Sonnets on a bookstore’s demise, 1990.

​1

Over a shoulder, through the humming cloud,
A newspaper focuses my attention
Upon a quiet headline with its mention
Of City’s Oldest Bookstore, Shutting Down.

Imagining a map, I scour the town
But the damned store eludes my apprehension —
Aloft in our Florida-bound suspension
I wish my fellow passenger would read aloud.

No such luck. The baby squirms as I crane
My neck, hoping to catch a clearer word
From the faint gray column of the Times’s prose.

Then letters squint louder to make it plain
And at once I’m wondering if you’ve heard:
Mendoza’s bookshop is about to close.

​

2

“Mendoza’s bookshop is about to close,”
I mutter to my wife, my daughter, too,
But silently I speak volumes to you,
Axel’s Castle, A Mass for the Dead, Rose

Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins, all those
Bound enthusiasms we would pursue —
Saroyan, Zukofsky, Marshack, Camus —
Through the cryptic cities a reader knows.

Title by title, we worked miles of shelves,
Unearthing our own dusty alphabet
That spelled out, within dim tottering nooks,

Definitions of our unspoken selves
That will murmur meanings till we forget
The hide and seek of the sibylline books.

​

​3

The hide and seek of the sibylline books
Began when old letters enhanced young fate
With prophecies difficult to translate
Into the language that a schoolroom speaks.

Typefaced sirens, disguised as quaint antiques,
Seduced us to their paged estate
Where knowing sentences would conjugate
The moods and tenses of our urgent looks.

Such voices lured us to our first bookcase.
The large, low volumes within childish reach
Led us down alleys alert with spines

To intuition’s spellbound hiding-place:
There unfathomed scripture could start to teach
Before a mind learned to linger between the lines.

​

4

Before a mind learned to linger between the lines
In love with each sentence’s warp and woof,
Naked intelligence remained aloof
From the deep weavings of a text’s confines.

Worn cloth covers bore talismanic signs
That spoke to starlight through the homebound roof
Which sheltered thought, demanding proof
Of the powers conjured by a book’s designs.

To acolytes serving the will of words
Every book possessed is an oracle:
We swallowed whole bodies of arcane lore

To read the dense entrails of printed birds
Where the guts of life were grammatical,
Encoded in black-and-white metaphor.

​

5

Encoded in black-and-white metaphor,
Conversation surfaced as best it could;
In Isaac Mendoza’s the talk was good.
The titles’ potential in semaphore

Flashed between us through the word-weary store
While a gas flame fluttered in its brass hood
To warm the close, asphyxiant mood
Poets indulge in, but Muses abhor.

In the bookshop’s mind-webbed, graying air
We sought correlatives to our desire
To find a voice within our intellects,

Shaping a language to be kept with care
On the many pages it might inspire
When we rose from among the analects.

​

6

When we rose from among the analects
We’d wordlessly study, with restless eyes,
One another’s ration of bound supplies
Exchanging in glances our best respects

Toward the strange interests a friend collects
(In which we’d vaguely recognize
The ghost of our own elusive prize:
The heart’s horn book, with which no eye connects).

A memory ago my parents stored
A box of books for a transient friend
Whose life was running out of space and time;

Up in the attic I honored the hoard
With all the attention a boy could spend
Searching lost libraries to find a rhyme.

​

7

Searching lost libraries to find a rhyme
The heart dispenses with its own regard,
Trying out postures from the avant-garde
Three parts ridiculous to one sublime.

The books that once scripted our pantomime,
Asleep in their jackets, paper and hard,
Now taunt us, old habits we can’t discard
As we career, head last, into our prime.

I pick up a book and fondle its cover;
At my side, a new hunger nurses, mumming
Her mother through infancy’s shroud.

The plane rushes past the place where thoughts hover,
Yet still I reach back for faint verses coming
Over a shoulder, through the humming cloud.

A reflection from A Month of Sundays.

We invest all creation stories (large and small, universal and individual) with our sense of time, so that every birth is a beginning rather than a revelation, every death an ending rather than a return to the dark waters from which life sprang.

