For health reasons, mental and physical, I decided to take a few days' break from my tremendous professional duties and from my long list of looming deadlines for things to be written (most of which I really do not want to write, and can barely even remember agreeing to write), in order to read some books from which I might hope to derive some pleasure, amusement, or inspiration. This is what I used to do in graduate school: in the month before submitting my dissertation, I read Ulysses and Der Zauberberg both, and at the time I felt that this task was equally important to the one that gained greater public acknowledgement. Back then, I found this sort of purposeless reading (or even, perhaps, purposively purposeless, as in zwecklose Zweckmässigkeit) was the best way to ensure that I would continue to think new things, to develop in unpredictable ways.
And what fine recreation this weekend has been! I've been alternating between two books, László Krasznahorkai's Satantango and a collection of Melville's shorter novels. I have much to say about both, but that would be improper for the moment, since I'm not finished, and the whole point of this weekend was to stop this incessant tapping at the claviature and do some damned reading. But very briefly, the two authors could not be more different, and going back and forth between them is a sort of swing between two extremes of literary pleasure. With Krasznahorkai, I sink into the ground, and feel my own death; I process it all in the lower-back part of my brain, the lizard part that survives when I sleep and that I've always imagined will be the last to go. With Melville, it's all in the front; it makes me smile and want to read it out loud for love of life.
Now, forthwith to some representative passages.
First, from Krasznahorkai: "'I'll go south', Futaki declared, gazing at the rain. 'At least the winters are shorter there. I'll rent a little land near some town that's growing and spend the day dangling my feet in a bowl of hot water...' Raindrops were gently trickling down both sides of the window because of the finger-wide crack that ran all the way from the wooden beam to the window frame, slowly filling it up then pushing their way along the beam where they divided once more into drops that began to drip into Futaki's lap, while he, being so absorbed in his visions of faraway places that he couldn't get back to reality, failed to notice that he was actually wet. 'Or I might go and take a job as a night watchman in a chocolate factory... or perhaps as a janitor in a girls' boarding school... and I'll try to forget everything, I'll do nothing but soak my feet in a bowl of hot water each night while this filthy life passes'."
And from Melville (this from The Encantadas, or, The Enchanted Isles): "[A]part from [the tortoises'] strictly physical features, there is something strangely self-condemned in the appearance of these creatures. Lasting sorrow and penal helplessness are in no animal form so suppliantly expressed as in theirs; while the thought of their wonderful longevity does not fail to enhance the impression... As I lay in my hammock that night, overhead I heard the slow, weary draggings of the three ponderous strangers along the encumbered deck. Their stupidity or their resolution was so great that they never went aside for any impediment. One ceased his movements altogether just before the midwatch. At sunrise I found him butted like a battering-ram against the immovable foot of the foremast, and still striving, tooth and nail, to force the impossible passage. That these tortoises are the victims of a penal, or malignant, or perhaps a downright diabolical enchanter, seems in nothing more likely than in that strange infatuation of hopeless toil which so often possesses them. I have known them in their journeyings to ram themselves against rocks and long abide there, nudging, wriggling, wedging, in order to displace them, and so hold on their inflexible path. Their crowning curse is their drudging impulse to straightforwardness in a belittered world. Meeting with no such hindrance as their companion did, the other tortoises merely fell foul of small stumbling blocks; buckets, blocks, and coils of rigging; and at times in the act of crawling over them would slip with an astounding rattle to the deck. Listening to these draggings and concussions, I thought me of the haunt from which they came; an isle full of metallic ravines and gulches, sunk bottomlessly into the hearts of splintered mountains, and covered for many miles with inextricable thickets. I then pictured these three straightforward monsters, century after century, writhing through the shades, grim as blacksmiths; crawling so slowly and ponderously, that not only did toadstools and all fungous things grow beneath their feet, but a sooty moss sprouted upon their backs."
Strange. When I had set out to transcribe a few passages, I had been thinking of the two works as opposite in every way. Copying them out, I found they were remarkable similar in imagery... but, still, not at all alike in perspective. Krasznahorkai's humans are Melville's tortoises. Melville's hero stands outside it all with wonder and joy, observing and recording; Krasznahorkai has no heroes, but only men, clamoring as best they can, sinking into the elements. They are not even straightforward or long-lived, like the tortoises. Just mossy and sunken.
I've already said too much. Back to reading.
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