Stuff I’ve Been Reading

— Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, by Christopher Hitchens
There are a couple of his collections of older pieces – pre 9/11 – I haven’t read before. Many of these pieces were put in later collections (Arguably, and the most recent collection, published earlier this year – A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration – of the book reviews he wrote for London Review of Books). Unacknowledged Legislations dates from the late 1990s, an eerie time, for sure, in retrospect. There’s another collection of his pieces published in the 1980s, the early 90s – and the political writing brings back such queasy memories. Iran-Contra! This collection is all literary: book reviews, and lengthy pieces on people like Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde (two of those), and then pieces on all of his faves. Do I really need to read another essay by Hitchens on Saul Bellow or Evelyn Waugh? Frankly, yes. I do. Percy Shelley said that poets were the “unacknowledged legislators of the world”.

— The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa.
I have no idea how I had never even heard of this book before. I love it when that happens. Someone I trust – in this case, my pal Therese, whom I met at Bloomsday 20 years ago – was in Lisbon and posting pictures of following Pessoa’s footsteps, sitting where he sat, walking his streets, like she has also done with James Joyce’s Dublin. She said The Book of Disquiet helped form her own thoughts on writing. I was like: WHAT. WHO IS THIS GENIUS. I am never ashamed of not knowing something. It’s exciting to get caught up to speed. Pessoa was a fascinating individual, creating an entire world of pseudonyms, although what he did moved way way beyond “pseudonym”. He created entire personalities, with biographies, astrological charts, addresses. The outer surface of his life was unchanging. He worked as a bookkeeper. He spent his time sitting in a cafe and writing his thoughts on dreams and reality and Lisbon. He had no relationships. He was solitary. I can’t read the book in large chunks. I have to take it in small doses. The design of it is meant for that kind of reading. You don’t have to read it in order. In fact, Richard Zenith, who wrote the introduction (as well as editing and translating), said Pessoa did have an order for his fragmentary “riffs”, but an ideal way to read the book would be to toss all of the numbered fragments in the air, scattering them, and read them at random. Sometimes Pessoa’s thoughts are so bleak you wonder how he survived the prison of his own mind. But then I think of how I thought before I got diagnosed, the truly apocalyptic visions in my head, the terror of the abyss, always yawning beneath my feet, it makes sense. I get it. I’m making my way slowly. But there are so many passages where I feel recognized, seen. He was brave enough to put it all down.

Some quotes:

• I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don’t know where it will take me, because I don’t know anything.

• I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me.

• If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling.

• What is said endures. There’s nothing in life that’s less real for having been well-described. Small-minded critics point out that such-and-such poem, with its protracted cadences, in the end says merely that it’s a nice day. But to say it’s a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It’s up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting outer world.

• Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake. The wind, blowing uncertainly, was a formless flag unfurled over a non-existent army post. High, strong gusts ripped through nothing at all, and the window-frames shook their panes to make the edges rattle. Underlying everything, the hushed night was the tomb of God (and my soul felt sorry for God).

• Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other’s presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical memory can define.

• They all have, like me, their future in the past.

• The consciousness of life’s unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence.

• The dreamer isn’t superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer’s superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.

• Ah, no nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed!

• My past is everything I failed to be. I don’t even miss the feelings I had back then, because what is felt requires the present moment — once this has passed, there’s a turning of the page and the story continues, but with a different text.

• Collective thought is stupid because it’s collective.

• I find myself partially described in novels as the protagonist of various plots, but the essence of my life and soul is never to be a protagonist.

• And behind all this, O sky my sky, I secretly constellate and have my infinity.

• Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel and not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not, “I feel like crying,” which is what an adult, i.e. an idiot, would say, but rather, “I feel like tears.” And this phrase — so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it 00 decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. “I feel like tears”! That small child aptly defined the spiral.

• Everything stated of expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text.

• I know nothing greater, nor more worthy of the truly great man, than the patient and expressive analysis of the ways in which we don’t know ourselves, the conscious recording of the unconsciousness of our conscious states, the metaphysics of autonomous shadows, the poetry of the twilight of disillusion.

• Nothing happened, except in what I felt.

Reading all this, it’s easy to understand why Book of Disquiet is considered one of the masterpieces of Modernism. Every page is like that. Like I said, small doses. I think of Jorge Luis Borges, as an old man, blind, asking Christopher Hitchens to read Kipling to him. Hitchens obliged, and Borges stopped him, saying “Long sips — more slowly.”

— The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
When times get stressful, I take on big rigorous reading projects. This has been a year of big books that took me months to read. I did another reading of the complete Shakespeare sonnets. One a day. It’s maybe my 5th time doing this? So recommend. I read the Library of America collection of Thomas Jefferson’s papers. Again, it took me months. I have the Library of America collections of all of the founding fathers, and have only read the Alexander Hamilton all the way through (of course). I like reading these because there’s no accompanying commentary, and minimal footnotes. You’re on your own. It’s a direct encounter. I read the complete works of Edmund Burke. You know. This is challenging stuff, but I like it, because I do it first thing in the morning, it has nothing to do with anything in my life – it’s not work or even pleasure – it’s just this thing I like doing. Now, this volume is massive. It snaps shut if you try to leave it open. It’s huge. It has the books, stories, plays, poems, and essays. As should be clear, I am intimately familiar with this man. I’ve read Dorian Gray. Of course, I’ve read all the plays, forwards and back. And know his most famous essays – De Profundis – The Soul of Man Under Socialism. And his most famous poems, like Ballad of Reading Gaol. But there are book reviews in here, essays on actresses, on the life around him, on issues of the day – aesthetic and otherwise. I can’t wait. I am currently re-reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. I’m going to read (or re-read) every piece. Excited to re-read the plays!

 
 
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