Matthew Ted > Books: form-biography‎ (41)

At quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a yo

At quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage at the amphitheater in Chautauqua to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.

I'd like to talk about books.

There's only one book worth talking about.

Let me tell you about a book about a book. It's written by the Turkish author Pamuk, and called "The New Life". In this book there's a book that has no name, and we do not know anything about what's written on its pages. But everyone who opens this book has their whole life changed. After they read the book they are not the same as they were before. Do you know a book like that?

Of course. It is the book containing the Word of God, as given by the Archangel to the Prophet.

Did the Prophet write it down immediately?

He came down from the mountain and recited, and whoever was nearby wrote it down on whatever came to hand.

And he recited with complete accuracy. What the Archangel said: word for word. And then they wrote it down with complete accuracy also. Word for word.

That is obvious.

And what happened to these pages?

After the Prophet's life ended, his Companions put them in order, and that is the Book.

And they put them in order with complete accuracy.

Every true believer knows this. Only the godless would question this, and they don't matter.

Can I ask you a question about the nature of God?

He is all-encompassing. All-knowing. He is All.

It is in your tradition, is it not, that there is a difference between your God and the God of the other People of the Book, the Jews and the Christians. They believe, as it says in their books, that God created Man in His own image.

They are wrong.

Because, if they were right, then God might have some resemblance to men? He might look like a man? He might have a mouth, and a voice, and be able to use it to speak to us?

But this is not correct.

Because, in your tradition, the idea of God is that He is so far superior to Man, so much more exalted, that He shares no human qualities.

Exactly. For once you are not talking garbage.

What would you say were human qualities?

Our bodies. How we look and how we are.

Is love a human quality? Is the desire for justice? Is mercy? Does God have those?

I am not a scholar. Imam Yutubi [the YouTube star the attacker supposedly watched] is a scholar. He is many-headed and many-voiced. I follow him. I have learned everything from him.

I don't mean to ask for your scholarship. You agree that your God has no human qualities, according to your own tradition. Let me just ask this. Isn't language a human quality? To have a language, God would have to have a mouth, a tongue, vocal chords, a voice. He would have to look like a man. In his own image. But you agree that God is not like that.

So what?

So if God is above language—so far above it as He is so far above all that is merely human—then how did the words of your Book come into being?

The Angel understood God and brought the Message in a way that the Messenger could understand, and the Messenger received it.

Was the Message in Arabic?

That's how the Messenger received it and how his Companions wrote it down.

Can I ask you something about translation?

You do this too much. We are going in one direction and then you swerve across the road and start driving the other way. Not only a butterfly but a bad driver.

I only want to suggest that when the Archangel understood the Word of God and brought it to the Messenger in a way that the Messenger could understand, he was translating it. God communicated it the way that God communicates, which is so far above human understanding that we cannot even begin to comprehend it, and the Angel made it comprehensible to the Messenger, by delivering it in human speech, which is not the speech of God.

The Book is the uncreated Word of God.

But we agreed that God has no words. In which case, what we read is an interpretation of God. And so maybe there could be other interpretations? Maybe your way, your Yutubi's way, is not the only way? Maybe there is no one correct way?

You are a snake.

Can I ask what language you read the Book? In the first language or another?

I read it in this inferior tongue in which we are speaking now.

Another translation.

The crisis began one early afternoon when Pliny the Younger was seventeen and staying with his mother and uncle in a villa overlooking the bay of Naples. His mother noticed it first, ‘a cloud, both strange and enormous in appearance’, forming in the sky in the distance. Pliny said that it looked like an umbrella pine tree, ‘for it raised high on a kind of very tall trunk and spread out into branches’. But it was also like a mushroom [1]: as light as sea foam — white, but gradually turning dirty, elevated on a stem, potentially deadly. They were too far away to be certain which mountain the mushroom cloud was coming from, but Pliny later discovered it was Vesuvius, some thirty kilometres from Misenum, where he and his mother Plinia were watching.

