On the terrible days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, kneytlakh legn takes place—the measuring of graves. The women measure out the cemeteries with a string, then wind the string back up around a bobbin, for later use as candlewicks; some of the women will also use it to tell fortunes. Each of them murmurs a prayer under her breath, and they look like witches in their wide, ruffled skirts, which catch on blackberry thorns and rustle among the dry yellow leaves.

Once, Yente herself measured the graves, believing it to be the duty of every woman to measure how much room was left for the dead, or whether there was any room at all, before any new living people were born. It is a kind of bookkeeping that women take care of—women are always better, in any case, at keeping the accounts.

But what reason do they have for measuring the graves and cemeteries? After all, the dead are not contained in their graves—Yente has learned this only now, however, after plunging thousands of wicks into wax. Graves are in fact altogether pointless, since the dead ignore them and roam—the dead are everywhere. Yente sees them all the time, as if through glass, for however much she might like to join their ranks, she can’t. Where is this? It’s hard to say. They behold the world as if from behind a windowpane, inspecting it and always coveting something inside it. Yente tries to figure out what the faces they make mean, likewise their gestures, and in the end, she gets it: The dead would like to be talked about; they are hungry, and that is their food. What they want from us is our attention.

And Yente notices something else—that that attention is inequitably distributed. Some people are spoken about a great deal, with myriad words pronounced about them. Of others, people utter not a single word, nary a syllable, ever. Those dead will flicker out after a while, moving away from the glass, disappearing somewhere into the back. There are a great many of that latter group, millions of them, completely forgotten. No one even knows they lived on earth. There is no trace of them, which is why they are freed faster, and depart. And maybe that’s a good thing. Yente would depart, as well, if only she could. If only she weren’t still bound by that powerful word she swallowed. The little piece of paper is gone, and there’s no trace left of the string. It’s all dissolved, and the tiniest particles of light have been absorbed into matter. All that remains is the word like a rock that reckless Elisha Shorr employed to tether Yente. (The Books of Jacob)

During that year, for “security” reasons, as they say, I recorded almost nothing of my political evolution, as we might call it; I had moved on from the tenuous anarchism of my youth to Marxism, aided by my studies in history and particularly by a modern-history course that I had taken with Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, a Spaniard closely affiliated with the Communist Party who had escaped from a Francoist prison along with other activists, among them a woman, Barbara Johnson, an American who had allowed herself to be arrested in order to organize the escape from inside the prison. And Sánchez-Albornoz had ended up in Buenos Aires, where his father, the prominent Hispanicist Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz was, if I am not mistaken, the president or prime minister or chancellor of the Spanish Republican government-in-exile, an imaginary position given that Franco’s power was well established and he ruled the country with an iron fist, aided by the Americans. And so, Don Claudio did nothing but get together with the melancholy exiled Spaniards in the bars on Avenida de Mayo, in Buenos Aires, while his son traveled to La Plata every week to teach us modern history in the College of Humanities. He would arrive on Tuesday mornings, give his class in the history department for three or four students, myself among them, and then return to the capital by train in the afternoon. His classes left a permanent mark on me because he decided, in 1962, to concentrate his course on the passage—or the transition—from feudalism to capitalism and made us read, along with the rest of the syllabus, the extraordinary chapter in Marx’s Capital on primitive stockpiling, that is to say, on the origins of capitalism. A history of epic, legendary proportions, because the peasants and their feudal counterparts in the countryside began to be leveled by commercial capital, that is to say, by money, which was eliminating the power of the rural nobility and causing an ever-growing mass of the peasant population to lose everything and have nothing to sell other than their labor. Foucault, Emilio said, Michel Foucault has said that historians are led unavoidably to utilize the Marxist categories in their analysis. “To say ‘Marxist historian,’” said Foucault, “is a pleonasm, like saying ‘American cinema.’” And so, in that course, while taking notes frantically and reading Marx and the great English Marxist historians until late at night, I was forgetting my father’s Peronism and the vague family anarchism of my girlfriend Elena (without an H). University politics also influenced my decision, and my friendship with Luis Alonso, a provincial who had come to the University being—or claiming to be—a revolutionary, was another influence, just as I, like all of my contemporaries, was influenced by the Cuban Revolution and the figure of Che Guevara, who had given a stunning performance to the OAS, near us, at the meeting at Punta del Este, dressed in his olive-green suit, with his thin beard and the five-pointed star on his beret, which looked like a third eye on his face, so Argentine. But, as has been the case throughout my life, books were what really convinced me. One time, not long ago, some friends invited me to go fishing at El Tigre, and so, to prepare for the occasion, I, who had never fished or been interested in that private activity of standing still and silent and waiting, rod in hand, for a fish to bite, I bought myself a couple of fishing guides (How to Fish for River Fish was one), and the next day, on the island El Tigre, I caught more fish than any of my friends, who had all practiced the art of fishing since childhood. I was the absolute champion in that friendly fishing tournament in the Paraná River. In this same way, I became a Marxist: because of reading some books in Sánchez-Albornoz’s course on the origins of capitalism in England.

We took a break for coffee in the study’s kitchen and then returned to the worktable, and Renzi went on recounting the adventures of his second year as a student in the city of La Plata.

He was active in the student union, and his perception of politics soon made him decide, as a Marxist, to oppose the Argentine Communist Party’s positions in particular and the politics of the USSR in general. In this way he was naturally getting closer, along with his friend Luis Alonso, to the positions, we might say, of Trotskyism. First, because the Trotskyists categorically opposed the Communist Party, and second because they are very theoretical, ultra-intellectual, and not very practical. So they suited me perfectly, as someone who above all was, and continues to be, an abstract intellectual. The funniest thing is that I came closer to Silvio Frondizi’s group, a small Trotskyist sect, very Anti-Peronist and not very practical. For example, the person who “enrolled” me in the movement of the revolutionary left, Praxis, which was the name of the small circle of militants, was Tito Guerra, a perpetual student, very entertaining, who convinced me to join that clandestine and minuscule organization. I can remember our final conversation in the woods at La Plata, in front of the lake, and there, one autumn afternoon, I decided to commit myself to politics and become part of the group. The funny thing was that the day after he convinced me, Tito Guerra renounced his position in the organization and abandoned politics.

Thus began my political experience, organically; my life didn’t change too much, I went to some meetings, stayed active in the College, was a candidate for president of the center but, luckily for me, I lost the election by three votes (it would have been by two, if I had voted for myself, something I did not do, of course). Meanwhile, I had started writing the stories for La invasión, and with one of the first, “Mi amigo,” which was actually the second I had ever written, I won a short-story competition organized by a magazine that carried a fair amount of weight among young writers in those days. The funniest thing is that I discovered I was the winner during a lecture one afternoon by the writer Beatriz Guido, who had come to La Plata to give a talk on Salinger at the College; in the middle of the lecture, she said she had just read a very good story because she a was a judge in the magazine’s short-story competition, and she started to talk about a literary epiphany and named me, as I sat in the audience that afternoon in the Great Hall, and praised my story “Mi amigo,” and I realized, surprised, that she meant me and felt a contradictory emotion, which has always accompanied me through good and bad: it was not I, sitting there among my companions, who had written that story, it was someone else, different from me, more introverted and more valiant, whereas I was fairly lost in those days, emotionally distanced from everything. I could not bring myself to talk to her; it seemed impossible to me to stand up and tell her, “I am the young writer of that story.” A true horror, too real. Literature is much more mysterious and strange than the simple physical presence of the so-called author, and so I stayed in my seat, in the tenth row, I think, which is to say that I was close enough for her to see me but she did not know me, and I preferred to remain sitting, anonymous, though I would later become friends with Beatriz Guido and she was always generous, enthusiastic about me and whatever I was writing. I kept still, and she went on talking, and the people who knew me must have thought that I was not there or else did not realize she was talking about me. The fact is that, with such an acclaimed writer naming me as one of the most serious and promising of young Argentine writers, my stock had quickly risen to a new level. The girls immediately started becoming interested in me—me, who tried to stand at the peak of my brief and stunning fame.

