the grey-skinned demon whose limbs were severed from him one by one. Eventually, his belly was opened and he fell. Am I right to think Indra struck him with a mace that was also a bolt of lightning? A mace made from the bones of a sage?

My favourite of the comics was Sati and Shiva, for its exquisite line drawings – the beautiful eyes of Sati and the majesty of the purple skinned god. I read of a Shiva happy, romantic, relaxing with his bride. Sati would come to be insulted by her father when he failed to take blessings Shiva (I have cut short the story); she gave herself up to immolation (she would be reborn as Parvarthi). Shiva’s rage was magnificent: he pulled out a clump of hair and split it in two. So was Durga born (or reborn) and a thousand demons. They flew down to punish Sati’s father, beheading him and ravaging his kingdom. Eventually, Shiva became calm and allowed the father to come back to life, but with the head of a goat.

These are stories, marvellous stories, to tell those who are not ready for the truth. Watching Hero this morning, I marvel at the prospect of films of the same marvellous quality being made from the puranas of India. And I wondered, too, how one might carve up different ages of reading. I thought: the dreams of heroism, of magic, are dreams of lightness. Youth is that lightness, where the course of the future has not yet been decided not yet the potential one bears within oneself. Who will I be?, asks the child as he reads.

I thought: the legends give youth a future of which to dream. It can only be represented as lightness, as the freedom from gravity, and by magical powers, stronger than any adversary. But when do these dreams come to an end? When is it time to leave the puranas behind? When the adolescent’s body becomes too heavy to dream – or, better, that dream is not a dream of lightness because it cannot leave the body behind. One paralysed dreams of movement; one without wings dreams of flying: this is the difference between the dreams of the child and the adolescent: the first dreams of what he might be, the second of what he is not.

Now the freedom afforded by reading becomes less abstract. Now the world has come into focus: the expanse outside the house of your parents’ begins to reveal its law. It will not bend to you. You are not the hero who will alter its course. Now the drama becomes one of rebellion. You test the limits of the world and have them confirmed. The world is the world. You are brought up against it and its law. Your dreams are those of confinement and struggle. Now you read The Dark Knight or Watchmen: the hero is in the world and struggles with its law.

And if the world is too strong for the hero? When heroism is dispersed across the everyday? That is the time for abstraction, for that reading which confirms that everything you read had been a purana, and that the truth lay in the indifferent light which falls on the streets and the housing estates. Is there is a kind of reading which conforms to that light? To the fact of the world?

Admit it, you’ve read very little fiction for years; you’ve reread favourites, it is true, but only on occasion and always tentatively, nervously, as though you were worried you would disturb something in yourself by continuing.

When was the last time you really read, when you gave day after day to reading, when you read with abandon, with no sense of what would be useful to you, with only the horizon that reading clears before you and the urgency of reading itself carrying you through the hours? When your own future was open and vague enough to form the backdrop upon which your reading could project itself; when your cares were only of the immediate kind; and it was a matter not of your life, your vocation, finding a job or keeping one, but of tomorrow, of the weekend, or the weekend after that?

And now? Is it true that you’ve become settled enough to read? That you can begin to read fiction again because you have made a place for yourself in the world you can wager because you know it is your own? The experience of tragedy depends upon the safety of the audience; you are afraid, but not for your physical well being. Isn’t something of the same true for the sublime, at least for the sublime work of art? Then the work resembles only that theatrical performance which takes place at a distance, away from you. Reading must always take place at arm’s length.

But the books to which you are drawn, those you’ve read over the last few days (Roubaud, Josipovici, Bernhard) do not permit this distance. Then there is a kind of reading that will not allow you to escape: a response, a responsiveness to what reaches and refuses you in the work. For this refusal cannot be held at a distance; the book fascinates, which is to say, it brings you nearer to its unfolding than you can endure.

In one sense, reading is nothing; it leaves everything intact; the world, as you look up from the page, is still the world. A cloud passed over the sun; that was all. But it was as though it took forever to pass. As though, reading, you passed forever through the darkness the work inhabits. As though the sun itself that had gone dark.

This is still too vague. Approach it from another angle. Once you were an avid reader, you wanted the wondrous, the exciting, and you found books to satisfy that demand. You were drawn to genre books and then to the classics; you read until you found yourself enclosed by a small circle of books and it was though you would never leave that circle. Gone, now, was the attraction of the great names of literature; excitement and wonder were not enough; now you could only reread the books which fascinated you because of the way in which they seemed to resist reading. The circle of reading drew tighter; there were fewer works, each with a special obduracy, a stone like resistance. They stood all around you, obscure monoliths. And then it was as though the circle of reading were tightening around your neck.

What happened? What freed you? You found authors who wrote on the authors important to you. The circle widened. Then you found the authors who influenced those authors in turn: philosophers, fearsome creatures. You found yourself on the open plain: philosophy spread everywhere, in all directions. Now there was too much too read; you felt a kind of agoraphobia before this new expanse. You wanted to be enclosed, to find yourself among the great stonelike books and draw the circle of reading around you. Only now it was protection you sought; you were afraid of the infinite expanse of the philosophical library.