There for the first time I saw the gassed bodies in mass. But I must admit openly that the gassings had a calming effect on me, since in the near future the mass annihilation of the Jews was to begin [...] I was always horrified by the death by firing squads, especially when I thought of the huge numbers of women and children who would have to be killed. I had had enough of hostage executions, and the mass killings by firing squad ordered by Himmler and Heydrich. Now I was at ease. We were all saved from these bloodbaths, and the victims would be spared until the last moment.

On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles—whatever one may choose to call them—we know: the best of us did not return.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfilment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.

She would like to assemble these multiple images of herself, separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth during World War II up until the present day. Therefore, an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation. Each time she begins, she meets the same obstacles: how to represent the passage of historical time, the changing of things, ideas, and manners, and the private life of this woman? How to make the fresco of forty-five years coincide with the search for a self outside of History, the self of suspended moments transformed into the poems she wrote at twenty ('Solitude', etc.)? Her main concern is the choice between 'I' and 'she'. There is something too permanent about 'I', something shrunken and stifling, whereas 'she' is too exterior and remote. The image she has of her book in its nonexistent form, of the impression it should leave, is the one she retained from 'Gone With the Wind', read at the age of twelve, and later from 'Remembrance of Things Past', and more recently from 'Life and Fate': an image of light and shadow streaming over faces. But she hasn't yet discovered how to do this. She awaits if not a revelation then a sign, a coincidence, like the madeleine dipped in tea for Marcel Proust.

I worry that simply summarising someone's Views cannot convey a full Sense of their Spirit—the linguistic Habits of the Author get lost, his Style too, and Humour and Anecdotes cannot be simply summarised.

Declaration

Before I leave my life of my own free will and with a clear mind, I feel bound to fulfill a final obligation—to give heartfelt thanks to this wonderful land of Brazil [...] Every day I learned to love this country more, and I would not have asked to rebuild my life in any other place after the world of my own language sank and was lost to me, and my spiritual homeland, Europe, destroyed itself.
But to start everything anew after a man's 60th birth year requires special powers, and my own power has been expended after years of wandering homeless. I thus prefer to end my life at the right time, upright, as a man for whom cultural work has always been his purest happiness and personal freedom—the most precious possessions of this earth.
I send greetings to all my friends! May they live to see the dawn after this long night! I, who am most impatient, go before them.

Stefan Zweig

Joyce and another student, George Clancy, liked to rouse Cadic [teacher] to flights of miscomprehension. In a favourite little drama, Joyce would snicker offensively at Clancy's efforts to translate a page into English. Clancy pretended to be furious and demanded an apology, which Joyce refused. Then Clancy would challenge Joyce to a duel in the Phoenix Park. The horrified Cadic would rush in to conciliate the fiery Celts, and after much horseplay would persuade them to shake hands.

When Yeats imprudently mentioned the names of Balzac and of Swinburne, Joyce burst out laughing so that everyone in the cafe turned round to look at him. 'Who reads Balzac today?' he exclaimed.

Jim is beginning his novel, as he usually begins things, half in anger [...] I suggested the title of the paper 'A Portrait of the Artist', and this evening, sitting in the kitchen, Jim told me his idea for the novel. It is to be almost autobiographical, and naturally as it comes from Jim, satirical.

The couple went on to London. As yet neither wholly trusted the other. When they arrived in the city, Joyce left Nora for two hours in a park while he went to see Arthur Symons. She thought he would not return. But he did, and he was to surprise his friends, and perhaps himself too, by his future constancy. As for Nora, she was steadfast for the rest of her life.

Copy No. 1000 [of Ulysses] he inscribed to his wife and presented to her in Arthur Power's presence. Here, in Ithaca, was Penelope. Nora at once offered to sell it to Power. Joyce smiled but was not pleased. He kept urging her to read the book, yet she would not.

he could answer truthfully, 'It's hard to say.' 'Then what is the title of it?' asked Suter. This time Joyce was less candid: 'I don't know. It is like a mountain that I tunnel into from every direction, but I don't know what I will find.' Actually he did know the title at least, and had told it to Nora in strictest secrecy. It was to be 'Finnegans Wake', the apostrophe omitted because it meant both the death of Finnegan and the resurgence of all Finnegans. The title came from the ballad about the hod-carrier who falls from a ladder to what is assumed to be his death, but is revived by the smell of the whiskey at his wake.

