Self-restraint, in fact, consists of the ability to resist, to master, to tame, to keep from giving in to vulgar or dangerous inclinations. Which can mean that once the levee breaks, there is no bottom, there are no more limits to the actions that take joy in the savage delight of being liberated … and by the sheer force of inertia continue their course without hindrance. Into the void. From rigid conformity to outright perversion, the distance is not only short, it can be a single step. You should further consider that pitiless and bullying acts, while they may sorely restrict the freedom of those upon whom they are inflicted, unleash the freedom of the person inflicting them. And they therefore constitute at the same time the maximum level of oppression and the maximum level of liberty, both coercion and unbridled freedom. There is no point in trying to resist the argument: rape and murder are liberatory, if viewed with the eyes of those who commit them. Perfect circularity between these two extremes is attained when those who have been oppressed by violence utilize it in their turn to achieve liberation: the joy of those who suddenly stop obeying, submitting, restraining themselves, being patient—and simply explode. Suffice it to think of the celebration of this turnaround that can be seen in countless revenge films, of which the founding father remains Straw Dogs, where the professor, the civilized man who has been the victim of mistreatment, suddenly reverses the situation by making use of the same violence that was used against him, but amplified tenfold by his frustration and brilliant mind. Malevolent energy concealed behind the screen of good manners. (The Catholic School)

The next day it would be my turn to say confession. I saw it as a sort of test I would have to take, and I wondered if I would be fully prepared for it. As long as it was a matter of repeating lessons you’d heard in class or things you’d read in a book … but the things you’re supposed to confess aren’t written down anywhere. They were going to have to come out of me, out of my soul, and what’s more, they were bad things, nasty and filthy, my sins.

Whichever way it goes, you come out looking pretty bad. If you were to confess little or nothing, it might seem you were trying to conceal your wicked deeds (which in fact amounts to one more wicked deed), or else it must mean that you are such a good person—but I mean so full of sweetness and light—that you had nothing to tell the father confessor, in other words, a disgusting little angel.

To me, the intimacy required to tell someone else the harm I had done was inaccessible. You can conceal it, the harm, you can invent it, exaggerate it, or attenuate it … but you can never say it.

[...] 

As long as I went to confession and said confession, it remained a genuine torture for me. I was sincere but, at the same time, I lied, and though I was sure I’d told the truth, at the end of confession, it seemed to me that I hadn’t told the truth at all, both because the sins confessed weren’t true, and because I had kept the real ones carefully hidden. I thought that I’d forgotten to mention important things, wrongs I’d committed that were far more serious than those I’d confessed, even though when I stopped to think about it, none actually came to mind. Or else I have the even more sinister sensation that I had soft-pedaled my sins, telling them in such a way that I came out looking good, so that when all was said and done I got away scot-free, I practically deserved to be congratulated, if not for having committed them, at least for having recounted them so very nicely. Too nicely, in other words, like Rousseau and his Confessions, which of course I hadn’t read at that age but in which I’d later recognize a reflection of myself, make no mistake, not for the spiritual greatness and breadth of thought, unequaled and unattainable, but rather for the pervasive hypocrisy, about which there could be no doubt. But my greatest remorse came from the awareness that I had by no means actually repented, that is, that the repentance declared at the end of confession was in no way genuine. A convention to be respected, a formula to be recited. I only had one real regret—that I felt nothing. Nothing at all. No authentic repentance nor any impulse to make a new resolution or deep emotion or a vow to give something up. I wasn’t ashamed, exactly, but neither was I proud of the wrong I had done, the way one may feel when one is truly wicked.

I felt insincere, whatever I might say or refrain from saying. My remorse was never authentic or spontaneous, my contrition was always contrived, copied from some other model, from something I’d read or heard or seen, just like so many other behaviors in my life, truth be told, that I adopted simply out of imitation, like a talented calligrapher, without ever feeling them wholeheartedly as my own for even a fleeting instant, without believing in them or, rather, believing that it was best, all things considered, to act that way, because that’s just the way people act, because it’s required of you, because that’s what others do, because everyone else expected it of me. This is a more than adequate reason to go along: the problem is that slight feeling of being out of phase, that instant of detachment. My confession was like a song being lip-synched, with the background music playing and the lips moving as you pretend to sing, but all it takes is the slightest hitch in the timing and the fakery is revealed on the singer’s face. Confession was, for me, the utmost moment of artificiality, that is, of distance not between what I was saying and what I was thinking, but rather between what I was saying and what I was feeling. And that, I am sorry to say, was nothing at all.