Perhaps as a result, the directors of the Trotskyist group proposed that I act as the editorial secretary for the magazine they were planning to publish. And so, for a couple of years, I was in charge of the magazine Liberación, a legal publication, at least on the surface, as they would say in the conspiratorial jargon of the time. The director was a Trotskyist laborer, José Speroni, a union leader of great import who belonged to the revolutionary militant group that had followed the instruction of Nahuel Moreno, who, in secret, while a member of the Fourth International, had defined the tactics of “enterism,” meaning a militant Trotskyist infiltration of Peronism, undercover agents of the worldwide revolution working inside the unions but never revealing their true political position. The tactic was so effective that ten years later, when he was still close to returning to power, General Perón condemned and denounced the Trotskyists in the Fourth International, those he labeled responsible for controlling the left wing of the Justicialist movement, as Perón called his political force. Speroni had been a “mole” in the Peronist union movement and had reached the level of secretary-general in the textile guild. But he was discovered to be an undercover agent and had to resign from his position and act openly as a militant Trotskyist. He was very intelligent. Very bright, had a great deal of experience, and was a figurehead as director of the magazine. The other editorial member was the great philosopher Carlos Astrada, who had studied with Heidegger in Germany and was one of the favorite disciples of the author of Being and Time, but who, being more or less close spiritually, as we might say, to Peronism in his interpretation of the national identity’s phenomenological essence, had veered toward Marxism. He wrote a memorable article during that time, explaining how Lukács’s book History and Class Consciousness, and in particular his chapter on the fetishism of commodities, had a direct influence on the delicate Black Forest philosopher. The magazine was designed by Eduardo Rotllie, a sculptural artist from La Plata who was very interested in the Russian avant-garde of the twenties. In this way, the magazine where I published articles, interviews, and notes really was a school for me and an unforgettable experience. My political activity during those years was limited to the magazine meetings. Meanwhile, the group’s activists would go through the working neighborhoods of Berisso and Ensenada, bringing Trotsky’s words from house to house, using a system they learned from Evangelist pastors: they rang the bells or knocked on doors (if there was no doorbell) and handed to the surprised refrigeration workers or their wives or their children copies of the group’s newspaper, which was called, believe it or not, The Militant. The neighborhood people thought it was an army publication because, of course, they confused the word “militant,” which they did not know, with “military.” They thought “militant” was just another way of saying “military.” All except for the Peronist sympathizers, who understood immediately that it signified a Trotskyist daily. In response, following Perón’s directive, they insulted them and called them nasty epithets while slamming the door in their faces. I never participated in any evangelical work, and that seemed to create a certain hostile climate toward me in the organization. In fact, one afternoon, during a meeting of “the cell,” as they called it, in which my friend Luis Alonso participated, along with his girlfriend Margarita and a Peruvian student who slept in my room at the boardinghouse during the discussions, I remember as if it were today, my friend and comrade Luis Alonso asked to speak and, as though History were speaking through his mouth, contended that the organization should sanction me and sever me from my responsibilities as the magazine’s editorial secretary because I did not demonstrate the “mettle” (that was the word he used) of a revolutionary. In short, he wanted to occupy my position at the magazine himself, but he would not say it in that way; rather, he set to describing the differences between a revolutionary intellectual (for example, him) and a petit-bourgeois intellectual (for example, me, who, to my perfect horror, he called “pequebú”), so that I saw myself transformed into a sort of animal species, the pequebús, as it were a peccary. Then I asked for it to be put to a vote: Luis and his girlfriend voted against me, the Peruvian either abstained or voted against, and I don’t remember if I voted in my favor or abstained. He brought the decision from the tribunal—that’s to say, from the cell—to the higher proceedings of the organization, as he called them. They didn’t pay him the slightest attention and I stayed in charge of the magazine, but, from that moment onward, I never spoke to him again, treating him as though he were invisible. The case is a minor one, but I realized then that if my comrade Luis had held the power he would have condemned me to the gulag in the name of the interests of the global proletariat. He spoke and was convinced he spoke in the name of truth, the truth of History and socialism as well. That ridiculous situation seemed to me an experience that was replicated elsewhere in the revolutionary groups and in socialist states: someone is accused of failing to obey the laws of History and is condemned to exile or to prison. It was a revealing experience for me and also a way to perceive the stores of depth and anger hiding inside our so-called “Argentine friendships.” (The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years)

My best writing so far has arisen from a minor autobiographical reality transformed into a different story, wherein the lived experience only persists in the form of the feelings and emotions expressed in the story. (The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years)

She writes on a scrap of paper: “If you are truly merciful, bring them back to life.” She sprinkles it with sand and waits for the ink to dry, then she rolls the paper up tight. She keeps this little roll in her hands as she enters the chapel. It is cold, and there are not many pilgrims, so she walks down the middle, going up as close as she is allowed, as close as the barriers will permit her. To her left, a legless soldier, with disheveled hair that looks like a hank of hemp, whimpers. He can’t even kneel. His uniform is ruined, its buttons long since replaced, the aiguillettes torn off, no doubt to be used for something else. Behind him is an elderly woman wrapped in headscarves, with a little girl whose face is misshapen by a purple lump. One of her eyes is almost completely obscured under that proud flesh. Drużbacka kneels nearby and prays to the covered picture.

She has had all of her jewelry melted down and fashioned into a big heart, not knowing how else to express her pain. She has a hole in her chest, and she must be mindful of it; it hurts and oppresses her. And so she had cast a prosthesis out of gold, a crutch for the heart. Now she makes a votive offering of it in the monastery, and the monks hang it alongside the other hearts. She doesn’t know why, but the sight of the heart joined with the other hearts, big and small, brings Drużbacka the greatest relief, greater than prayer and greater than gazing into the black, impenetrable face of the Madonna. There is so much pain on view here, Drużbacka’s own pain just a drop in the sea of tears that have been shed in this place. Every human tear enters a stream that flows into a little river, and then the river joins a bigger river, and so on, until in the end, in the great current of an enormous river, it washes into the sea and dissolves on the horizon. In these hearts hung up around the Madonna, Drużbacka sees mothers who have lost, or are losing, or will lose their children and grandchildren. And in some sense, life is this constant loss. Improving one’s station, getting richer, is the greatest illusion. In reality, we are richest at the moment of our birth; after that, we begin to lose everything. That is what the Madonna represents: the initial whole, the divine unity of us, the world and God, is something that must be lost. What remains in its wake is just a flat picture, a dark patch of a face, an apparition, an illusion. The symbol of life is after all the cross, suffering—nothing more. This is how she explains it to herself.

At night, in a pilgrims’ home where she has rented a modest room, she cannot sleep—she hasn’t slept in two months, only dozing off for brief periods. In one of those, she dreams of her mother, which is odd, because she hasn’t dreamed of her mother in twenty years. For this reason, Drużbacka understands this dream as a harbinger of her own death. She is sitting on her mother’s lap, she can’t see her face. She sees only the complicated pattern on her dress, a sort of labyrinth.

When the next morning, still before dawn, she returns to the church, her gaze is drawn by the tall, well-built man in a Turkish outfit, dark, with a caftan buttoned up to the neck, his head bare. He has a thick black mustache, and long hair flecked with gray. At first he prays feverishly, kneeling—his lips move soundlessly, and his lowered eyelids, with their long lashes, tremble; then he lies down with his arms outspread on the cold floor, in the very center of the church, right in front of the barrier that protects the holy picture.

Drużbacka finds a place for herself in the nave, near the wall, and kneels with difficulty, the pain running from her knees all through her little old body. In the nearly empty church, every shuffle, every breath is amplified into a hum or a whistle that rebounds off the vault until it is drowned out by one of the songs intoned at irregular intervals by the monks:

Ave regina coelorum,

Ave Domina Angelorum:

Salve radix, salve porta,

Ex qua Mundo lux est orta.

Drużbacka tries to find some scratches in the wall, some chinks between the marble slabs with which the walls are lined, where she might be able to insert her roll of paper. For how would her missive make it to God if not through the stone lips of the temple? The marble is smooth, and its joints are mercilessly meticulous. In the end, she is able to press the scrap of paper into a shallow crack, but she knows it won’t last long there. No doubt it will fall out soon, and crowds of pilgrims will trample it.

That same day, in the afternoon, she meets again that tall man with the pockmarked face. Now she knows who he is. She grabs hold of his sleeve, and he looks at her in surprise, his gaze soft and gentle.

“Are you the imprisoned Jewish prophet?” she asks without preamble, looking up at him; she reaches barely to his chest.

He understands, and he nods. His face doesn’t change; it is gloomy and ugly.

“You have worked miracles, you have healed, that is what I heard.”

Jacob does not so much as blink an eye.

“My daughter died, as did six of my grandchildren.” Drużbacka spreads out her fingers before him and counts: one, two, three, four, five, six . . . “Have you heard of bringing the dead back to life? Some people seem to be able to do it. Prophets know the way. Have you ever managed to do it, even with just an old dog?” (The Books of Jacob)

At Easter, after many petitions from Jacob, the prisoner is granted permission to walk out onto the ramparts once a week. From then on, all the old soldiers await his Sunday promenade. Would you look at that, he’s up there now. The Jewish prophet. His dark figure, tall but stooped, walks along the wall, there and back, turning with a kind of violence and racing in the other direction, to then rebound off some invisible wall and start back again, like a pendulum. You could set the clocks by him. Roch will do exactly that—he will adjust the watch he received from the convert. It is the most valuable thing he has ever owned in his life, and he regrets that this has happened to him only now. If he had had it twenty years ago . . . He pictures himself in his parade uniform, walking into an inn teeming with comrades in arms. At least he can be assured that, thanks to this watch, he will have a decent funeral, with a wooden casket and a grand salvo.

He observes the prisoner calmly, without sympathy, accustomed as he is to unexpected twists of fate. To Roch’s mind, this convert prophet’s is a pretty decent fate. His followers provide their master with good food and smuggle money into the monastery, even though it is strictly prohibited. Many things are prohibited in the monastery, and yet they have everything here, whether it’s Wallachian or Magyar wine or even vodka, and everyone closes their eyes to tobacco. The bans have little effect. They only work at the start, but then human nature with its long finger begins to poke a hole in them, first a little one and then, when it encounters no resistance, a larger and larger one. Until finally the hole is bigger than what isn’t the hole. That’s how it goes with any interdiction.

The prior, for example, has banned the old soldiers on numerous occasions from begging for alms at the entrance to the church. And they really did quit for a while, but then, after a few days—though there wasn’t any begging—one hand did extend for just a little while as the pilgrims passed by. Soon others joined it, then more and more, until, after another few days, a muttering began:

“Spare a little change.” (The Books of Jacob)

Among the advantages of the state in which Yente has found herself is that she now understands the workings of the messianic machine. She sees the world from above—it is dark, faintly marked by sparks of light, each of them a home. A faltering glow in the western sky draws a red line under the world. A dark road winds, and beside it the river’s current gleams like steel. Along the road moves a vehicle, a tiny dot that can hardly be seen; a dull rattle spreads in waves through the dark, thick air as the cart goes over the little wooden bridge and on past the mill. The messianic machine is like that mill standing over the river. The dark water turns the great wheels evenly, without regard for the weather, slowly and systematically. The person by the wheels seems to have no significance; his movements are random and chaotic. The person flails; the machine works. The motion of the wheels transfers power to the stone gears that grind the grain. Everything that falls into them will be crushed into dust.