One such evening ended with Joyce alighting from the taxi at his door and suddenly plunging up the street shouting, 'I made them take it,' presumably an angry brag that he had foisted 'Ulysses' upon the public. Nora looked at Laubenstein and said, 'Never mind, I'll handle him,' and soon deftly collected her fugitive.

in the middle of one such session there was a knock at the door which Beckett didn't hear. Joyce said, 'Come in,' and Beckett wrote it down. Afterwards he read back what he had written and Joyce said, 'What's that "Come in"?' 'Yes, you said that,' said Beckett. Joyce thought for a moment, then said, 'Let it stand.' He was quite willing to accept coincidence as his collaborator.

The strangest story. . . It can be read, I think, only with the most continually warring emotions - admiration for Proust's courage to endure the slow suicidal routine on which he believed his great novel depended; admiration for Céleste's courage in adapting herself to such monstrous service; . . . growing horror at the way in which Proust used cold-bloodedly everyone he knew as creatures for his art; . . .

"You know Céleste, I want my work to be a sort of cathedral in literature. That is why it is never finished. Even when the construction is completed there is always some decoration to add, or a stained-glass window or a capital or another chapel to be opened, with a little statue in the corner."

I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armour, as if I were a lobster. I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armour or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corslet meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional.

And so it is a reader, first and foremost, that I wish to pay tribute to these colleagues who have gone before me, in the form of these extended marginal notes and glosses, which do not otherwise have any particular claim to make.

I have learned how it is essential to gaze far beneath the surface, that art is nothing without patient handiwork, and that there are many difficulties to be reckoned with in the recollection of things.

At the end of September 1965, having moved to the French-speaking part of Switzerland to continue my studies, a few days before the beginning of the semester I took a trip to the nearby Seeland, where, starting from Ins, I climbed up the so-called Schattenrain. It was a hazy sort of day, and I remember how, on reaching the edge of the small wood covering the slope, I paused to look back down at the path I had come by, at the plain stretching away to the north criss-crossed by the straight lines of canals, with the hills shrouded in mist beyond; and how, when I emerged once more into the fields above the village of Lüscherz, I saw spread out below me the Lac de Bienne, and sat there for an hour or more lost in thought at the sight, resolving that at the earliest opportunity I would cross over to the island in the lake which, on that autumn day, was flooded with a trembling pale light. As so often happens in life, however, it took another thirty-one years before this plan could be realized and I was finally able, in the early summer of 1996, in the company of an exceedingly obliging host who lived high above the steep shores of the lake and who habitually wore a kind of captain's cap, smoked Indian bidis and seldom spoke, to make the journey across the lake from the city of Bienne to the island of Saint-Pierre, formed during the last ice age by the retreating Rhône glacier into the shape of a whale's back—or so it is generally said.

At any rate, in the few days I spent on the island—during which time I passed not a few hours sitting by the window in the Rosseau room—among the tourists who come over to the island on a day trip for a stroll or a bite to eat, only two strayed into this room with its sparse furnishings—a settee, a bed, a table and a chair—and even those two, evidently disappointed at how little there was to see, soon left again. Not one of them bent down to look at the glass display case to try to decipher Rosseau's handwriting, nor noticed the way that the bleached deal floorboards, almost two feet wide, are so worn down in the middle of the room as to form a shallow depression, nor that in places the knots in the wood protrude by almost an inch. No one ran a hand over the stone basin worn smooth by age in the antechamber, or noticed the smell of soot which still lingers in the fireplace, nor paused to look out the window with its view across the orchard and a meadow to the island's southern shore.

And so we see Mörike at the last sitting in the garden surrounded by his wife's relations on a hot summer's day, the only one with a book in his hand, and in the end not very content in his role as a poet, from which he—unlike his clerical calling—can no longer retire. Still he has to torment himself with his novel and other such literary matters. But for years now the work has not really been going anywhere. The painter Friedrich Pecht, in a reminiscence about this time, relates how on several occasions he observed Mörike noting things down which came into his head on speecial scraps and pieces of paper, only soon afterwards to take these notes and 'tear them up into little pieces and bury them in the pockets of his dressing-gown.'