And then there was that morbid certainty of having forgotten perhaps the only real sin that was worth bothering to confess and expiate. Sincerity, courage, memory: zero. Exactly what this great buried sin might be never came to mind, no matter how hard I tried. It was there, of that I felt certain, but it remained out of my reach. (The Catholic School)

As little children and then as boys and young men, we were full of doubts of a legalistic nature. Do we or don’t we? Are we allowed to? And under what conditions? What were the terms established, the oaths sworn? Isn’t this a bizarre miracle—that something prohibited should suddenly become licit? Why? Isn’t it perhaps unjust that that which is unjust should suddenly become just? Schedules, quantities, measurements, very precise calculations, boundaries not to be transgressed. As far as the gate, only up to the sign that says DANGER, no later than eight o’clock, not before meals, be back in an hour. Even games are made up of prohibitions. The observance of every commandment ends up giving more importance to the rules as such, than to the reasons those rules were established. The prohibition against going swimming after a meal is an obvious and generic precaution, but if you give it an exact duration (when I was a kid, no less than three hours! You couldn’t go swimming for three hours after eating, which in our imagination meant that if you dove into the water two hours and fifty-nine minutes after polishing off a panino, you’d die the minute you hit the water…), when you draw an exact line, then all the forces are marshaled on one side and the other, like two armies lined up in battle, the forces of good and evil. Children are the most inflexible custodians of the given promise, of the geometry of prohibitions, and when they break their word or a prohibition, it’s out of either extreme courage or desperation, never out of solid good sense, they never think, “Oh, come on, how much will it really matter…” the way adults do. There’s no adjustment possible in the mind of a child. Home before dark, is that clear? All right, Mamma, but dark, exactly … when does dark begin?

With holy mass, the same thing happened. I had more scruples than an elderly Pharisee, and if I had been born an Orthodox Jew or a fundamentalist Muslim or any other of those many faiths brimming over with rules and prescriptions telling you that you must take care how you walk, when you breathe, what you drink, watch, and eat, which hand you use and which hat you wear and how many times you wash, painstakingly attentive to the smallest actions that are all regulated from the very outset, I think I would have been perfectly at my ease, ahhh, life would have been prescribed and guided minute by minute according to the observance of the laws, like a ticking clock, calmly, ineluctably, and once you’ve respected those rules you’re all good, no one can say a thing to you. You’re safe. You’ve paid in advance. The sternest law works this way, so that the very fact that you’ve observed it constitutes punishment enough. You punish yourself by obeying it.

The problem, though, is that little by little the moral core of the law begins to escape you, and you limit yourself to doing the basic minimum necessary to respect it, not a gram, not a lira, not a second, not a genuflection more than is strictly required. The rule is reduced to bone, worn shiny from being gnawed. Done! you can say to yourself once you’ve observed the precept. Done with that, now, too!

When I found out that a mass was valid once you reached the Our Father, then there was no way I was going to attend the whole service. Never. I split the second to make sure I got there just in time for the eucharistic liturgy after I discovered that that was all it took. (The Catholic School)

 Confession is a sacrament that may be even harder to understand than the eucharist—when you’re ten years old. He would ask me what sins I’d committed and I didn’t know what to answer. I would have been glad to accuse myself, in utter seriousness, of something very bad, but I searched and searched, almost desperately rummaged and struggled to feel a powerful sentiment of remorse, and nothing came to mind except for trifles and the desire to be done with it: I was, as so often happens to me, deeply moved and at the same time bored and impatient, and so I replied to Father Saturnino that I’d told lies … and then, that I’d disobeyed … disobeyed Mamma: but even that was half a lie, since I was an obedient child. Still, I was ashamed to have so little to confess and, therefore, little of which to repent; I really was embarrassed, not of my sins, but rather of their paltry number and negligible nature, and as a result I wished I could invent a few more, to make a more interesting sinner of myself, one more deserving of forgiveness, a prodigal son. I had understood that the more you sin, the greater the joy your repentance will cause. Indeed, to use the language of the religious, the greater the jubilation.