Getting out of captivity also requires tragic sacrifices. The Messiah must stoop as low as possible, down into those dispassionate mechanisms of the world where the sparks of holiness, scattered into the gloom, have been imprisoned. Where darkness and humiliation are greatest. The Messiah will gather the sparks of holiness, which means that he will leave behind him an even greater darkness. God has sent him down from on high to be abased, into the abyss of the world, where powerful serpents will mercilessly mock him, asking: “Where’s that God of yours now? What happened to him? And why won’t he give you a hand, you poor thing?” The Messiah must remain deaf to those vicious taunts, step on the snakes, commit the worst acts, forget who he is, become a simpleton and a fool, enter into all the false religions, be baptized and don a turban. He must annul all prohibitions and eliminate all commandments.

Yente’s father, who saw with his own eyes the First, that is, Sabbatai, brought the Messiah on his lips into their home and passed it on to his favorite daughter. The Messiah is something more than a figure and a person—it is something that flows in your blood, resides in your breath, it is the dearest and most precious human thought: that salvation exists. And that’s why you have to cultivate it like the most delicate plant, blow on it, water it with tears, put it in the sun during the day, move it into a warm room in the nighttime. (The Books of Jacob)

Nahman, or Piotr Jakubowski, has been sitting in his tiny room and writing for many days now. It is terribly cold in the apartment he and Wajgełe rented in Solec, which is far away from everything. Wajgełe has not been herself since the death of the child; whole days go by without her saying a word. No one comes to see them, and they don’t go to see anyone. Dusk falls fast, the color of rust. Jakubowski gathers wax and squeezes together new candles from the scraps. He writes out page after page that falls onto the floor.

. . . overflows. Every situation feels endless to me when I try to describe it, and out of helplessness, the pen falls from my hands. The description of a situation never fully exhausts it, for there is always something left undescribed. When I write, every detail sends me back to another, and then the next one again to something else, to some sign or gesture, so that I must always make a decision about what direction to pursue, in telling this story, where to fix my internal gaze, that same powerful sense that is able to summon back past images.

So in writing I stand at every moment at a crossroads, like the idiot Ivan from the fairy tales Jacob used to love telling us so much back in Ivanie. And now those crossroads are before my eyes, those bifurcating paths, of which one, the simplest one, the middle path, is for fools, while the other, to the right, is for the overconfident, and then there is the third path, which is for the brave, the desperadoes, even—that one will be full of traps, potholes, hexes, and calamitous occurrences.

It happens that sometimes I choose that simple road, the one in the middle, and I naively forget about all the complications of what I am describing, trusting in the so-called facts, the events as I would narrate them to myself, as if my eyes were the only ones to perceive them, as if there were no hesitation or uncertainty in existence, and things were as they appeared to be (even as we behold them, as I discussed so feverishly with Moliwda back in Smyrna). Then I write: “Jacob said,” as if it weren’t my ears that heard it, but God’s—that is what Jacob said, and that is a fact. I describe a place as if others would have experienced it as I did, as if that were the way it was. I trust my memory, and in recording what comes out of it, I make that frail instrument into a hammer that is to forge a bell. Going down that path, I believe that what I describe really happened, and that it happened that way once and for all. I even believe that there was never any chance of anything else having happened instead.

The simple middle road is false.

When such doubt comes over me, I choose the road on the right. Now it is the other way around—I am the rudder and the ship, and so I focus on my own experiences, as if the world before my eyes did not exist but was instead formed solely by my senses. And in spite of what Reb Mordke always taught me, I blow on my own fire and thereby ignite the embers of my self, about which I ought to forget, the ashes of which I should rather scatter to the wind—but instead I feed it until it is a gigantic flame. And then what do I have? Me, me, me—a regret-worthy state of accidental imprisonment in a hall of mirrors, the sort the Gypsies sometimes put up in order to charge an admission fee. Then everything is more about me than it is about Jacob, his words and acts are made to pass through the sieve of my tangled vanity.

The road to the right is a pathetic state indeed.

Therefore in desperation but also hope I run toward the left, and in doing so, make the same choice as the idiot Ivan. Just like him, I let myself be guided by chance and the voices of those who would help me. No one who did not do this, who did not trust the voices from the outside, would survive that madness of the left path, instead becoming an instant victim of the chaos. Recognizing myself as a speck being whipped around by greater forces, recognizing myself as a boat on the sea flung around by the waves (as when we sailed to Smyrna with Jacob), abandoning my ideas of my own power and having the trust to surrender to rule, I really become the idiot Ivan. And yet, it was he who conquered all the princesses and all the kingdoms of the world and tricked the most powerful into their downfalls.

And so I, too, surrender to the guidance of my own Hand, my own Head, Voices, the Ghosts of the Dead, God, the Great Virgin, Letters, Sefirot. I go sentence by sentence, blindly down the line, and although I don’t know what awaits me at the end, I patiently stumble forward, not inquiring into the price I will have to pay, and even less so about any reward. My friend and ally is that moment, that urgent hour, the dearest time to me, when suddenly out of nowhere the writing gets easy, and then everything appears to be wonderfully able to be expressed. What a blissful state it is! Then I feel safe, and the whole world becomes a cradle that the Shekhinah has laid me down in, and now the Shekhinah leans in over me like a mother over an infant.

The path to the left is only for those who have shown they deserve it, those who understand what Reb Mordke always said—that the world itself demands to be narrated, and only then does it truly exist, only then can it flourish fully. But also that by telling the story of the world, we are changing the world.

That is why God created the letters of the alphabet, that we might have the opportunity to narrate to him what he created. Reb Mordke always chuckled at this. “God is blind. Did you not know that?” he would say. “He created us that we would be his guides, his five senses.” And he would chuckle long and hard until he began to cough from the smoke. (The Books of Jacob)

In Coetzee's eyes, we human beings will never abandon politics because politics is too convenient and too attractive as a theatre in which to give play to our baser emotions. Baser emotions meaning hatred and rancour and spite and jealousy and bloodlust and so forth. In other words, politics is a symptom of our fallen state and expresses that fallen state. (Summertime)

I write for love, respect, money, fame, honor, redemption. I write to be included in a world I feel rejected by. But I don’t want to be included by surrendering myself to expectations. I want to buy my admission to others by engaging their interests and feelings, doing the least possible damage to my feelings and interests but changing theirs a bit. But I think I was not aware early on of those things. I wrote early on because it was there to do and because if anything good happened in the poem I felt good. Poems are experiences as well as whatever else they are, and for me now, nothing, not respect, honor, money, seems as supportive as just having produced a body of work, which I hope is, all considered, good. ("The Paris Review Interview" in Set in Motion)

I never seem to think there is such a thing as an audience, and certainly never try to reach an audience. What I try to do is through the work possible in writing the poem, I try to create a poem that will come as close as possible to saying the kind of place I am, where I am and who I am and what seems to me to be central, and so on. . . . As a single person. And then my highest hope is that some equally single, some other person will find that poem and say, “Yes, this is true for me as well.” I’m not trying to lead a mob for a cause so-and-so in Washington, or to get people to believe in my politics instead of theirs. I would just like to say, as truthfully as I can, what seems to me to be true for me, as an individual, and then if that’s true for anyone else in the world who happens across my poems then he will recognize it. And then we will know that I am here and perhaps one day I’ll find out he’s there. And we’ll have that. So I do want an audience, but I want them to recognize themselves, wherever they are. One in Montana, one in West Virginia, and one in southern Florida, or wherever they are. And we could all say, “Yes, that feels right for me.” (“The Unassimilable Fact Leads Us On...” interview with Jim Stahl in Set in Motion)

“Besides, I hate lessons about the value of money. What’s the point? Everybody knows it’s valuable. I don’t want any lessons imposed on me. I don’t like people that give lessons. We’re all free. We were meant to love and help each other, not to give lessons.” (A Sport and a Pastime)

The more clearly one sees this world, the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist. (A Sport and a Pastime)

The carts are so packed that one has to get down off them to have a chance of making it over even the smallest rise. Feet raise clouds of dust, for September is hot and dry, and the grass by the road is faded from the sun. Most people go on foot, resting every few miles in the shade of the walnut trees, and then all the adults and children look around in the fallen leaves for the nuts, which are as big as their palms.

At crossroads such as this one, pilgrims coming from all different directions join together and greet one another heartily. The majority of them are poor, small tradesmen and craftsmen, the kind who support their families with their own hands, weaving, wiring, sharpening, and mending. The men, in ragged clothing, are bent double from the portable stalls they carry on their shoulders from morning to night. Dusty and tired, they exchange news and offer one another simple food. They don’t need anything other than water and a piece of bread to tide them over until the great event. When you think like that, a person doesn’t want much in order to live. He doesn’t even have to eat every day. What does he need combs, ribbons, clay pots, sharp knives for, when the world is about to be totally transformed? Everything is going to be different, although no one can say how. That’s what they are all talking about.

The carts are full of women and children. Cradles are strapped to the little wagons and hung up under a tree when they stop awhile, mothers putting down their infants in them with relief, their hands having gone numb from holding them. The bigger children, barefoot, grimy, dazed by the heat, doze in their mothers’ skirts or on little beds of hay covered with dirty linen.

In some villages other Jews go out to them and spit at their feet, and children of every origin—Polish, Ruthenian, and Jewish—shout at them as they pass:

“Ne’er-do-wells! Ne’er-do-wells! Trinity! Trinity!”

