Everything and Nothing
Sunday, June 12, 2016
I have been told by my Argentine friend Roberto Baschetti
who works in the Argentine National Library (which this month will be under the
helm of Alberto Manguel) that the custom of having the index of a book at the
end instead of the beginning is now changing. But I must keep in mind that a
former head of the Argentine National Library was Jorge Luís Borges and that
Borges in the mid 60s was a patron of Librería Pygmalion on Calle Corrientes
(so had been my father, my mother and then me). It was at Pygmalion that Borges
befriended an employee, Manguel, who then became his reader as by then Borges
was losing his sight.
In the mid 1990s I purchased a beautiful book Henry James On
Italy. I had one hell of a time reading it. I mentioned this to William Gibson
who told me, “The key to James is to read him out loud.” He was right and I was
able to finish the delightful book. It was in that book that I found this quote
by James:
“Venice has been
painted and described many thousands of times, and of all the cities in the
world is the easiest to visit without going there.”
Back to the weirdness of reading Borges every day and
especially in my highfalutin tub that unlike our old house does not leak and I
can immerse myself up to my neck.
Today I was reading a unique Borges, It is a
book with many of the best prologues he wrote through the years. It is called
Prólogos con un prólogo de prólogos (I have never quite known why particularly in
Argentine books they do not have their titles capitalized except for the first
letter of the first word). This translates to Prologues with a prologue for the
prologues. So, yes, Borges writes a prologue for the book and, yes, the index
is at the end of the book. In that index there are 38, and one more, the Prologue
of Prologues.
These might surprise you: There is Ray Bradbury’s Martian
Chronicles (Borges was asked to write these for Spanish translations), Thomas
Carlyle - Sartor Resartus, Wilkie Collins – Moonstone, Francis Bret Harte –
Bocetos californianos, Henry James – La humillación de los Northmore, Herman
Melville – Bartleby, Lewis Carroll – Obras completas, William Shakespeare –
Macbeth and the most startling to some (but not to me as I purchased this book in Buenos Aires in the 60s in Spanish and read that prologue) Olaf Stapledon – Hacedor de estrellas
(Starmaker).
What I found out in my tub is that I am now prepared to read
more Kafka, more James, more Lewis Carroll and a slew of obscure (to me)
Argentine novelists and poets.
And there were a couple of gems in Borges’s prologue. On
James he writes that he was the bestman at Kipling’s wedding and on reading out
loud. William Gibson was right.
Further investigation brought me here. It seems that Emma
Thompson did an audio recording of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. She has
some comments on her experience and there is fine audio excerpt of The Turn of
the Screw.
And below in Spanish and then in English is one of my favourite prose/essay about God and a certain very famous English playwright. It's title in English is the same in Spanish: Everything and nothing. Interesting, too, in Borge's prologue on Henry James he quotes Graham Greene's from The English Novelists (1936) his take on James: "...Henry James, so solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry."
And below in Spanish and then in English is one of my favourite prose/essay about God and a certain very famous English playwright. It's title in English is the same in Spanish: Everything and nothing. Interesting, too, in Borge's prologue on Henry James he quotes Graham Greene's from The English Novelists (1936) his take on James: "...Henry James, so solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry."
Everything and nothing
Jorge Luis Borges (El hacedor ,1960)
Nadie
hubo en él; detrás de su rostro (que aun a través de las malas pinturas de la
época no se parece a ningún otro) y de sus palabras, que eran copiosas,
fantásticas y agitadas, no había más que un poco de frío, un sueño no soñado
por alguien. Al principio creyó que todas las personas eran como él, pero la
extrañeza de un compañero, con el que había empezado a comentar esa vacuidad, le
reveló su error y le dejó sentir para siempre, que un individuo no debe diferir
de su especie. Alguna vez pensó que en los libros hallaría remedio para su mal
y así aprendió el poco latín y menos griego de que hablaría un contemporáneo;
después consideró que en el ejercicio de un rito elemental de la humanidad,
bien podía estar lo que buscaba y se dejó iniciar por Anne Hathaway, durante
una larga siesta de junio. A los veintitantos años fue a Londres.
instintivamente, ya se había adiestrado en el hábito de simular que era
alguien, para que no se descubriera su condición de nadie; en Londres encontró
la profesión a la que estaba predestinado, la del actor, que en un escenario,
juega a ser otro, ante un concurso de personas que juegan a tomarlo por aquel otro.
Las tareas histriónicas le enseñaron una felicidad singular, acaso la primera
que conoció; pero aclamado el último verso y retirado de la escena el último
muerto, el odiado sabor de la irrealidad recaía sobre él. Dejaba de ser Ferrex
o "Tamerlán y volvía a ser nadie. Acosado, dio en imaginar otros héroes y
otras fábulas trágicas. Así, mientras el cuerpo cumplía su destino de cuerpo,
en lupanares y tabernas de Londres, el alma que lo habitaba era César, que
desoye la admonición del augur, y Julieta, que aborrece a la alondra, y
Macbeth, que conversa en el páramo con las brujas que también son las parcas.