This blessed rule stupefied me then as it does now and should be classed among the things whose spiritual grandeur I am able to intuit, but it is in fact that very grandeur that upsets and irritates me, undermining my very sense of justice. This would happen to me many times in the years that followed, when I saw men of the cloth so impassioned in their devotion to sinners that they made them their pets, almost their fair-haired boys: repentant terrorists, bank robbers who have turned to painting Madonnas, murderers who, in the end, seem almost to be better people than their innocent victims, seeing that, by choosing goodness after committing so much evil, they’ve helped to shift the scales in which the world’s good and evil are weighed, because if they stop their killing, then the dish of the scale that holds evil will in fact become that much lighter. I once thought of a way to win the Nobel Peace Prize: one sure method would be to become a terrorist, plant bombs and blow up airplanes, etc., and then at a certain point, decide to give up my wicked ways and lay down my arms and, in this exact manner, become to all intents and purposes a peacemaker, a man of peace.

Victims don’t stir the same passions as a rogue redeemed, that much is obvious.

I sincerely wanted to attain redemption but I didn’t know what from, so Father Saturnino came to my aid, convinced that I was ashamed to confess my sins, while I was actually struggling with a shame of the exact opposite hue; and just as good-hearted teachers do during an oral exam, when they see that a student is having difficulty, it was he who suggested to me a few of the sins I might have committed: and even if it wasn’t true or I didn’t begin to understand what the specific sin might be, I hurried to answer yes, yes, to each of his questions, yes, I did that, as if I thought that in order to obtain that blessed pardon I needed to reach a certain quota, a predetermined scorecard of evil, so that I could reset that number to zero and start over, as in the card game of sette e mezzo or blackjack, or a loyalty program at a gas station.

And I remember very clearly just what the last sin was that Father Saturnino suggested I go and rummage around in my memory for, just in case I might have committed that one, too.

“Have you ever watched dirty movies?”

“What?”

“Dirty movies.”

This time I hesitated to answer yes, because I really didn’t know what the brother was talking about. Dirty movies? Was he possibly talking about … pornographic films? That couldn’t be. I was ten years old. It wasn’t like now, when a kid can go on the Internet and watch people having sex, or threesomes, or group sex, rapes, and orgies. Again this time, when the wise brother saw me hesitate, he decided to help me out.

“You know what I mean, don’t you? Movies with undressed women.”

Just the mere word “undressed” made me blush violently. I’d never seen undressed women, in the movies much less in real life, if you leave aside a certain episode from my childhood that I may perhaps tell you about later on. And so, deciding that enough was enough, that I’d confessed to enough sins to give an image of myself as a sufficiently wicked Candlewick, I was about to say no, when the father confessor specified: “Like, Double O Seven movies.”

Secret agent 007. Bond. James Bond. And I had seen at least a couple of those movies, back then, Goldfinger for sure, and maybe Thunderball, but the women were never actually nude, when they took off their bras or when 007 unhooked them, they always had their backs to the camera, and even when they let their robes fall to the ground, the only thing you saw was their shoulders. Yes, in effect, I found those movies very unsettling, the brother had hit a bull’s-eye. And in Goldfinger I remember that there was a girl completely naked, dead on a bed and covered from head to foot in gold, painted gold … (The Catholic School)