In the evenings they don’t even ask for a place to sleep, they just lie down by the water, at the edge of a thicket, by some wall still warm from the day. The women hang the cradles, the diapers, light a fire, and the men set out into the village for some food, gathering along the way fallen green apples and purple plums that are swollen from the sun and lure wasps and bumblebees with their profligate sweet bodies.

Yente sees the sky opening over them in their sleep; they sleep strangely lightly. Everything is holy, as though it were special, as though it were Shabbat, as if it had all been washed and ironed. As if one had to walk very straight now and take very careful steps. Maybe the one watching them will finally wake from the numbness that lasts thousands of years? Under the divine gaze, everything becomes strange and heavy with portent. Children, for instance, find a metal cross pressed into a tree so firmly that it cannot be extracted from the bark that has grown around it. The clouds take on unusual shapes, perhaps of biblical animals—maybe those lions no one has ever seen, so that no one even knows what they looked like. Or a cloud that looks like the fish that swallowed Jonah as it floats over the horizon. And in the tiny little cloud beside it someone even spotted Jonah himself, spit out, crooked as an apple core. Sometimes they are accompanied by Noah’s blue ark. It glides across the firmament, enormous, and Noah himself bustles about in it, feeding his animals for a hundred and fifty days. And on the roof of the ark, just look, everyone, look—who is that? That is the uninvited guest, the giant Og, who, when the floodwaters were rising, latched on to the ark at the last minute.

They say: We will not die. Baptism will save us from death. But what’s it going to be like? Will people get old? Will people stay the same age for all eternity? They say everyone is going to stay thirty forever. This cheers the old and scares the young. But supposedly this is the best age, where health, wisdom, and experience are entwined harmoniously, their meanings equal. What would it be like, not to die? There would be a lot of time for everything, you’d collect a lot of groszy, build a house, and travel a little here and there, since, after all, a whole eternity cannot be spent in a single place.

Everything has lain in ruin until now, the world is made up of wants—this is lacking, that is gone. But why is it like that? Couldn’t there have been everything in excess—warmth, and food, and roofs over people’s heads, and beauty? Whom would it have hurt? Why was such a world as this created? There is nothing permanent under the sun, everything passes, and you won’t even have time to get a good look at it. But why is it like that? Could there not have been more time, and more reflection?

It is only when we become worthy of being created anew that we shall receive from the Good True God a new soul, full, whole. And man shall be as everlasting as God. (The Books of Jacob)

We conducted many investigations into the Trinity in Ivanie, and it seemed to me that I had come to grasp its meaning.

What is our real task if not the establishment of equilibrium between the unity of God and the multiplicity of the world created by him? As for ourselves, people—are we not abandoned in this “in-between,” in between the One and a world of divisions? This limitless “between” has its strange critical point—the double. This is the first experience of the thinking man—when he notices the abyss that appears between himself and the rest of the world. This is the painful Two, the fundamental crack in the created world that gives rise to contradictions and all sorts of dualisms. This and that. You and me. Left and right. Sitra Achra, or the other side, the left side, the demonic forces in the guise of the broken shells of the vessels that could not hold the light when they were broken (shevirat haKelim)—that is the Two. Perhaps were it not for the Two in the world, the world would be completely different, although it’s hard to imagine that; no doubt Jacob would be able to. One time we worked ourselves to the bone, late into the night, trying to complete this assignment, but it was to no avail, for our minds think in this rhythm: two, two, two.

The Trinity is holy, like a wise wife, reconciling contradictions. Two is like a young roe doe, leaping over every contradiction. That’s what makes the Trinity holy, that it can tame evil. But because the Trinity must ceaselessly work on behalf of the equilibrium it disturbs, it is shaky, and it isn’t until you get to Four that you attain the highest holiness and perfection that restores divine proportions. It is not in vain that God’s name in Hebrew is composed of four letters, and that all the elements of the world were established so by Him (Yeruhim once told me that even animals can count to four!), and everything that is important in the world must be quadruple.

Once Moshe went to the kitchen, took some challah dough, brought it back, and started forming some sort of shape from it. We laughed at him, especially Jacob, because nothing went together less than Moshe and kitchen work.

“What is it?” he asked us, and revealed the result of his project.

We saw on the table an alef made of dough, and we answered him accordingly. Then Moshe took the ends of the holy letter made of dough and in a couple of simple movements reshaped it.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Now it was a cross.

For, Moshe argued, the holy letter is the germ of the cross, its original form. If it were a living plant, it would grow into a cross. The cross thus contains a great mystery. For God is one in three forms, and then to the threeness of God we add the Shekhinah.

Such knowledge was not for everyone. People who had gathered with us in Ivanie were of such varying backgrounds and had had such different experiences that we all agreed not to give them this holy knowledge, lest they understand it amiss. When they asked me about the Trinity, I would raise my hand to my forehead and touch the skin there, saying, “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

These were the kinds of conversations we had only with each other, in a small group and in hushed voices—for the walls of the Ivanie huts tended to not be sealed completely—when we finished writing letters, and our fingers were all covered in ink, and our eyes were so tired that all they could do was gaze into the dance of the candle flames. And then Moliwda would tell us tales of the beliefs of those Bogomils, as he called them, and in those beliefs we were surprised to determine that we had much in common with them, as if the path taken by both us and them were in the beginning one but later bifurcated to then converge again into one, just like our two roads in Ivanie.

Is life itself not a stranger to this world? And are we not strangers, and is our God not a stranger? Is this not why we appear so different, so distant, so scary, and incomprehensible to those who really do belong to this world? But this world is equally bizarre and incomprehensible to any stranger to it, and its rules are incomprehensible, as are its customs. For the stranger comes from the farthest distance, from the outside, and he must endure the fate of the foreigner, alone and defenseless, completely misunderstood. We are foreigners’ foreigners, Jews’ Jews. And we will always be homesick.

Since we do not know the roads of this world, we move through it defenseless, blind, knowing only that we are strangers to it.

Moliwda said that as soon as we strangers, living amongst those others, get used to and learn to take pleasure in the charms of this world, we will forget where we came from and what sort of origins were ours. Then our misery will end, but at the price of forgetting our true nature, and this is the most painful moment of our fate, the fate of the stranger. That is why we must remind ourselves of our foreignness and care for this memory as we would our most treasured possession. Recognize the world as the place of our exile, recognize its laws as foreign, as strange . . .

Dawn is beginning to break when Nahman finishes; a moment later, just outside the window, the rooster crows in such dramatic fashion that Nahman trembles like a night demon who fears the light. He slips into the warmth of the bed and lies there for a long time on his back, unable to go to sleep. Polish words crowd into his mind, sticking together into sentences, and not even knowing how, he silently composes his prayer for the soul, but in Polish. And since yesterday he saw Gypsies here, they, too, are jumbled up in his mind, and they jump into his sentences, the whole caravan of them:

Like a sailor visiting the sea’s abyss,

Or, in the vast uncharted wilderness,

Like a Gypsy caravan, my dear soul

Won’t travel toward just any goal.

No shackles of iron can close it in,

Nor the pompousness of their chagrin,

No custom, no tradition will strain it.

Not my own heart’s shelter can contain it.

It alters since it doesn’t alter,

My soul won’t let me down or falter.

My soul rises, good Lord, to Your great dome;

Give it a fit room inside Your home.

Not even Nahman himself knows when he falls asleep. (The Books of Jacob)

By the time the Jews left Egypt, the world was ready for salvation and everything was waiting, prepared—both down below and on high. It was unprecedented—the wind died down completely, the leaves did not move on the trees, the clouds in the sky drifted so slowly that only the most patient were able to discern their movement. It was the same with the water—it became thick as cream, while the earth went the other way, became flimsy and unreliable, so that it often happened that people fell into it up to their ankles. No bird chirped, no bee flew, there were no waves in the sea, people did not speak—it was so quiet you could hear the heartbeat of the smallest animal.

Everything stopped in anticipation of the new Law, and all eyes were turned to Moses, who was climbing Mount Zion to receive it directly from God’s hands. And so it was that God Himself engraved the Law on two stone tablets in such a way that it would be discernible to the human eye and comprehensible to the human mind. This was the Torah of Atzilut.

During Moses’s absence, his people gave in to temptation and indulged in sin. Then Moses, coming down from on high and seeing what was going on, thought: I left them for such a short time, and yet they were unable to persist in virtuousness. Thus they are unworthy of the beneficent and noble law God appointed them. In his great despair Moses shattered the tablets on the ground so that they broke into a thousand pieces and turned to dust. Then a terrible wind rose up and threw Moses against the rock and set the clouds and the water in motion and made the earth solid again. Moses understood that his people were not mature enough for the law of liberty intended for the saved world. All day and all night he sat resting against the rock and looking down at the fires burning in the camp of his people, and he heard their voices, their music, and the cries of their children. Then Samael came to him in the guise of an angel and dictated to him the commandments that from then on would keep God’s people enslaved.

In order that no one would know the true Law of Freedom, Samael carefully gathered the little pieces of the shattered Torah of Atzilut and scattered them around the world among many different religions. When the Messiah comes, he will have to pass over into Samael’s kingdom to collect the tablets’ shards and present the new Law in its final revelation.

“What was this lost Law all about?” asks Wajgełe, when she and Nahman climb into bed.

“Who could possibly know, since it has been dispersed?” he answers warily. “It was good. It respected people.”

But Wajgełe is stubborn.

“Was it the opposite of what we have now? The opposite of ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ would be ‘Thou shalt commit it.’ And the opposite of ‘Thou shalt not kill’ would be: ‘Kill.’”