Despite the solemn invocations of our preaching and our prayers, we ignore eternity because our minds do not comprehend it, our hearts cannot hold it; we’re dizzied by its lack of definition.

We cast our lot with time because it is our worthiest tool: time alone gives shape to things, makes a habitable dwelling within whatever’s everlasting. 

Face to face with destiny.

In the glass she wore an expression of tense melancholy, for she had come to the depressing conclusion, since the arrival of the Dalloways, that her face was not the face she wanted, and in all probability never would be.

However, punctuality has been impressed upon her, and whatever face she had, she must go into dinner with it.

— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

“At 50,” George Orwell wrote with some finality (indeed, these were the last words written in the manuscript notebook he kept in the last year of his life), “everyone has the face he deserves.” Looking in the mirror myself now, well over a decade past my own half-century, I’m a little worried about the verdict my features have handed down. Vanished with barely a trace is the lean and hungry look which I wore through my first three decades, the aspect, alas, that I still incorrectly imagine I present to the world. Weight and worry pull down my vanity, rounding the flesh of my cheeks and wearying the skin around my eyes. My hairline recedes in an inexorable march up a bald mountain, and a sagging solemnity suggests a sorrow I have no right—given all the blessings I’ve known—to wear. Perhaps I’ve grown my beard to disguise from myself my just deserts.

On reflection, I’m not sure I like my looks as an emblem of my fate. Is character nothing more than the maturation of genetic traits (that nose, those lips) and the accretion of circumstance (the childhood scar, for instance, that dwells in the cleft of my chin)? Well, no, I suppose, it’s not: between inheritance and experience, our faces, be they profoundly metaphorical or merely superficial, make themselves up to meet the day.

But destiny is too large a word to fall within such a limited range of reference, and, like the high-schooler hiding his awkwardness behind a mask of attitude, we persist in believing, if only in the quiet confessional of our solitude, that we are meant for bigger, more beautiful things. This faith confounds both sense and senses, and we gaze through the looking-glass of life in hope of spying our true substance; it’s an immemorial rite that we engage in, the very ritual of consciousness, and ancients of every persuasion who engaged in the same speculation discovered, by lore and by logic, the core of being we still seek: a soul.

From its earliest alertness, the mind maps the world, sending out scouts to survey its surroundings, probing every problem with instruments of love and language, fashioning landscapes from elements of instinct, learning, and surmise, building its own cities of idleness or energy, purpose or pleasure, all in the service of apprehending an abiding destination, a privacy rich enough to animate the character with which we face the world. The pursuit is tricky, the prey elusive, immaterial, prone to take mysterious vacations. Will we ever catch up with it, reside within its ken? At what age do we recognize the soul that we deserve?

From a notebook: On War and Peace, 3

“Everything flows; nothing remains,” is how Guy Davenport rendered the most famous maxim of Heraclitus, immediately annotating his translation with bracketed alternatives—“[Everything moves; nothing is still. Everything passes away; nothing lasts.]”—and following these with a formulation nearly as well known: “One cannot step twice into the same river, for the water into which you first stepped has flowed on.”

Heraclitus came to mind as I came upon, in War and Peace, a passage about Prince Andrei Bolkonsky’s ennui in the aftermath of his ill-fated engagement with Natasha Rostov:

Before, too, there had been the same conditions of life, but before they had all cohered, while now everything had fallen apart. Nothing but meaningless phenomena, without any connection with each other, presented themselves to Prince Andrei one after the other.

“The most beautiful order of the world is still a random gathering of things insignificant in themselves,” Heraclitus also wrote (again, the translation is Davenport’s), and I thought of it immediately when I read Tolstoy’s description of Andrei’s state, and then couldn’t help but also think of the ancient philosopher’s assertion of the primal truth of flow and motion, each of which supply life with not only change but with coherence: time, if nothing else, connects random phenomena into an order that supplies connection, if only by coincidence, and significance insofar as our personal narrative makes sense to us and coheres around action, love, or purpose. Once that narrative current flags, or fails to connect one day to the next along some impulse that transcends time, or seems to, even as it is carried along with it, then things fall apart, and the world’s eternal flux is nothing more than a machine for dissipating meaning. Our only defense against randomness, or against the tide in which things pass away and leave no trace, is our own story, whether we inscribe it in memory or feeling; when that story is interrupted, or we lose our own faith in it, a caustic fatalism holds us hostage, just as it grips Andrei: “I’m going to the army—why? I don’t know myself, and I wish to meet a man whom I despise, in order to give him an occasion to kill me and laugh at me!”