We were all eager to spend time together but at the same time we were terrified at the idea of opening up, revealing the truth about ourselves. Pranks and crude jokes were the best way we had to conceal our inner life, drowning it in a vulgar laugh that was always slightly awkward and embarrassed and defensive. It was in fact much simpler to show off your penis in the locker room after gym class by swinging it like a lasso than to display any other undefended part of your personality. The crudeness cauterized wounds or prevented them from being inflicted. Sports were the ideal activity for this purpose, they allowed us to spend time together without obliging anyone to open up in any real way. In fact, by playing sports with our classmates and pals, we developed a supermuscle of control. In order to protect ourselves from the risk of potential confessions (the kind of stuff you’d expect from young ladies), we preferred to do things instead of talking about them, and in sports there’s next to no chitchat at all, a game is the kind of thing that after an hour and a half or two hours of insane intensity, thank heavens, comes to an end, so that you’ve given your all without actually giving anything specific or useful, the most burning commitment over the shortest period of time—and in fact it has many things in common with sex. That is, it allows you to emerge still virgin and uncontaminated. Risking your physical safety in sports ensures that you preserve your psychological safety. Male locker-room camaraderie, in other words, has very little in common with intimacy; instead it’s something midway between vaudeville, with its rat-a-tat volley of gags and bullshit, a lineup of suspects, and a conference table surrounded by generals with maps and charts before or after a battle. The things that are said there have the muscular character of an exhibition, and the rhythm of a variety show.

Unfortunately, true intimacy doesn’t exist in a partial or moderate form: it’s always, by its very definition, excessive. Made up of vertical lunges. Contaminating, like saliva in French kisses. That’s why we feared it, because we dimly sensed that you can never quite recover from contact with it, you can no longer veil what has once been unveiled.

Rather than opening up to your pals, then, it was necessary to conquer them, or, at least, stand up to them. Hold your own in public in such a way as to avoid being riddled with indiscreet questions. What it required were such gifts as a powerful or strident voice, the capacity to tell jokes and anecdotes (a good memory was fundamental if you wanted to keep stock of your repertory), quick repartee so that you could offer a clever or filthy riposte to any mockery, the ability to lay your audience low in helpless laughter or else make them shut their mouths with a sharp glare. What’s more, sports, as practiced intensively at SLM, were a reasonably effective bulwark against the threat of girls, or at least the thought of them, seeing that there weren’t any in the surrounding area. The only individual of the female gender in the entire school, as I’ve previously mentioned, was a woman who sold pizza at recess. Still, even a vague thought can be every bit as unsettling as a physical presence and, in some cases, even more intrusive. I, for one, can say that I’ve never felt females to be so incredibly close to me as the times that all I saw on all sides were other males: in my years at SLM, during my mandatory stint in the army, and in prison, I could easily swear that they were physically present, that’s just how close I felt them, intensely close, upon me, inside me. It’s like the old joke about the guy who goes to the doctor, claiming that he’s a hermaphrodite; “What are you saying, are you sure of this?” the doctor replies. “Let me take a look…” Then, after an examination, the doctor reassures him: “Trust me, you’re fully male, perfectly normal…” “No, doctor, the thing is,” the guy insists, in desperation, “I have a pussy, more than one in fact, right here!”—and he slaps his hand against his forehead.

Nothing remained to us, in other words, but mental projections that we’d try to exorcise with chaotic basketball games, hikes, push-ups on wooden handles, kicking balls back and forth on dusty red fields, raising long trailing clouds behind us with every galloping charge, like in the cartoons with the racing ostrich. Some went so far as to try heading a seven-pound medicine ball. With actual flesh-and-blood girls, in any case, we wouldn’t have begun to know what to do, what to say, it was an unknown ritual, one that most of us would learn, if anything, by testing out and rehearsing an array of phrases and acts borrowed from our older brothers like good suits, but only after we’d graduated. Once we were expelled into the real world. Only a mechanically applied ceremonial protocol would allow us to get over the shyness we’d accumulated over years of dress rehearsals.