“It’s not that simple.”

“You always tell me that—‘It’s not that simple, it’s not that simple . . . ,’” she mocks him. She pulls a pair of woolen stockings up over her skinny legs.

“People want easy explanations, and so we must simplify everything for their sake, and since it cannot be written down, it all becomes rather stupid . . . This or that, black, white—it’s like digging with a hoe. Simple is dangerous.”

“But I want to understand it, and I can’t.”

“Wajgełe, my time will come, and your time will come. That is grace. Sabbatai, the old Mosaic law, the one given by Samael, is no longer in effect. That also explains the conversion of our Lord, Sabbatai, to Islam. He saw that Israel, in obeying the Mosaic law, was no longer in the service of the God of the Truth. That is why our Lord gave up the Torah in favor of the Din Islam . . .” (The Books of Jacob)

There exists in Ein Sof, that is, in the Infinite itself, in the divine source, absolute good, which is the origin and source of all perfection and all good in the world. It is perfection, and perfection requires no alterations, it is dignified and immovable, there can be no movement in it. But for us, who look upon it from the underside of creation, from afar, this motionlessness seems dead, and therefore bad, yet perfection excludes movement, creation, change, and therefore the very possibility of our freedom. That is why it is said that in the depths of absolute good, the root of all evil is concealed, and that root is the negation of every miracle, every movement, and all that is possible and all that might still happen.

For us, then, for people, good is something other than what it is for God. For us, good is the tension between God’s perfection and his withdrawal in order that the world might arise. For us, good is the absence of God from where he could instead be.

Nahman rubs his chilled fingers. He can’t stop, the sentences attack his brain one after the next:

When the vessels broke, and the world came about, it immediately began to climb up to where it fell from, gathering itself from bottom to top, from least to most perfect. The world ascends higher and higher and works to perfect itself, obtaining new goods and adding them to the previous ones, organizing the sparks released from the shells of matter into brilliance and strength. This is tikkun, a process of repairing in which mankind can assist. The process of ascent must transcend the law that is already in place and create a new law, in order to then transcend it again. In this world of dead husks, nothing has been given once and for all. Whosoever does not move up stands still, that is, falls downward. (The Books of Jacob)

I take it all back. I take it all back. There are certain kinds of men in every field that I can talk to as well as I can talk to a good scientist. I met a historian, a writer of history from France once, and had a marvellous conversation with him. Maurois, his name was, André Maurois. And then I met an artist, Robert Irwin, who’s a very important artist in Los Angeles, in modern art, and I could talk to him at the same depth of excitement.

So I take it all back. If you give me the right man, in any field, I can talk to him. I know what the condition is: that he did whatever he did as far as he can go, that he studied every aspect of it, that he has stretched himself to the end. He’s not a dilettante in any way. Therefore he’s up against mysteries all the way around the edge. We can talk about mystery and awe. That’s what we have in common.

The cowherds pulled her out when they watered the cattle at dawn. By the time we arrived there on our way to school, she was lying on the thin ice formed by the water which had been spilt from the well. Under this covering the black clods of earth, the pieces of straw and dung glinted and sparkled like rare jewels under glass. There she lay with open eyes in which, like the small objects under the ice, was frozen the broken terror of a startled glance. Her mouth was open, her nose rather haughtily tilted, and on her forehead and beautiful cheeks there were huge scratches which had either occurred during her fall, or had been made by the cowherds as they let down the bucket before they caught sight of her among the ice-patches in the dark winter dawn. She was barefooted, she had left her boots in the assistant farm-manager’s room, by the bed from which she had suddenly leapt and dashed straight as an arrow to the well.

I first read these words ten years ago, on a hot day in February. Early in the morning of that day I had closed the window of this room and had pulled down the blind in order to keep out the sunlight and the north wind. I had then taken a book down from one of the shelves and had sat at this table and begun to read.

The name of the book that I read on that hot day has already been written on one of these pages. I had taken the book down from the shelf in the morning because I wanted to read a book about grasslands. Even then, ten years ago, I had grown tired of most of the books on my shelves. Each year I had read fewer books. The only books I was still interested in reading were books about grasslands.

Until that hot day in February I had never opened the covers of the book containing the words that I wrote on this page fifteen minutes ago. I took down the book from the shelf on that hot day because I understood that one of the words on the cover of the book was the word for grassland in the Magyar language.

Ten years ago I believed that any person named or referred to in a book was already dead. The person named on the cover of the book might have been alive or dead, but any person named or referred to inside the book was unquestionably dead.

On the hot day when I first read in a certain book the words beginning, The cowherds pulled her out when they watered the cattle at dawn...I did not at once cease to believe what I had believed all my life concerning the people named or referred to in books. What I did was to write on a page.

Of the many hundreds of pages I have written in this room, the first page I wrote was a letter. After I had written the letter I addressed it and posted it to a woman who had once lived in a street named Daphne in the district where I was born. Then I went on writing on other pages, every one of which is still lying somewhere around me in this room. On every day while I was writing on pages, I thought of the people referred to or named in the book with the word for grassland on its cover.

At first while I was writing I thought of those people as though they were all dead and I myself was alive. At some time while I was writing, however, I began to suspect what I am now sure of. I began to suspect that all persons named or referred to in the pages of books are alive, whereas all other persons are dead.

When I wrote the letter which was the first of all my pages, I was thinking of a young woman who was, I thought, dead while I was still alive. I thought the young woman was dead while I remained alive in order to go on writing what she could never read.

Today while I write on this last page, I am still thinking of the young woman. Today, however, I am sure the young woman is still alive. I am sure the young woman is still alive while I am dead. Today I am dead but the young woman remains alive in order to go on reading what I could never write. (Inland)

Then let them that are in Judaea flee to the mountains...

In the spring of 1951 I first saw the leaves coming forth on the fig-tree in my backyard two months before I heard the fig-tree mentioned in the gospel. When I first saw the leaves I was living in the house with the fish pond behind it. I could not have imagined when I first saw the leaves that before I heard the gospel I would have travelled two hundred kilometres across the Great Divide to the district between the Ovens and Reedy Creek and then back again to the old weatherboard house on the edge of a grassland near the backyard where my father had held me for my first photograph.

I heard the last gospel of the church year only a half-hour’s walk from where I had seen the leaves on the fig-tree but I knew while I heard the gospel that I would never see that particular fig-tree again – or the house with the fish pond or the girl from Bendigo Street.

When I heard the gospel I felt a heaviness pressing on me, but not for long. I was still only twelve years old, and the summer and the new church year were beginning. I had thought, as I thought every year on the last Sunday after Pentecost, of the end of the world drifting towards me like clouds or smoke from the direction of Europe or the Middle East; but then I had thought of a greenness within the greyness.

I was thinking every day of the settlement in the mountains between the King and the Broken. I was going to ask my parents not to take me to the other side of the city of Melbourne but to let me live with one of the families who grew potatoes in the red soil of clearings in the green forest and who sang the office of vespers and compline every evening in the timber chapel built with their own hands.

Something else kept me from feeling heaviness. Among the first words of the gospel for the last Sunday after Pentecost are the words addressed to the reader. I had always considered those words as addressed in a special sense to me.

Like many children, I was afraid of the end of the world. But even at the worst moment – even when the stars of heaven were falling and the sun was being darkened – I could still hear the sound of the words being read. Not even the end of the world could drown out the sound of the words describing it.

I considered myself the Reader. Even after the greenness of the world had been buried under the greyness, the Reader would have to remain alive in order to read what the Writer had written about the green and the grey.

For twenty-five years, until I began to write on these pages, I would have said that the child had been right. I would have said that I had remained alive. I was alive and reading.

When I began to write on these pages I thought often about a person I called my reader. Sometimes I addressed the person named Reader. I could not think of words without a reader. I could not think of a reader who was not alive. But since I first began to write on these pages I have learned that a reader need not be alive. I can think of this page being read by a person who is dead as easily as you, reader, can think of this page as being written by someone who is dead.

Heaven and earth shall pass away but my words shall not pass away. (Inland)

And from the fig-tree learn a parable: when the branch thereof is now tender, and the leaves come forth, you know the summer is nigh. So likewise you, when you shall see all these things, know that it is nigh, even at the doors.

Even the gospel was more than one gospel. The reading for the last Sunday after Pentecost began with the abomination of desolation and with a warning to the reader. For three quarters of its length, the gospel for that last Sunday of the year continued to warn. Near the end came the clouds and the four winds, and then the last pause before the ultimate turmoil. And in that last pause, startlingly under the terrible sky, the fig-tree appeared, with its leaves coming forth.

More clearly than anything I read or heard in my childhood, that last pause near the end of the last gospel of the year told me that every thing would always be more than one thing. The last pause told me that every thing would always contain another thing, which would contain still another thing or which would seem, absurdly at first sight, to contain the thing that had seemed to contain it.

Five years after I had heard the last gospel of the ecclesiastical year in the parish church of Saint Mark, Fawkner, I listened for the first time in my life to a piece of what I called classical music. Near the end of that music I heard a pause. The solemn themes of the music paused for a moment. Just before the clouds had drifted over all the sky and just before the four winds whistled and the last struggle began, I heard the pause of the summer that seemed nigh.

I have heard that pause many times since in pieces of music. I have heard the pause while I read the next-to-last page in many a book. The larger, the solemn themes are about to go into battle for the last time. By now, of course, the solemn themes are not themes but men and women, and when they pause for the last time they look over their shoulders.

They look back towards some district where they lived as children or where they once fell in love. Perhaps they see the green lawn or even the branch with green leaves that they saw in their native district. For a moment a simple theme is the only theme heard; the greenness appears in place of the greyness.