Which is to say things cohere only by our efforts to give them a fictive—but by no means false—energy. What Prince Andrei Bolkonsky needs is the prescription given to a protégé by the character Eliza in Neal Stephenson’s novel, The Confusion:

Pay attention, that’s all…. Notice things. Connect what you’ve noticed. Connect it into a picture. Think of how the picture might be changed; and act to change it. Some of your acts may turn out to have been foolish, others will reward you in surprising ways; and in the meantime, simply be being active instead of passive, you have a kind of immunity that’s hard to explain—

A reflection from A Month of Sundays.

We are familiar with the state of grace (or at least with the idea of it), but that other states—of despair, for instance, or melancholy, or bewilderment and anxiety or even gladness—might be conditions of the soul, a possession by divine or cosmological promise of our inmost intelligence, seldom occurs to us.

Perhaps they’re our instinctual way of paying respect to the otherworldly without ever leaving the familiar world, of acknowledging that past, present, and future cannot be the only order of our lives, for time’s marking is not magnanimous enough to comprehend the beauty and cruelty of the love that animates us or the death that is our destiny.

The order that encompasses such a joyful and sorrowful creation surely passeth all understanding, but it is undeniably present in the weather of our days, a summoning of power and loveliness that is endless in its invention, something like the Spirit of God that moved upon the face of the first waters, before light and darkness were charged with their labors and set to work.

From a notebook: On War and Peace, 2

Near the midpoint of War and Peace, Tolstoy offers a key to the book’s concerns: the significance of its “war” belongs not to campaigns against Napoleon nor to the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino, so vividly sketched in its chapters; neither does the meaning of its “peace” reside in the sumptuous balls or several romances so irresistibly depicted. One might say, rather, that Tolstoy’s real interest is in the “and”, the spaces between peak experiences—those zeniths we seldom recognize as such until we are far enough away from them to realize their eminence—that represent the moment-by-moment presence and portent of our loves, fears, uncertainties.

Sometimes Pierre remembered stories he had heard about how soldiers at war, taking cover under enemy fire, when there is nothing to do, try to find some occupation for themselves so as to endure the danger more easily. And to Pierre all people seemed to be such soldiers, saving themselves from life: some with ambition, some with cards, some with drafting laws, some with women, some with playthings, some with horses, some with politics, some with hunting, some with wine, some with affairs of state. “Nothing is either trivial or important, it’s all the same; only save yourself from it as best you can!” thought Pierre. “Only not to see it, that dreadful it.”

Reading this passage called to mind some thoughts on courage penned by the philosopher A. C. Grayling, which I was lucky enough to find just now in his book, Meditations for the Humanist:

Most people tend to think of courage as a warrior virtue, as belonging typically to battle; and therefore, by analogy, to endeavour on the upper slopes of Everest, in the deeps of the sea, and even on the sports field—in other words, wherever endurance, grit and determination in the face of physical challenges are required. That is true enough. But courage is often demonstrated, because it is often needed, in greater quantities in daily life; and there are even times when ‘merely to live’, as Seneca put it in a letter to Lucilius, “is itself an act of courage.”

Ordinary life evokes more extraordinary courage than combat or adventure because both the chances and the inevitabilities of life—grief, illness, disappointment, pain, struggle, poverty, loss, terror, heartache: all of them common features of the human condition, and all of them experienced by hundreds of thousands of people every day—demand kinds of endurance and bravery that make clambering up Everest seem an easier alternative. Whereas mountaineering and deep-sea diving are self-contained activities that last a certain length of time with—if all goes well—a return to a status quo ante when they are over, facing (say) grief or disappointment is quite different. They are open-ended, new, different dispensations with unforeseeables deeply embedded in them, promising only that much will have to be borne before relief comes. To lie sleepless with pain at night, or to wake every morning and feel the return of grief, yet to get up and carry on as best one can, is courage itself.

