But I am preaching at you, when my own example should serve. You will believe me, niece, when I tell you that I learned, in time, that all the contents of all the books that I had read or would read were invisible. Whatever personages I had loved, or would love in the future, were for ever hidden from me. Certainly, I saw as I read. But what I saw came only from my poor stock of remembered sights. And what I saw was only a scrap of what I believed I saw. An example will serve.
Last night, I was reading yet again from a book the author of which was born before the midpoint of the previous century but lived until the year before my own birth. I had read only a few words referring to the chief female personage of the book before the appearance in my mind of the first of the images that another sort of reader would have supposed to have originated by some means in the text of the book. Being by now well skilled in such tasks, I needed only a moment of mental exertion before I recognised the source of the image just mentioned. Note first that the image was of a detail only. The text referred to a young woman. Would you not expect that any image then arising in my mind would be an image of a young woman? But I assure you that I saw only an image of a corner of a somewhat pale forehead with a strand of dark hair trailing across it. And I assure you further that this detail had its source not in any sentence of the text but in the memory of the reader of the text, myself. Some weeks before, while I sat in my usual seat in a rear corner of the church, I observed from under my eyebrows a certain young woman as she returned to her seat from the communion rail. I observed many details of her appearance, and all were of equal interest to me. Neither in the church nor at any time afterwards did I think of any of those details as being connected with any personage in any book that I had read. And yet, dear niece, the image of a strand of dark hair and a corner of a forehead are all that I can see, for the time being, of a personage who has been dear to me for longer than I have been writing my letters to you.
Much might be learned from all this, dear niece. I myself have certainly learned much from many similar discoveries. Item: if, for the sake of convenience, we call the subject matter of books a world, then that world is wholly invisible to the residents of the world where I write these words and where you read them. For I have studied the images not only of personages but of those details we suppose to be the settings of books and suppose further to have arisen from words in the text. The same book whose chief female character is visible to me presently as only a strand of hair trailing across a forehead, that same book contains hundreds of sentences describing a variety of landscapes in the south of England. I have observed myself to read all of those so-called descriptive sentences while seeing in my mind only one or another of precisely four details from the scattered coloured illustrations in a magazine that had belonged to my dead sister and still lay about this house. All of the illustrations were of landscapes in the midlands of England.
But you have read enough of arguments and demonstrations, and I have almost lost my thread. Trust me to know that the personages I have been devoted to since boyhood have been invisible to me, as have their homes, their native districts, and even the skies above those districts. At once, several questions occur to you. You assume, correctly, that I have never felt drawn towards any young woman in this, the visible world, and you want me to explain this seeming failure in me.
I have often myself considered this question, niece, and I have come to understand that I might have brought myself to approach one or another young woman from this district, or even from the town of Y— if even one of the following two conditions could have been fulfilled: before I had first seen the young woman, I would have had to read about her, if not in a book then in passages of the sort of writing such as appears in the sort of books that I read; alternatively, before I had first seen the young woman I would have had to know that the young woman had read about me as described earlier in this sentence.
You may consider these conditions overly stringent, niece, and the chance of their being fulfilled absurdly remote. Do not suspect for a moment that I devised these conditions from a wish to remain solitary. Think of me, rather, as a man who can love only the subjects of sentences in texts purporting to be other than factual.
There has been only one occasion when I felt myself drawn to treat with a young woman of this, the visible world without any bookish preliminaries. When I was still quite young, and still not reconciled altogether to my fate, I thought I might strengthen my resolve by learning about other solitaries: monkish eremites, exiles, dwellers in remote places. I happened to find in a pile of old magazines that someone had lent to one of my sisters an illustrated article about the island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic. I learned from the article that the island is the loneliest inhabited place on earth, lying far from shipping routes. The cliffs around the island allow no ship to berth. Any visiting ship must anchor at sea while the men of Tristan row out to her. These things alone were enough to excite my interest. You know the situation of this farm: a strip of land at the very southern edge of the continent, with its boundary on one side the high cliffs where I often walk alone. You should know also that the nearest bay to this farm is named after a ship that was wrecked there during the previous century. But my interest in the lonely island increased after I had learned from the magazine article about a disaster that had happened some forty years before my birth. A boat carrying all the able-bodied men of the island was lost at sea, and Tristan became a settlement of mostly women and children. For many years afterwards, so I read, the young women prayed every night for a shipwreck to bring marriageable men.
There came into my mind an image of a certain young woman of Tristan da Cunha, and whenever I looked up from my paddocks to the cliffs I thought of her as standing on the highest cliff of her island and staring out to sea. I was impelled to visit the library in the town of Y— and to consult a detailed atlas. I learned, with much excitement, that the island of Tristan da Cunha and the district where this farm is situated lie almost on the same latitude. I learned further that no land — not even the speck of an island — lies between Tristan and this coast. Now, dear niece, you must know as I know that the prevailing winds and currents in this hemisphere are from west to east, and so you can anticipate the conjectures that I made after I had studied the atlas. If the young woman on the cliff tops of the island of Tristan had written a message and had enclosed the message in a bottle and had thrown the bottle into the Atlantic Ocean from a cliff on the western side of her island, then her message might well have been carried at last to the coast of this district.
You may be inclined to smile as you read this, niece, but after I had first conjectured thus, I began the habit of walking once each week along the few beaches near this farm. While I walked, I composed in my mind various versions of the message from the young woman of Tristan. I found no bottle, which should hardly surprise you, but I was often consoled to think that a message such as I had imagined might lie during all my lifetime in some pool or crevice beneath the cliffs of my native district.
You have another matter to raise. You want to argue that each of the personages I have devoted myself to had her origins somewhere in the mind of the author of the writing that first brought her to my notice. You suggest that I might have studied the life and the pronouncements of the author in order to discover the reality, as you might call it, beneath my illusions, as you might call them. Better still, I might read a suitable work by a living author and then submit to him or her a list of questions to be answered in writing and at length.