For an absurd moment within that moment, the listener or the reader dares to suppose that this after all is the last theme; this and not the other is the end; the green has outlasted the grey; the grey has been covered over at last by the green.

But this is only a moment within a moment. The clouds resume their drifting; the four winds whistle. The solemn themes turn to meet the storm. (Inland)

 hen you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, standing in the holy place (he that readeth, let him understand)...

These words, like most of the words of my religion, had many meanings. Whenever I heard these words as a child, I was standing myself in the holy place: in a large weatherboard church in McCrae Street, Bendigo; or in a tiny church with poles propping its walls on the continuation inland of the Great Ocean Road at Nirranda; or in the fibro-cement and weatherboard church-school in Landells Road, Pascoe Vale. I was standing in the holy place and hearing the words, but I had my missal open in my hands – I was also reading. I was he who reads: he who was commanded to understand.

Around me in the church, hundreds of other people – children and adults – were reading the same words that I was reading. Yet I had no doubt that I was the one commanded to understand; I was of all those readers the true reader.

I was the true reader because I had always known that everything I read was true. If it was not true in the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri, or wherever I happened to be standing or sitting when I read, still it was true in some district elsewhere.

When I had read those words in weatherboard churches or in the fibro-cement and weatherboard church-school, I had understood that all the districts of the world would one day be destroyed. At some time before the end, the people of all the districts of the world would flee from their homes; they would flee with their few sticks of furniture and their rags of clothes, but they would not escape. The people of every district would suffer, and the females would suffer worst. Then, while the people were still fleeing, they would see Jesus himself: the person who had first spoken the words that had later been written by Matthew. The people trying to escape would see, towards the end, the true speaker of the words they had once read, coming in the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty.

Whenever I had read the gospel for the last Sunday after Pentecost I had seen a sky darkening, men and their wives and children fleeing, and then the grey clouds of heaven drifting towards the people. But without lifting my eyes from the page, I knew that the sky was mostly blue over the district where I was standing; I knew that men were pushing lawnmowers across their backyards and women were opening the doors of ovens and then pouring cups of water into baking-dishes where legs of lamb or rolls of beef were roasting. I knew that these men and women saw no clouds drifting towards them. (Inland)

On grasslands I almost forget my fear of drowning. Grasslands have waves and hollows, but the shape of the land under the waves is easy to dream of seeing. If the shape of a grassland changes, it changes too little to be noticed during a lifetime. When the wind makes waves in the grass, I lie under the leaning stems. I am not afraid of drowning in grass. On grasslands I have solid soil under me, and under the soil rock – the one thing I have always trusted.

I walk long distances across grasslands before I come to a creek or a river. And even I, who was always too frightened to learn to swim, can wade across a stony bed and poke a short stick into the deeper holes, and can find bottom and come out safely on the other side.

Ponds, swamps, bogs, and marshes frighten me, but I know where to look out for them. Much more alarming is to learn from seeing a subsided place or a sudden, cream-coloured cliff at my feet that for some time past, while I thought I was safe, I was walking over limestone country.

After I had written the sentence above, I remembered a thin book of poems by W. H. Auden that I had put on my shelves twenty years ago. I found the book and I turned to a long poem I had remembered as praising limestone country. I began to read the poem, but I stopped half-way through the third line of the first stanza after reading that the poet is homesick for limestone because it dissolves in water.

I did not want to read the words of a man sick, or pretending to be sick, for stone that dissolves in water. I did not want to hear from a man wanting to stand at the site of the wearing away of the thing I most trust; at the site of the melting of the most solid thing I know into the thing I am most afraid of.

I did not read any further into that poem, but I turned to another poem I had remembered: ‘Plains’.

This time I read the whole of the first stanza, but I did not read past the poet’s announcing that he cannot see a plain without a shudder and his pleading to God never to make him live on a plain – he would prefer to end his days on the worst of seacoasts in preference to any plain.

I put the book back on the shelf where it had stood unopened for twenty years, and I thought of all the poets who have stood on the seashores of the world watching the sea pulling idiot-faces at them or listening to the sea making idiot-noises at them. I thought the reason for my never having been able to write poetry must be that I have always kept well away from the sea. I thought of all the lines of poetry in the world as the ripples and waves of an idiot-sea, and all the sentences of prose in the world as the clumps and tussocks, leaning and waving in the wind but still showing the shape of the soil and the rock underneath, on a grassland.

I am hardly frightened of the creeks or the slow, shallow rivers of grasslands. But I prefer not to think of the underground streams of limestone country. The worst death would be to drown in a tunnel, in darkness.

I am not likely to die in limestone country. I am more likely to learn one day that the grass of the world is all one grassland. For most of my life I have looked at strips and patches of grass and weeds among the outlying streets of districts or beside railway lines or even in corners of graveyards. Or I have looked at the bare spaces between streams on maps of landlocked districts and great plains far from my own district. More likely than my being tricked by limestone country, I expect to find one day that I can walk easily across all the grasslands of the world: I can walk easily because the seas and the deep rivers have shrunk to the corners and the margins of the pages of the world.

Even the rain on grasslands seems no threat.

From a certain cloud high above the horizon a grey feather hangs down. The clouds around are whitish and drifting steadily, but one grey cloud drags a wing like a bird trying to lead the eye away.

Later a fine rain falls. The drops cling to skin, or they slide slowly down the sides of grass-stems. The feel of rain on grasslands is no more than the brushing past of a wing of water.

Whenever I want to read about the rain on grasslands, I take down from my shelves the book Proust: A Biography, by André Maurois, translated by Gerard Hopkins, and published by Meridian Books Inc. of New York in 1958.

In the last paragraph of that book I read the words:

Yet it is his exaltation that has brought us the perfume of the hawthorn trees that died long years ago; that has made it possible for men and women who have never seen, nor will ever see, the land of France, to breathe with ecstasy, through the curtain of the falling rain, the scent of invisible yet enduring lilacs. (Inland)

Some people have said that an eye is a window, but anyone who has looked carefully has seen that an eye is a mirror.

[...]

I put Tess of the D’Urbervilles back in its place on my shelves, and I took down Wuthering Heights and looked at certain pages. At first I looked as though I was looking through window-pages, but then I saw that the young woman I saw was not even a young woman but a girl-woman and that the grassy place I saw was not a moorland but part of a paddock of grass in the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. When I had seen this I was ready to acknowledge that a page of a book is not a window but a mirror. But in order to prove this finally to myself I looked for a certain page that I remembered in Wuthering Heights. The words on that page describe a man sleeping in a room and dreaming of the ghost of a female child who is trying to get into the room from outside by way of the window.

I stood in this room of my own and I held out in front of me the page where the word window is printed. If a page of a book is a window, I should have seen at that moment – in order from the nearest to my eyes to the furthest from them – the man in his room, the window of that room, and on the other side of that window the face of a female child calling herself Catherine Linton. I should have seen, while I went on looking at the page which was itself a window and which had the word window printed on it, the man thrusting his fist through the glass from inside outwards, then the female child gripping the man’s hand with one of her own hands, then the man trying to shake his hand free from the grip of the hand of the female child, then the man dragging the wrist of the female child backwards and forwards across the edge of the broken pane until the wrist is marked by a red circle of blood.

But what I saw instead was myself in the room and a girl-woman on the other side of the window and trying to get in. I was a man whose hair had turned grey at its edges and whose belly had begun to protrude. The girl-woman was someone I had last seen when she and I were twelve years old. And I did not thrust my fist through the glass; I turned a key in one of the double panes of the window and swung the panes apart and then back against the walls of the room. Then I took hold of the wrist of the girl-woman and guided her into the room.

I had believed for most of my life that a page of a book is a window. Then I had learned that a page of a book is a mirror. (Inland)

Play the game. Don’t make it all about you. Look for challenges. But don’t aim for a specific outcome. Eschew ulterior motives. Hold nothing back. Be gentle and strong. Get involved, and the hell with winning. Don’t over-analyze, don’t calculate, but stay alert, alert for signs. Be vulnerable. Show your eyes, invite others to look deep; make sure there’s enough space, and try to recognize everyone’s own image. Make no decisions you don’t feel excited about. Let yourself fail. Above all, give yourself time and take the long way round. Never ignore what a tree or a body of water has to tell you. Turn in where you drawn to do so, and give yourself permission to bask in the sun. Never mind your relatives, offer support to strangers, bend down to look at trifles, duck into deserted places, don’t fall for the high drama of destiny, laugh conflict to bits. Show your true colors till you prove to be right, and the rustling of leaves turns sweet. Walk about the villages. (Walk About the Villages)

I do not read books nowadays but I sometimes handle books and sometimes I even look into a book. If the book is a book that I read long ago, I look at a few pages. But if the book is one of the many that I have never read, I read the words on the dust-jacket and in the preliminary pages. I am not so stupid that I suppose the words I read are telling me about the other pages – the pages of the text that I will never read. I suppose instead that the words I read at the front and the back of the book and even the illustrations and the patterns on the dust-jacket are telling me about the pages of text in some other book. The other book is nowhere on my shelves. I may never see the other book. I cannot guess what colours might be on the dust-jacket of that other book, or what words at its front and its back might tell about the inner pages of some other book still.

Or the other pages – the pages of the text that I only read about – are between the covers of no other book. Those pages have drifted away who knows where. Sometimes I think of all the drifting pages of the world as having been collected and brought together in buildings of many rooms in grassy landscapes under skies filled with clouds, and as having been bound, after all their drifting, into dream-books with dream-patterns on their jackets and dream-colours on their spines and dream-words on their preliminary pages, and as having been stored on the shelves of a dream-library.