The bravery required to face “different dispensations with unforeseeables deeply embedded in them”: that’s as good a summation of what Tolstoy’s masterpiece is about as one is likely to find, for it captures the unfolding experiences of the characters—Natasha and Nikolai, Prince Andrei and Princess Marya, Sonya and Julie and Pierre and all the rest—in the everydayness that the author, through his art, has made so enduring.

“Courage,” Plato wrote (as Grayling shares in his epigraph to the essay I’ve quoted), “is a kind of salvation.” What it saves us not only from, but for, as Pierre will learn, is life.

Yahia Lababidi, Revolutions of the Heart:
“Belief, in the midst of chaos, remembers the indestructible world.”

“Bodies are like poems that way, only a fraction of their power resides in the skin of things, the remainder belongs to the spirit that swims through them.”

❦

Samantha Power:
“The binaries of the modern moment don’t suit a lot of lived experience.”

❦

John Cheever, Journals:
“As I approach my fortieth birthday without having accomplished any one of the things I intended to accomplish—without ever having achieved the deep creativity that I have worked toward for all this time—I feel that I take a minor, an obscure, a dim position that is not my destiny but that is my fault, as if I had lacked, somewhere along the line, the wit and courage to contain myself competently within the shapes at hand.”

❦

Arnold Bennett:
“Ninety percent of the friction of daily life is caused by tone of voice.”

❦

Arthur Quiller-Couch, On the Art of Reading:
“For all great Literature, I would lastly observe, is gentle towards that spirit which learns of it. It teaches by apprehension, not by comprehension . . .”

From a notebook: On War and Peace, 1

A couple of years ago, Margot and I embarked on a tandem reading journey. Concerned that I was succumbing to digital distraction and losing the ability to concentrate, I prescribed myself Proust as a therapeutic measure: I would immerse myself in his imagination for ten pages a day until I had fully traversed the seven volumes of his search for lost time. I invited Margot along for company, and she willingly took up the challenge. Ten months later, when the music stopped on the author’s exquisitely choreographed concluding scene, we were out of breath, exhilarated. Buoyed by the success of that long haul, we took a quick sprint through The Count of Monte Cristo—a book a third as long as Proust’s masterpiece (only 1200-odd pages!), its prose and plot move so fleetly that we completed it in little more than a month—and continued on to The Ambassadors, Our Mutual Friend, Daniel Deronda, and a few other sizable tomes. Companionship is welcome over the long haul of a substantial work, for whenever one of us gets busy (or lazy) and falls behind, the other can call out with encouragement from a few chapters ahead.

Halfway on our journey through War and Peace, I read with interest a piece by Janet Malcolm on English renditions of the Russian classics; on the one hand, it was a frankly tetchy denigration of the critically acclaimed versions of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and, on the other, a generous celebration of the industry and inspiration of Constance Garnett (1861-1946), whose Homeric feats of translation first introduced many of the major works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, and Chekhov to an English-language audience. Malcolm’s eye, or better, ear, is focused on the niceties of Garnett’s Victorian style (which is nice indeed, and clearly shaped, as Malcolm suggests, by the standards of Dickens, Trollope, and George Eliot), as compared to what she calls the “flat, awkward English” of Pevear and Volokhonsky. The latter pair would, no doubt, demur, and, rightly or wrongly, attribute the character of their prose to greater fidelity to the particular energy of Tolstoy’s mode of expression than Garnett exhibits. In fact, here’s a relevant exchange from an interview I did with Pevear and Volokhonsky when their edition of War and Peace was published in 2007:

James Mustich: I’m struck by the connection between the role of the historian or the novelist trying to impose a false order on things and the role of the translator who may well impose a false order, or style, on the work. Comparing your translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to earlier versions, it seems to me that there is an implicit critique of previous translations, in that your fidelity to the “happening” of the language, to the line-by-line happening of the words, takes precedence to the ideal of some smoother style, some more homogenous style that might be more reader-friendly. Or even more editor-friendly, as you discovered when you first submitted your Anna Karenina. (Editor’s Note: When Pevear and Volokhonsky turned in the manuscript for this to their London publishers, they were told it was “unreadable.” As Pevear exclaimed to David Remnick in The New Yorker: “They told us it had to be more ‘reader-friendly.’ But Tolstoy himself is not reader-friendly!” Aided by the imprimatur of Oprah’s Book Club, it proceeded–friendly or not—to make its way into the libraries of some several hundred thousand readers.) It seems like what Tolstoy is saying about historians and novelists, you are implicitly saying about translating these works—that you can’t impose that false order, that it’s in the language as it happens that the story is really told.

Richard Pevear: That’s exactly right. Especially imposing an order from outside. Because as an experimental writer, Tolstoy’s language, his seeking in words is also experimental. He worked very hard at how to arrive at, as he says, the effect that he intended. But certainly, it’s not as if there is simply an event which has to be recounted to the reader, because it’s also a way of experiencing that event. A writer only has words to render the quality of the experience, and so the quality of his language is essential to the work. The translator has to follow that, or he loses that specific artistic quality, which is what you’re trying to translate.

Except for its just appreciation of Garnett’s achievement, which all readers should celebrate, Malcolm’s argument is not terribly convincing based on the evidence she supplies in her essay. And I’m not sure that even if it was convincing it would matter much: the content of War and Peace can take care of itself, because Tolstoy’s multifaceted conception insinuates itself into a reader’s mind as its own reality, both vast and intimate. (Margot and I were, as it turns out, reading the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, and I can’t say that I noticed it much one way or the other.) Virginia Woolf, who no doubt read Garnett, put it well in A Room of One’s Own:

The whole structure, it is obvious, thinking back on any famous novel, is one of infinite complexity, because it is thus made up of so many different judgements, of so many different kinds of emotion. The wonder is that any book so composed holds together for more than a year or two, or can possibly mean to the English reader what it means for the Russian or the Chinese. And what holds them together in these rare instances of survival (I was thinking of War and Peace) is something that one calls integrity, though it has nothing to do with paying one’s bills or behaving honorably in an emergency. What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. . . . One holds every phrase, every scene to the light as one reads—for Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement, and, shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were something very precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives, one puts it back on the shelf, I said, taking War and Peace and putting it back in its place.

In an essay in the online magazine Guernica about her labor executing her magnificent translation of Don Quixote, Edith Grossman wrote: “looming in the background of all literary endeavor, establishing a gloomy, compelling counterpoint to the utopian model, is Flaubert’s melancholy observation: ‘Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.’”

Dancing bears, stars, pity—the author of War and Peace would no doubt greet that imagery with a knowing nod. “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy,” said Isaac Babel.

A reflection from A Month of Sundays.

“The years teach much which the days never know,” said Emerson; they gather to themselves our hopes and fears, faiths and failures, loyalties and memories, allowing the past to assume an almost institutional presence, a corpus of authority and belief that guides—knowingly or unconsciously—our thought and action.

The days, meanwhile, come and go stealthily, like playful, errant, elusive gods, slipping away before we have time to apprehend them. Our attention can never pay enough tribute to these local deities, to the surprise and the routine of their daily incarnation, and never fix, except in the static glimpse of words or pictures, the fleeting hours.

A reflection from A Month of Sundays

1
Pervasive enough to be invisible, powerful enough to disrupt, if not destroy, the shape and substance of our lives, weather is a wonder worthy of our admiration (if not, indeed, our worship). Yet the weather comes and goes so quickly our direct regard of it seldom relaxes into a steady contemplation of the lessons it may carry. The natural landscape remembers the weather’s whims, of course, but (except after the most extreme outbursts) wears them with such nonchalance we hardly notice.

2
A good portion of wisdom is the knowledge that truth is never a fact but always a force; it arrives in our lives like the weather, assured and unpredictable, a resource and a danger.