Nadie fue tantos hombres como aquel hombre, que a semejanza del egipcio Proteo
pudo agotar todas las apariencias del ser. A veces, dejó en algún recodo de la
obra una confesión, seguro de que no la descifrarían; Ricardo afirma que en su
sola persona, hace el papel de muchos, y Yago dice con curiosas palabras no soy
lo que soy. La identidad fundamental del existir, soñar y representar le
inspiró pasajes famosos.
Veinte
años persistió en esa alucinación dirigida, pero una mañana le sobrecogieron el
hastío y el horror de ser tantos reyes que mueren por la espada y tantos
desdichados amantes que convergen, divergen y melodiosamente agonizan. Aquel
mismo día resolvió la venta de su teatro. Antes de una semana había regresado
al pueblo natal, donde recuperó los árboles y el río de la niñez y no los
vinculó a aquellos otros que había celebrado su musa, ilustres de alusión
mitológica y de voces latinas. Tenía que ser alguien; fue un empresario
retirado que ha hecho fortuna y a quién le interesan los préstamos, los
litigios y la pequeña usura. En ese carácter dictó el árido testamento que
conocemos, del que deliberadamente excluyó todo rasgo patético o literario.
Solían visitar su retiro amigos de Londres, y él retomaba para ellos el papel
de poeta.
La
historia agrega que, antes o después de morir, se supo frente a Dios y le dijo:
Yo, que tantos hombres he sido en vano, quiero ser uno y yo. La voz de Dios le
contestó desde un torbellino: Yo tampoco soy; yo soñé el mundo como tú soñaste
tu obra, mi Shakespeare, y entre las formas de mi sueño estabas tú, que como yo
eres muchos y nadie.
Everything and Nothing (edit) :: J. L. Borges
There was no one in him; behind his face (which even in
the poor paintings of the period is unlike any other) and his words, which were
copious, imaginative, and emotional, there was nothing but a little chill, a
dream not dreamed by anyone. At first he thought everyone was like him, but the
puzzled look on a friend’s face when he remarked on that emptiness told him he
was mistaken and convinced him forever that an individual must not differ from
his species. Occasionally he thought he would find in books the cure for his
ill, and so he learned the small Latin and less Greek of which a contemporary
was to speak. Later he thought that in the exercise of an elemental human rite
he might well find what he sought, and he let himself be initiated by Anne
Hathaway one long June afternoon. At twenty-odd he went to London.
Instinctively, he had already trained himself in the habit of pretending that
he was someone, so it would not be discovered that he was no one. In London he
hit upon the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who
plays on stage at being someone else. His playacting taught him a singular
happiness, perhaps the first he had known; but when the last line was applauded
and the last corpse removed from the stage, the hated sense of unreality came
over him again. He ceased to be Ferrex or Tamburlaine and again became a
nobody. Trapped, he fell to imagining other heroes and other tragic tales.
Thus, while in London’s bawdyhouses and taverns his body fulfilled its destiny
as body, the soul that dwelled in it was Caesar, failing to heed the augurer’s
admonition, and Juliet, detesting the lark, and Macbeth, conversing on the
heath with the witches, who are also the fates. Nobody was ever as many men as
that man, who like the Egyptian Proteus managed to exhaust all the possible
shapes of being. At times he slipped into some corner of his work a confession,
certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his single
person he plays many parts, and Iago says with strange words, “I am not what I
am.” His passages on the fundamental identity of existing, dreaming, and acting
are famous.
Twenty years he persisted in that controlled
hallucination, but one morning he was overcome by the surfeit and the horror of
being so many kings who die by the sword and so many unhappy lovers who
converge, diverge, and melodiously agonize. That same day he disposed of his
theater. Before a week was out he had returned to the village of his birth,
where he recovered the trees and the river of his childhood; and he did not
bind them to those others his muse had celebrated, those made illustrious by
mythological allusions and Latin phrases. He had to be someone; he became a
retired impresario who has made his fortune and who interests himself in loans,
lawsuits, and petty usury. In this character he dictated the arid final will
and testament that we know, deliberately excluding from it every trace of
emotion and of literature. Friends from London used to visit his retreat, and
for them he would take on again the role of poet.
The story goes that, before or after he died, he found
himself before God and he said: “I, who have been so many men in vain, want to
be one man: myself.” The voice of God replied from a whirlwind: “Neither am I
one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and
among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons—and none.”
[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by
Mildred Boyer]