Yet sometimes a drifting page drifts away from the drifting pages around it. Such a page might drift in among other sorts of pages – even in among the preliminary pages of books such as these books around me here.

One day in this room I read in the preliminary pages of an unlikely book these words:

There is another world but it is in this one.

Paul Eluard

I cannot remember having read the inner pages of the book in whose outer pages I found these words. I have never taken the trouble to find out who Paul Eluard is or was. I prefer to think of who he might have been: a man whose life’s work was to compose, perhaps in some language other than my own, a sentence that has drifted far away from the pages where it was first written and has come to rest for the time being in one of the preliminary pages of a book in this room where I sometimes get up from my table in order to open the front pages of some book whose spine has made me dream of myself reading the pages that must have drifted long before into some dream-book.

There is another world, and I have seen parts of that world on most days of my life. But the parts of that world are drifting past and cannot be lived in. For as long as I used to see drifting past me those parts of the other world, I used to wonder about the place where all the drifting parts drifted together. But I no longer wondered after I had read the words attached to the name Paul Eluard.

There is another world but it is in this one...So say the words printed among the preliminary pages of one of the books that I have never read. But what place exactly do the words this one refer to? They cannot refer to the space between the covers of the book where I found them. I have never yet found a book whose preliminary pages and whose inner pages belong together. And in any case, the name of the author on the front of my book is not Paul Eluard but Patrick White. The words this one can only refer to the so-called world between the covers of a book I have never seen: a book whose author is a man named Paul Eluard.

Perhaps those words from Paul Eluard first appeared in the preliminary pages of a book of his. But I repeat: I have never found any book whose preliminary pages belonged with its inner pages, which means that the other world is within drifting pages that I will almost certainly never see: pages in a dream-book that I can only dream of.

On the other hand, the words of Paul Eluard might have first appeared on the inner pages of one of his books. In that case, I have to understand the words somewhat differently. If the words were in the inner pages of a book, they can only have been uttered by a narrator or a character – by one of those people who inhabit the inner pages of books. There is another world, says one of those people deep inside the pages of a book, but it is in – and therefore at one remove further from you out there – this world where I am now.

The other world, in other words, is a place that can only be seen or dreamed of by those people known to us as narrators of books or characters within books. If you or I, reader, happen to glimpse part of that world drifting past, as it were, it is because we have seen or dreamed of ourselves seeing for a moment as a narrator or a character in a book sees or dreams of seeing.

If someone reading this page is thinking of Paul Eluard as a living man uttering his words in the place that is usually called the real world and referring perhaps to something as simple as a world he has dreamed of or the world in which the characters in books lead their so-called lives, then I can only answer that if a man named Paul Eluard walked into this room tonight and uttered his mysterious words, I would understand Mr Eluard as my reader wants to understand him. But until Paul Eluard comes into my room I have only a copy of his written words. He wrote his words and at the instant of his writing them the words entered the world of narrators and characters and landscapes – not to mention pages that drift into other books where they might be read by people such as myself.

But what if Paul Eluard wrote no book? What if the only words he wrote in all his life are the ten mysterious words, which he wrote only once on a blank page before setting the page adrift? There is another world but it is in this one...Even then, the words are still written. However, in this case the other world must be understood as lying within the virgin whiteness which is all that part of the page where, as yet, no word has been written. (Inland)

I have not gone deep enough, that’s the thing. In solitude one must penetrate, one must endure. The icy beginning is where it is worst. One must pass all that. One must go forward all the way, through bitterness, through righteous feelings, advancing upon it like a holy city, sensing the true joy. I try to summon it to me, to make it appear. I am certain it is there, but it does not come easily. Of course not. One must waver. One must struggle. Beliefs are meant to cleave us to the bone. (A Sport and a Pastime)

I am writing in a room of a house. All over the table in front of me and all around on the floor behind me are pages. On the walls around me are shelves of books. Around the walls of the house are grasslands.

Sometimes I stare out through my window and I suppose that if I set out walking I would never reach the end of grasslands. Sometimes I stare at the bookshelves and I suppose that if I began to read the books I would never read to the end of books. Sometimes I stare at these pages; and pardon me, reader, but what I suppose would place a heavy burden on you.

Luckily for you, reader, you know I was wrong in some of my supposing. You have these pages in your hand and you can see to the end of them. You are reading these pages now because at a certain time in the past (as you see it) and in the future (as I see it) I came and I will come to the end of these pages.

It is easier for you than for me, reader. While you read you are sure of coming to the end of the pages. But while I write I cannot be sure of coming to the end. I may go on with my endless writing here among the endless grasslands and the books that can never be read to the end.

You are a reader of books, reader. You can suppose what a reader would feel in front of a book that is endless. Myself, I do not read books, as you well know. I do hardly more than stare at covers and spines, or I dream of pages drifting. But I am in danger of writing on endless pages.

Read on, reader. I am about to write about myself living on grasslands in your part of the world and a long way from Szolnok County. You may well suspect me of having changed the names of streams only to confuse you. You may suspect me again of writing about the district between the Sio and the Sarviz. But if I do not write what I am about to write, reader, these pages will be endless. (Inland)

Reader, I may be far from the man you think I am. But who, in any case, do you think I am? I am a man, as you know; but ask yourself, reader, what you consider a man to be.

You can dream easily enough of the body of a man sitting at this table where all these pages have been strewn. The body is not yet old, but certainly it is no longer young, and the belly on the body protrudes a little, and the hair on the head of the body is turning grey at the edges. You can dream of yourself seeing that body, and I was going to write that you can dream of the words that the hand of the body writes on the pages in front of the belly of that body, but of course you do not have to dream, since you are reading this page at this moment.

Do you suppose then, reader, having dreamed and read, that you have learned what I am?

Let me tell you, reader, what I consider you to be.

Your body – whether or not the belly of it protrudes or the hair on the head of it is turning grey, and whether the hand in front of the belly is writing or at rest or busy at something else – your body is the least part of you. Your body is a sign of you, perhaps: a sign marking the place where the true part of you begins.

The true part of you is far too far-reaching and much too many-layered for you or me, reader, to read about or to write about. A map of the true part of you, reader, would show every place where you have been from your birthplace to the place where you sit now reading this page. And, reader, even if you tell me you have lived all your life in a place of books and colour-plates and hand-written texts deep in the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute – as well you may have lived it – even then, reader, you know and I know that every morning when you first turned your eyes on that place it was a different place. And when every place where you have ever been on every day of your life has been marked on the map of the true part of you, why then, reader, the map has been barely marked. There are still to mark all those places you have dreamed about and all those places you have dreamed of yourself seeing or remembering or dreaming about. Then, reader, you know as well as I know that when you have not been dreaming you have been looking at pages of books or standing in front of bookshelves and dreaming of yourself looking at pages of books. Whatever places you saw at such times, along with all the places you dreamed of yourself seeing, must all appear on the map of the true part of you. And by now, you suppose, the map must be almost filled with places.

Do not merely suppose, reader. Look with your eyes at what is in front of you. All the places you have so far marked have only sprinkled the wide spaces of the map with a few dots of towns and hairlines of streams. The map shows many hundreds of places for every hour of your life; but look, reader, at all the bare spaces on the map, and see how few the marked places still seem. You have looked at places and dreamed of places and dreamed of yourself looking at places or remembering places or dreaming of places during every hour of your life, reader, but still your map is mostly empty spaces. And my map, reader, is hardly different from yours.

All those empty spaces, reader, are our grasslands. In all those grassy places see and dream and remember and dream of themselves having seen and dreamed and remembered all the men you have dreamed you might have been and all the men you dream you may yet become. And if you are like me, reader, those are very many men, and each of those men has seen many places and dreamed of many places and has turned many pages and stood in front of many bookshelves; and all the places or the dream-places in the lives of all those men are marked on the same map that you and I are keeping in mind, reader. And yet that map is still mostly grasslands or, as they are called in America, prairies. The towns and the streams and the mountain ranges are still few, reader, compared with the prairie-grasslands where you and I dream of coming into our own. (Inland)

I learned that no thing in the world is one thing; that each thing in the world is two things at least, and probably many more than two things. I learned to find a queer pleasure in staring at a thing and dreaming of how many things it might be.

[...]

No thing was one thing. Beside every path that I followed, some plant had the look or the feel of human skin. Parts of the flowers of plants had the shapes of parts of men and women. Each thing was more than one thing. The long green leaves bunched around the agapanthus were the grass skirts of women who were naked above their waists. But any one of those leaves, if I put my hand in among them, was the strap of leather that my teachers at school brought down with all the strength of their arms on the palms of boys for punishment. (Inland)

On each Sunday of my childhood, the colour that I saw in the silk of the vestments and the altar-cloths in church was green or red or white or violet. For one hour each week one or another of those colours appeared, in strict accordance with the calendar of the Roman Church.

The colours coming and going were like the threads that I watched in the hands of the girls during sewing class, on Friday afternoon in the schoolroom. I sometimes asked a girl to let me look at the underside of the cloth in her hands – the side away from the pattern of leaves or flowers or fruit slowly forming. I trusted that a pleasing pattern was beginning to appear on the upper side of the cloth, under the eyes of the girl. But I studied the side of the cloth that seemed to matter less. I watched the tangled strands and the knots of mixed colours underneath for hints of shapes quite different from leaves or flowers or fruit. I would have enjoyed the game of pretending to the girl that I knew nothing of the pattern she was working at: of pretending to think that the tangled colours were all I could admire.