People can’t begin to imagine what a fragile fabric male shyness is, they never seem to make the effort, except perhaps to make fun of it. And they never consider, even more than the stumbling block of shyness itself, just how mortifying it is to have to make recourse to various stratagems to find one’s way out of it: in pathetic little vignettes, the movies and TV have retailed the tryouts, a boy in front of a mirror rehearsing his lines, as he plans to invite a girl to dance, the declarations of love uttered to one’s own image in the mirror by gawky guys who then shut their eyes and wrap their arms around their own shoulders and kiss themselves, but all this is strictly to get a laugh out of the audience, while male shyness really does have a dark, morbid side, demented and mad, which can lead variously to murder and suicide, forget about sophomoric comedies with Jack Lemmon or Adam Sandler! When you feel as if you’re being strangled … that the air won’t reach your lungs … and a devastating wave of desire rises to the verge of an anxiety attack, and yet it still can’t breach the levee and transform itself into action. You don’t lift a finger. Your voice dies in your throat. And she impatiently turns away, walks across the room, starts talking to other boys …

Even idiotic pranks like taking a classmate’s underwear, left in the locker room during swim lessons, and drenching them thoroughly (this was a trick played frequently on Arbus, and I confess that a couple of times I myself was a member of the gang of pranksters), played a role in this process of negotiation. These were moves on the chessboard of our identities, constantly under construction. In this way, we negotiated the fear of being taken for faggots. We negotiated the desire, however small or large that desire might be, to be faggots without letting it be seen. We negotiated the rank that we were to be given in the hierarchy, where the classmate forced to wring out his sopping underwear was dropped a level or two, and if subjected sufficiently to cruel leg-pulling and ass-kicking, might sink to the very bottom of the barrel, and even remain there, a permanent pariah. To become the target of ridicule, in fact, constituted our greatest fear, a fear that we negotiated with ourselves, each of us splitting into a dual personality, at once victim and agent of the same persecution, to see which of the two personalities would be the first to collapse, the faggot within me or the real man? The serial killer or the naked girl in the shower? When you’re an adolescent, it’s impossible not to be both things at once. We negotiated our way through that rising tide of pointless, vulgar words and a barricade of rude and repetitive gestures pushed well beyond the bounds of the absurd (pinches, knuckle-grinders, nape-smacks, accompanied by shrill whistles and neighing, goat-nips and donkey-chomps, soldier-slaps, unannounced smacks to the testicles), struggling the whole time with our aggressivity. Put like that, I wouldn’t be able to say whether we tamed those aggressive impulses or became enslaved to them like so many robots.

Since all of us were equally revolted by the thought of playing the part of the victim, we had to study, like so many would-be professional executioners, how to lop off a head, hurrying feverishly lest our own head be lopped off first. Honestly, I never really believed in even a tenth of the jerky wisecracks or extravagant boasting I spouted back then, in retaliation to those spouted by my pals and classmates, and I’m not saying that I realize that only now: I already knew it at the time. And yet, like so many others, aspiring as I did to be like everybody else and, when it came right down to it, succeeding—I said those things. I spouted them. Well, what’s so bad about that? You were in trouble if you missed a chance to make a rhyme with words ending in “-ock” or “-ucker” or “-ussy” or “-unt.” They just made your mouth itch at the chance. We also negotiated these succulent opportunities to show off our poetic or creative sides. To show some wit—wit, which delights in whistling through obscenities. Though none of us were born to the working classes, the low humor of our filthy nursery rhymes challenged the finest creations of an age-old tradition, in general, and Roman tradition, in particular, based on long, filthy lists and a ruthless vision of life, a cavalcade of cynicism and ass-fucking.

But foul language made us feel like good kids. Why not, a genuine community of good kids. It’s often said of people with dubious reputations, even of criminals, that deep down they’re good kids. If you scratch the surface, deep down you’ll find a good kid. What is it exactly that makes a young man a “good kid”? What are we talking about? About someone who’s always loyal to his buddies and ready to do what they’re willing to do without hesitation, to follow them anywhere, even when we’re talking about deplorable deeds, because if he tried to pull out at the last minute, then what kind of a buddy would he be, what would be so good, after all, about this good kid? A man is judged by the things he does, not by the things he says, so if someone doesn’t happen to get the chance to show what he’s capable of, he runs the risk of remaining a child, in the sedentary society we live in, stingy as it is with special moments. That’s why sports were invented, that is, a rapid succession of acid tests that can be administered two or three times a week, even at school, without having to wait for a war to break out or an apartment building to catch on fire in order to test those who are involved, to test their courage, their emotional control, and their willingness to endure pain. With the fairly pedestrian excuse of physical exercise, improving their posture, etc.: and at SLM they’d understood all this perfectly, to the point that they outfitted the school with a very modern gymnasium, and a pool where half of the Quartiere Trieste now splashes and swims (we’ll talk about that later on), as well as a sports center with basketball courts and soccer fields on Via Nomentana, where every afternoon buses full of shouting kids would pull up, and then leave several hours later full of the same kids, but now exhausted. We’d return from that sports center so sweaty and weary that often, in the winter, when night fell early and Via Nomentana was jammed with traffic, we’d fall asleep, dusty heads leaning together. Maybe males can establish relationships only in the midst of raging battle, so they re-create that condition on the playing fields. (The Catholic School)