Now you sought protection from those mutilated books written at the edges of literature. Books whose characters have lost their way, whose plots run astray in the infinite. Books which seem to write of themselves, of the strange gratuitousness of their own existence. Books which took a detour and took the whole world on that detour. What are their names? Whisper them: Klossowski’s The Baphomet, Bataille’s Le Petit, Blanchot’s Waiting, Forgetting, Duras’s The Ravishment of Lol V. Stein, Artaud’s Collected Works.

What do you find in their pages? A fictional world which frays before you, a worldly expanse which has worn thin and through whose thin fabric you can see the whole night as though shining behind it. A world in whose mundane objects you discover the pull of that night and in whose characters you meet the force of the infinite wearing away. ‘No one here wants to be linked to any story’.

The Baphomet, Le Petit, Waiting, Forgetting: books that do not unfold events as on a stage before you. That do not conjure an imaginary world out of the air. Books in which nothing happens, books with half-characters and suspended suspense. Books in which the nothing-is-happening is happening. For nothing has happened and nothing will ever happen; all you hear is a kind of roaring, a conflagration of language. The black fire which sets fire to itself and all literature. Books that are like anti-arks, books which preserve nothing and destroy everything.

Bliss: you are scattered by these books. You read and you are scattered and so too is literature scattered. There is no longer that ray of intentionality which animates black shapes and the whiteness between them; no longer that magic through which a living world may be born from dead pages. In each of these books, literature comes to an end; a tradition is not so much completed or perfected as destroyed, over and again.

A new fear: you betray these books by returning to them. You should have left them behind as soon as you found yourself in the library of philosophy. For now you return to them armed by what you think you have learnt. Commentator, exegete, everything you write is irrelevant, words added to a movement of writing that was already complete and perfectly closed on itself.

I am a ghost of the books I read. As I read, I incorporate – the book gives me my body. But when I close the book? My body fades away, I begin to forget everything but a vague sense that I was, not so long ago, more than a ghost.

As I read, I am swept up by what I read; the ideas inhabit me – I am the book, I am bound to its author (she and I experienced the same joy, the same ecstasy). But then when I finish the book, when I am beached on the shore, a great sense of loss, of mourning … until, just a few weeks later, I have already forgotten the experience and fevered annotations are written as though by another person. How I envy him!

Too frightened by the strength of the major books, I take company with minor ones, obscurities, works that have not been buried in commentary. Then I learn minor works shine with the reflected light of major ones; I cannot avoid reading the great names. But then I learn the major books themselves do not constitute constants or standards, that it is always a matter of a minor reading.

Keep yourself within the draft of a strong book. It protects you. In discussion, it can speak through you. A magic circle: the books you show know well enough to allow them to speak through you. Let’s say (just a few): Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality, Heidegger’s Being and Time…. This takes a great deal of time, and many of us never reach the point strong thinkers achieved early on. We are commentators, many of us, lost in the forest.

Sometimes, close to a strong book, letting it guard me, an opening occurs and I am filled with confidence, I have the answers to questions…. But those questions were born and addressed in the strong book; just as, reading a novel, I imagine that I, too, could write a novel – or that writing would be as easy as reading.

The old problem in philosophy put so well by Socrates: you have to appropriate thought for yourself – you have to lay claim to it, to be able to defend yourself against objectors, and to transform what you think to meet new circumstances. Yes, this is the problem, and one I feel acutely when I leave the glade to which the strong book brought me. For then, I wonder, what have I kept from this reading? To where has this reading brought me? Confused, lost, there is only the sense of the overwhelming difficulty of philosophy and the hideous strength of strong thinkers.

To take revenge on a book – a weak thinker wonders how he can take revenge on a book of strong thought. How is this possible? In the feeling of vindication that arises from taking issue with this or that argument – which already assumes, beforehand, that the book can be cut down to a sequence of discrete arguments whose arguments can be tested and found wanting. How, then, do you meet a strong book? How do welcome it? It is a question of finding its orientation and following it, of leaning with it into the wind.

When you love the great work of an author or a composer, you should also love his or her minor works, however forgotten, half-formed and misconceived. In fact, they are deserving of a special love and attention because they can indicate something about the physiognomy of the author in question. The weaknesses they reveal – the way they miss the point – belong to the overall movement of ‘greater’ works. This, at least, is what I think when I read a book like Duras’s Yann Andrea Steiner, or watch Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg. How poorly they ape the past successes of their author! But how marvellous that we have these imperfect works – that their creator, in her or his generosity, sent them into the world. Here, I am not commending the cult of personality to which Duras and, I think, Bergman succumbed (how else can I account for the cruelty of his remarks about his sister in The Magic Lantern?) No, it’s the very way their signature begins to break apart in the minor work – the way, indeed, the artifice trembles in its versimilitude. It almost falls apart – this is marvellous not because it is then that it is confirmed that the artist is as imperfect as I am, but because the great delicacy of the artist’s task reveals itself. To be strong enough to be weak – to endure the draft of inspiration, to hold her- or himself in the claim of the work, to allow, to the point of deformation, the particular book or film to realise itself – yes, this is impressive. But also to be weak enough such that strength – the power of form – does not obscure the heart of the tabernacle at the heart of the work: to preserve that weakness to the point that it overwhelms us through its very materiality, its unbridled force – this is the miracle that reveals itself in the ‘failed’ work.