The colours and the seasons of the Church were complicated, but I saw them only from beneath. The true pattern was on the other side. Under the clear morning sky of eternity, the long story of the Old Testament and the New was a richly coloured tapestry. But on my side, under the changeable skies of Melbourne County, I saw only the green and the white and the red and the violet strangely interlaced, and I made from them whatever patterns I could. (Inland)

If I were to try in front of you people today to write in the air the beginnings of a piece of short fiction, I would begin by reporting in a sentence or two certain details from the image that I recalled this morning when I was trying to recall images the details of which I have noted during recent years in the file mentioned earlier. I would report details that might seem banal or trivial to you people, although I would assure you of my confidence that those details were full of meaning for me. Why else, I would ask you rhetorically, would the image and all its details have stayed in my mind for year after year when so many other images had disappeared? In short, I would write in the air between you and myself one or two sentences reporting that a hen crouched on the ground in an unkempt front garden of a house of red bricks on a certain afternoon of the fifth decade of the twentieth century when the sky was filled with close-packed and fast-moving grey and black clouds and when the same wind that drove the clouds across the sky ruffled tufts of feathers on the crouching hen.

I would report much more of this single image. I would report that a male child who happened to notice the hen from the rear seat of a motor car while it drove out of the unkempt garden and who wondered why the hen was crouching when it might have been foraging noticed in an instant before the car turned out of the garden and north-wards towards a place called Kinglake, where he had never yet been and about which he had often speculated, that the wind had ruffled in the same instant not only the hackles of the hen, which were of a rich, copper-orange colour, but a few of the under-feathers, which were of a glossy black colour, and that the ruffling of the under-feathers had caused to be exposed to the wind the head of a chicken, only a few days old and of a pale, creamy colour.

I would then pause in my reporting and would assure you that I was not, most emphatically not, writing a sort of autobiography while I was reporting the details of the hen and the ruffled feathers, even though I myself happened to have lived in a house of red bricks during a few years of the decade mentioned earlier and even though my father happened to have won so much money on Dark Felt in the Melbourne Cup of 1943 that he bought a huge brown Nash sedan and took his wife and children for Sunday drives for several months until he had to sell the Nash sedan to settle his latest debts with his bookmakers. If I were writing a sort of autobiography, I would say to you good people, I would be reporting the sort of detail just mentioned. I would be reporting my memories of the summer of 1943–44, when my father took me and my two brothers and my mother for a drive every Sunday. I would be reporting conversations, shaping anecdotes, trying to suggest motives…

I would go on with my reporting of details of images. I would report that the noise of the car caused the hen to rise to its feet, enabling the male child in the back seat to notice that the cream-coloured chicken was the only chicken of the black hen with the copper-orange hackles and causing the child to wonder why his father, who owned the hen and the chicken and many other hens and chickens and roosters, had not dashed the head of the chicken against a post as he had dashed the heads of a number of other chickens in the past when he had not wanted to have the mothers of the chickens looking after only one or two or even of a handful of chickens when she might have rejoined the flock of hens that laid eggs daily.

I would report a few details of a few more images. In the meanwhile I would remind you that my noting the details of image after image was not at all what is sometimes called free association. I would point out that my looking at the details of the image of the hen with the ruffled feathers brought to my mind a succession of images that I took no interest in: images of, for example, the garden where the hen sat in the wind or of the house nearby. I would explain that I usually discovered each of the images that I needed for a piece of fiction while I stared in my mind at the details of a previously discovered image and looked out for the detail that winked at me. Soon after I had noticed the winking of the detail of the copper-orange hackles of the hen, for example, I had seen in my mind for the first time, so I believed, an image of an illustration in a book for children in which illustration a number of infant children were either dead or asleep or beneath the surface of a stream the water of which had been coloured an orange-gold colour by the artist.

I would have been aware, as soon as I had used the word winking in my report of my means of discovering images, that one at least of you, my listeners, would have wanted me to explain further what exactly I saw when an image winked at me. And I would have been prepared to explain, when one of you questioned me after I had finished talking to you, that a detail of an image does not wink in quite the way a human being winks to another. The detail of an image, being almost always something other than a human face, has no eye with which to wink, and must signal to me by a sort of flickering or fluttering or nodding or trembling. Even so, I choose deliberately the word winking to describe this primitive signal to me from some patch of colour or some shape in my mind. I so choose, because my seeing the signal never fails to make me feel reassured and encouraged as many a person must feel after being winked at by another person. And I choose the word winking in this context because a wink from one person to another often signals that the two persons share a secret knowledge, so to speak, and I often feel, after some detail in my own mind has winked at me, that I have been shown proof that the farthest parts of my own mind are friendly towards me; that whatever may be hidden in those far parts of my mind is willing to reveal itself to me; that all is well in what passes with me for the world. ("The Breathing Author" in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs)

On Approach 

• Fiction should have a ghostlike presence in it somewhere, something omniscient. It makes it a different reality.

• Writing is about discovering things hitherto unseen. Otherwise there’s no point to the process.

• By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment.

• Expressionism was really a kind of willful avant-gardism after the First World War, an attempt to wrench language into a form it does not normally have. It must have purpose, though. It hasn’t really occurred in English but is very common in German.

• Write about obscure things but don’t write obscurely.

• There is a certain merit in leaving some parts of your writing obscure.

• It’s hard to write something original about Napoleon, but one of his minor aides is another matter.

On Narration and Structure 

 • In the nineteenth century the omniscient author was God: totalitarian and monolithic. The twentieth century, with all its horrors, was more demotic. It took in people’s accounts; suddenly there were other views. In the natural sciences the [twentieth] century saw the disproving of Newton and the introduction of the notion of relativity.

• In the twentieth century we know that the observer always affects what is being observed. So, writing biography now, you have to talk about where you got your sources, how it was talking to that woman in Beverly Hills, the trouble you had at the airport.

• Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.

• The present tense lends itself to comedy. The past is foregone and naturally melancholic.

• There is a species of narrator, the chronicler; he’s dispassionate, he’s seen it all.

• You can’t attribute a shortcoming in a text to the state a character is in. For example, ‘he doesn’t know the landscape so he can’t describe it’ ,‘he’s drunk so he can’t know this or that’.

 On Description 

• You need to set things very thoroughly in time and place unless you have good reasons [not to]. Young authors are often too worried about getting things moving on the rails, and not worried enough about what’s on either side of the tracks.

• A sense of place distinguishes a piece of writing. It may be a distillation of different places. There must be a very good reason for not describing place.

• Meteorology is not superfluous to the story. Don’t have an aversion to noticing the weather.

• It’s very difficult, not to say impossible, to get physical movement right when writing. The important thing is that it should work for the reader, even if it is not accurate. You can use ellipsis, abbreviate a sequence of actions; you needn’t laboriously describe each one.

• You sometimes need to magnify something, describe it amply in a roundabout way. And in the process you discover something.

• How do you surpass horror once you’ve reached a certain level? How do you stop appearing gratuitous? Horror must be absolved by the quality of the prose.

On Detail 

 • ‘Significant detail’ enlivens otherwise mundane situations. You need acute, merciless observation.

• Oddities are interesting.

• Characters need details that will anchor themselves in your mind.

• The use of twins or triplets who are virtually indistinguishable from each other can lend a spooky, uncanny edge. Kafka does it.

• It’s always gratifying to learn something when one reads fiction. Dickens introduced it. The essay invaded the novel. But we should not perhaps trust ‘facts’ in fiction. It is, after all, an illusion.

• Exaggeration is the stuff of comedy.

• It’s good to have undeclared, unrecognized pathologies and mental illnesses in your stories. The countryside is full of undeclared pathologies. Unlike in the urban setting, there, mental affliction goes unrecognized.

• Dialect makes normal words seem other, odd and jagged. For example, ‘Jeziz’ for Jesus.

• Particular disciplines have specialized terminology that is its own language. I could translate a page of Ian McEwan in half an hour—but golf equipment! another matter. Two Sainsbury’s managers talking to each other are a different species altogether.

On Reading and Intertextuality 

 • Read books that have nothing to do with literature.

• Get off the main thoroughfares; you’ll see nothing there. For example, Kant’s Critique is a yawn but his incidental writings are fascinating.

• There has to be a libidinous delight in finding things and stuffing them in your pockets.

• You must get the servants to work for you. You mustn’t do all the work yourself. That is, you should ask other people for information, and steal ruthlessly from what they provide.

• None of the things you make up will be as hair-raising as the things people tell you.

• I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice. You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt.

• Don’t be afraid to bring in strange, eloquent quotations and graft them into your story. It enriches the prose. Quotations are like yeast or some ingredient one adds.

• Look in older encyclopaedias. They have a different eye. They attempt to be complete and structured but in fact are completely random collected things that are supposed to represent our world.

• It’s very good that you write through another text, a foil, so that you write out of it and make your work a palimpsest. You don’t have to declare it or tell where it’s from.

• A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom.

• If you look carefully you can find problems in all writers. And that should give you great hope. And the better you get at identifying these problems, the better you will be at avoiding them.

On Style 

 • Every sentence taken by itself should mean something.

• Writing should not create the impression that the writer is trying to be ‘poetic’.

• It’s easy to write rhythmical prose. It carries you along. After a while it gets tedious.

• Long sentences prevent you from having continually to name the subject (‘Gertie did this, Gertie felt that’ etc.).

• Avoid sentences that serve only to set up later sentences.

• Use the word ‘and’ as little as possible. Try for variety in conjunctions.

On Revision 

 • Don’t revise too much or it turns into patchwork.

• Lots of things resolve themselves just by being in the drawer a while.

• Don’t listen to anyone. Not us, either. It’s fatal.