Anyone who as a boy belongs to the middle class doesn’t even notice the fact, in part because the privileges he enjoys or the privations he suffers aren’t really all that spectacular, in the final analysis; he hardly even imagines that he can qualify as a “bourgeois young man”: when he looks in the mirror he sees a young man, not a “bourgeois young man,” even though that’s exactly what he is and how he actually appears, even when he’s in his underwear he’s a bourgeois young man in his underwear, lifting weights to develop his arm muscles, in front of the mirror in the bathroom of a bourgeois home, etc. But he doesn’t perceive himself that way, at age fifteen or sixteen he hardly thinks that belonging to a class is significant, and most of all he really doesn’t think of himself as belonging to a social class, if anything he might consider the soccer team he roots for, the music that he likes or detests, the way he dresses, or his political beliefs, which, in the case of a middle-class young man, could vary from the extreme right wing to the extreme left without either option seeming odd.

A borgataro from the poorer outskirts of town or an heir to a fortune or the scion of an aristocratic family almost immediately realize who they are and where they come from and where they’re heading or risk heading: the markers along the highways of their lives.

The young bourgeois man, on the other hand, will all at once perceive, on a given day that is as likely to come at age eighteen as at age thirty or forty, the class he belongs to, and in a flash it will become just as evident to his eyes that his clothing, his home, his motorcycle or his car, his very thoughts and desires and the way he has of relishing life or suffering, and even the sweetheart he has chosen or who has chosen him and who might well now be his wife, and have been for some time—all these things are the way they are precisely because he is bourgeois.

From that moment on, no matter what he might be doing, even organizing a picnic or signing an insurance policy or kissing a woman who might or might not be his wife, he’ll be possessed by that awareness. (The Catholic School)

We had a destructive and self-destructive attitude. Self-destruction was the science we knew best, the discipline that we practiced most assiduously. Even those who studied seriously or attended a gym on a regular basis, and thus seemed to be interested in strengthening their mind or their body, would end up distorting them both, generating maniacal thoughts or bowing themselves down under a heavy blanket of muscles. There seemed to be only two paths: either reject all exercise, or else take it to a fanatical extreme. Whichever path you took, the result was unharmonious.

We were out to conquer the world, or actually, the universe, but before doing that, we had to beat the closest adversary, even if it was just at a game of cards: there, your deskmate, that’s who you had to defeat, destroy him—but at the same time, help him. That’s what they taught us at SLM. The weakest must be defeated and, at the same time, helped.

It’s the same contradiction we encounter so frequently these days in politicians’ speeches, when in the same breath they claim to be fighting “for a meritocracy,” but also to ensure that “no citizen is left behind,” when it’s plain as day that the first thing excludes the second. (The Catholic School)

