I was listening to Paul Theroux read Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Gospel According to Mark” and was surprised to discover that Theroux had been one of Borges’s readers. “I was taking the trip that I wrote about in The Old Patagonian Express,” he says,
I ended up in Buenos Aires. We had the same publisher, and I told him that Borges was my hero. He said, “Oh, well, he’d love to see you. He’s blind, of course, and he needs to be read to. You can be his reader.” So I went to his apartment. There was a white cat, I remember, sleeping on his lap. I read to him. He loved Kipling, and Chesterton, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wrong Box.
Theroux then adds that he appreciated Borges’s sense of humor, which he describes as “self-effacing.”
It is an odd anecdote, not so much from Theroux’s perspective but from the publisher’s. It’s hard not to think of him sitting in his Buenos Aires office taking every odd opportunity to offer to visiting writers the chance to read to Borges himself. “Just behind this curtain, ladies and gentlemen, you, too, can read to Argentina’s greatest living writer!” Who could pass up such a chance?
Theroux makes much more of his meeting with Borges in The Old Patagonian Express. There he recounts Borges extolling the virtues of New England and Austin, Texas, scoffing at Canada, preaching about race and history and politics, divining writers and their writing, laughing at Jesus. Borges is such a raconteur in the book that Theroux excuses the detail of his transcription by noting the old man’s blindness was the perfect disguise for the fact he was taking copious notes. Despite concluding Borges was “almost angelic,” in Theroux’s hands younger Borges is actually more like a whirlwind.
Of course, Borges already had readers, including his mother and occasional boys whom he conscripted. Alberto Manguel read to him for two years and has written at length about it in With Borges and A History of Reading. I haven’t read the former (Scott Esposito has a nice review), but in the latter Manguel, too, recalls reading Kipling and Stevenson as well as a dozen other writers and their works, and he fondly remembers Borges’s humor. Manguel says that Borges would frequently interrupt him to comment on the line he just read, compare the text to another, or take a note on the end pages. He writes:
The experience felt like a sort of happy captivity. I was enthralled not so much by the texts he was making me discover (many of which eventually became my own favourites) as by his comments, which were vastly but unobtrusively erudite, very funny, sometimes cruel, almost always indispensable. I felt I was the unique owner of a carefully annotated edition, compiled for my exclusive sake. Of course, I wasn’t; I (like many others) was simply his notebook, an aide-mémoire which the blind man required in order to assemble his ideas. I was more than willing to be used.
I wonder how many others can boast, like Theroux and Manguel, that they read to Borges? I have found reference to and the names of a few:
Just as fascinating as who read to Borges is the question of who claims to have read to Borges but lied about it? For example, I don’t think John Moss ever did, but he did publish a brief essay titled “Reading to Borges” in Danielle Schaub’s Reading Writers Reading. He’s using the act of reading as a metaphor, not as a lie, but surely Borges’s fame has inspired one or another literary groupie to make the boast.
I’m sure more anecdotes could be turned up in Spanish-language searches.
These photographs I took last during a mild (for us—western Iowa was hit hard) ice storm. At the time, much of our ice had come in the form of fog that had sidled up to the trees and breathed crystals onto their branches; only later did they get a proper coating to weigh them down. The setting is just outside my workplace, walking from the parking lot toward the building.
This is not a political blog; however, I sent the following letter (well, e-mail) to Tom Harkin, my Senator, today, because it’s important. Feel free to copy it and send it to him, or to revise it to send to your own Senator, if you are so inclined.
Dear Senator Harkin:
Today I read in a story from the Los Angeles Times about your efforts to change the Senate’s rules regarding the filibuster. I support those efforts. But I also urge you to be more ambitious: the filibuster should be ended for good and the Senate’s rules should be changed to severely curtail blocks on Executive branch appointments.
The minority’s ability to block everything from legislation to Executive branch appointments means that the United States cannot take on the important problems of our time, such as the rising costs of health care and the dire consequences of climate change. It means that positions important to the smooth running of government, such as the Undersecretary for International Affairs and the Assistant Secretary for International Economics and Development in the Department of the Treasury, are left empty in a time of great financial distress. It means that America’s judiciary is poorly staffed and that criminal cases go untried and unprosecuted. The arcane, antidemocratic procedures of the Senate need to end now to ensure the United States can operate and be governed well.
I am sure that some Democratic Senators worry about ending the filibuster because they believe there will be a time when they will again be in the minority. Their hesitation is a hedge to protect the legislation they worked so hard to pass. I acknowledge that danger, but I am willing to accept it, as should they. As you have said, “Elections should have consequences“—that is true just as much as when Republicans win elections as when Democrats win them. When the elected majority cannot pass legislation it was elected to pass, when the elected President cannot pursue policies he or she was elected to pursue, then it is not just legislation and Executive branch policy being undermined by the filibuster—it is the will of the people.
Again, I support your efforts change the Senate’s rules, and I urge you to step up those efforts.
Sincerely,
It is 7.35 PM on a Wednesday. K lies restlessly asleep beside me. The futon we are on has heavy wooden arms that curl out from the purple mattress like the crest of a wave. (It is a futon that will not long be with us: any day now we will trade up to a sofa, and it will regain its right and true identity as a college woman’s furniture. I am sure it has felt out-of-place with us the past five years, despite the small apartments we have inhabited and the perpetual transitoriness of our lives. Has it resented us for keeping regular hours? Did its loathing increase when we bought a kitchen table and began eating dinner there?) Bingley lies curled up on her chest, and Jane lies across my arm, a heavy enough weight to cut off the blood circulation to my wrist and make it difficult to type. (I’d hate to meet the man who could cast off such a creature as Jane. His heart would be so cold his blood would skitter, not pulse, from artery to vein.) And Newton lies restlessly on a blanket by the television, which is off. His own restlessness is despondency and boredom. Not only is he shut inside all day while we are at work, on winter days such as we have had lately, when the temperatures are near zero degrees Fahrenheit and the wind chills are so severe they make your skin hurt, neither of us get as much exercise as we would like. It is too cold to run in the mornings, too cold to walk far in the evenings, too overwhelming to make it even for a few minutes to the park. I am as restless as he, ready to get out in the world, ice and snow and poor traction be damned so long as I can work up enough breath that the icicles will cover all of my beard and what sweat I do work up will freeze, a fine film of salt and water waiting for exposure to the dry air of the furnace to reveal itself for what it is.
Things are quiet tonight.
One is supposed to look ahead after New Year’s day, ready to tickle the 2010 baby and make it laugh. But I want to take one last look back at 2009 to say “good riddance” to a year marked by layoffs and unemployment, medical procedures, legal troubles, ill focus, worry, disappointment, and anguish. December ended well, however, so well that I have high hopes for 2010—higher than I’ve had for any new year in the past half-dozen. Whether things will remain so high remains to be seen, but at least it’s starting somewhere good.
For this post I thought to make a chart of the year’s highs and lows, but after thinking about it, I realized the chart is really too arbitrary to be of any use. All the mixedness of mixed emotions, for example, is collapsed into a single up or down slope; the entire chart is interpretation disguised as empiricism. So I won’t use the thing as a representation of 2009, but I will link to it for your amusement. The exercise led me to this: I think it would be fascinating to review a year’s worth of data from a daily surveys of one person’s emotions.