As little children and then as boys and young men, we were full of doubts of a legalistic nature. Do we or don’t we? Are we allowed to? And under what conditions? What were the terms established, the oaths sworn? Isn’t this a bizarre miracle—that something prohibited should suddenly become licit? Why? Isn’t it perhaps unjust that that which is unjust should suddenly become just? Schedules, quantities, measurements, very precise calculations, boundaries not to be transgressed. As far as the gate, only up to the sign that says DANGER, no later than eight o’clock, not before meals, be back in an hour. Even games are made up of prohibitions. The observance of every commandment ends up giving more importance to the rules as such, than to the reasons those rules were established. The prohibition against going swimming after a meal is an obvious and generic precaution, but if you give it an exact duration (when I was a kid, no less than three hours! You couldn’t go swimming for three hours after eating, which in our imagination meant that if you dove into the water two hours and fifty-nine minutes after polishing off a panino, you’d die the minute you hit the water…), when you draw an exact line, then all the forces are marshaled on one side and the other, like two armies lined up in battle, the forces of good and evil. Children are the most inflexible custodians of the given promise, of the geometry of prohibitions, and when they break their word or a prohibition, it’s out of either extreme courage or desperation, never out of solid good sense, they never think, “Oh, come on, how much will it really matter…” the way adults do. There’s no adjustment possible in the mind of a child. Home before dark, is that clear? All right, Mamma, but dark, exactly … when does dark begin?

With holy mass, the same thing happened. I had more scruples than an elderly Pharisee, and if I had been born an Orthodox Jew or a fundamentalist Muslim or any other of those many faiths brimming over with rules and prescriptions telling you that you must take care how you walk, when you breathe, what you drink, watch, and eat, which hand you use and which hat you wear and how many times you wash, painstakingly attentive to the smallest actions that are all regulated from the very outset, I think I would have been perfectly at my ease, ahhh, life would have been prescribed and guided minute by minute according to the observance of the laws, like a ticking clock, calmly, ineluctably, and once you’ve respected those rules you’re all good, no one can say a thing to you. You’re safe. You’ve paid in advance. The sternest law works this way, so that the very fact that you’ve observed it constitutes punishment enough. You punish yourself by obeying it.

The problem, though, is that little by little the moral core of the law begins to escape you, and you limit yourself to doing the basic minimum necessary to respect it, not a gram, not a lira, not a second, not a genuflection more than is strictly required. The rule is reduced to bone, worn shiny from being gnawed. Done! you can say to yourself once you’ve observed the precept. Done with that, now, too!

When I found out that a mass was valid once you reached the Our Father, then there was no way I was going to attend the whole service. Never. I split the second to make sure I got there just in time for the eucharistic liturgy after I discovered that that was all it took. (The Catholic School)

The “I” in narrative is no longer the singular subject of the biography, but rather the occasional experimenter. The first person can be generated by the third person, etc. Writing produces a series of transformations and disintegrations, whether it is the “I” who stages the story, or the material or experiences that are integrated into its workings. (The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: The Happy Years)

I think differently, in a different way. I say different things to myself. I have different pictures. ("Lectures on Religious Belief" in Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religion)

The work of a young writer—Werther is the classic example— is sometimes a therapeutic act. He finds himself obsessed by certain ways of feeling and thinking of which his instinct tells him he must be rid before he can discover his authentic interests and sympathies, and the only way by which he can be rid of them forever is by surrendering to them. Once he has done this, he has developed the necessary antibodies which will make him immune for the rest of his life. As a rule, the disease is some spiritual malaise of his generation. If so, he may, as Goethe did, find himself in an embarrassing situation. What he wrote in order to exorcise certain feelings is enthusiastically welcomed by his contemporaries because it expresses just what they feel but, unlike him, they are perfecdy happy to feel in this way; for the moment they regard him as their spokesman. Time passes. Having gotten the poison out of his system, the writer turns to his true interests which are not, and never were, those of his early admirers, who now pursue him with cries of “Traitor!” ("Writing" in The Dyer's Hand)

And yet, when he got home full of impressions and plans, ripe and new as perhaps never before, a demoralizing change took place in him. Merely putting a canvas on the easel or a sheet of paper on the table was the sign of a terrible flight from his heart. His head remained clear, and the plan inside it hovered as if in a very transparent and distinct atmosphere; indeed, the plan split and became two or more plans, all ready to compete for supremacy—but the connection between his head and the first movements needed to carry it out seemed severed. Walter could not even make up his mind to lift a finger. He simply did not get up from where he happened to be sitting, and his thoughts slid away from the task he had set himself like snow evaporating as it falls. He didn’t know where the time went, but all of a sudden it was evening, and since after several such experiences he had learned to start dreading them on his way home, whole series of weeks began to slip, and passed away like a troubled half-sleep. Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his forehead the moment he tried to make up his mind to do something. Walter was fearful, and the symptoms he recognized in himself not only hampered him in his work but also filled him with anxiety, for they were apparently so far beyond his control that they often gave him the impression of an incipient mental breakdown.

But as his condition had grown steadily worse in the course of the last year, he found a miraculous refuge in a thought he had never valued enough before. The idea was none other than that the Europe in which he was forced to live was hopelessly decadent. During ages in which things seem to be going well outwardly, while inwardly they undergo the kind of regression that may be the fate of all things, including cultural development—unless special efforts are made to keep them supplied with new ideas—the obvious question was, presumably, what one could do about it. But the tangle of clever, stupid, vulgar, and beautiful is at such times so particularly dense and intricate that many people obviously find it easier to believe that there is something occult at the root of things, and proclaim the fated fall of one thing or another that eludes precise definition and is portentously vague. It hardly matters whether the doomed thing is the human race, vegetarianism, or the soul; all that a healthy pessimism needs is merely something inescapable to hold on to. Even Walter, who in better days used to be able to laugh at such doctrines, soon discovered their advantages once he began to try them out. Instead of his feeling bad and unable to work, it was now the times that were sick, while he was fine. His life, which had come to nothing, was now, all at once, tremendously accounted for, justified on a world-historical scale that was worthy of him, so that picking up a pen or pencil and laying it down again virtually took on the aura of a great sacrifice. (The Man Without Qualities)

All the Offenbach neophytes were buried in the city cemetery, though some years later this cemetery began to interfere with plans to expand the town, and it was ultimately liquidated in 1866. The bones of those buried there were carefully collected and respectfully reburied elsewhere. Jacob Frank’s skull was removed from his grave, and, thoughtfully recorded as “a skull belonging to a Jewish patriarch,” it passed into the hands of the historian of the city of Offenbach. Many years later, under unknown circumstances, it made its way to Berlin, where it underwent detailed measurement and research and was labeled a prime example of Jewish racial inferiority. After the Second World War, it vanished without a trace—either it was destroyed in the turmoil and chaos of war, crumbling to dust, or else it is still lying around somewhere in the underground storage facility of some museum. (The Books of Jacob)

Once swallowed, the piece of paper lodges in her esophagus, near her heart. Saliva-soaked. The specially prepared black ink dissolves slowly now, the letters losing their shapes. Within the human body, the word splits in two: substance and essence. When the former goes, the latter, formlessly abiding, may be absorbed into the body’s tissues, since essences always seek carriers in matter—even if this is to be the cause of many misfortunes.

Yente wakes up. But she was just almost dead! She feels this distinctly now, like a pain, like the river’s current—a tremor, a clamor, a rush.

With a delicate vibration, her heart resumes its weak but regular beating, capable. Warmth is restored to her bony, withered chest. Yente blinks and just barely lifts her eyelids again. She sees the agonized face of Elisha Shorr, who leans in over her. She tries to smile, but that much power over her face she can’t quite summon. Elisha Shorr’s brow is furrowed, his gaze brimming with resentment. His lips move, but no sound reaches Yente. Old Shorr’s big hands appear from somewhere, reaching for her neck, then move beneath her threadbare blanket. Clumsily he rolls her body onto the side, so he can check the bedding. Yente can’t feel his exertions, no—she senses only warmth, and the presence of a sweaty, bearded man.

Then suddenly, as though from some unexpected impact, Yente sees everything from above: herself, the balding top of Old Shorr’s head—in his struggle with her body, he has lost his cap.

And this is how it is now, how it will be: Yente sees all. (The Books of Jacob)

The demand for simple things is the demand for definiteness of sense.

We tend to take the speech of a Chinese for inarticulate gurgling. Someone who understands Chinese will recognize language in what he hears. Similarly I often cannot discern the humanity in a man.

It’s so easy to wander about amongst great objects in distant regions, so hard to grasp the solitary thing that’s right in front of you…

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)