“Did you know that in Buddhist monasteries one of the exercises is to meet each moment of your life by living it to the full?” asks Celia.
She’s come into the study, and it doesn’t look like on her first day as a Buddhist she’s going to let him be much of a hikikomori. Riba is surprised because Celia never comes into his room without knocking.
“In Buddhist monasteries they help you to think,” says Celia completely naturally, as if she hasn’t infringed one of their house rules by coming into his study.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Really? I’ll explain. In Buddhist monasteries they help you say to yourself, for instance: now it’s noon, now I’m walking across the patio, now I’m going to meet the abbot, and at the same time you have to think that noon, the patio, and the abbot are unreal, they’re as unreal as oneself and one’s own thoughts. Because Buddhism denies the I.”
“That’s something I am not unaware of.”
He observes that the conflict he wanted to avoid is about to happen, and thinks again that in no way does he want to live in a novel. But the fact is, what he feared is happening: it won’t be easy living with someone who’s changed a lot in the last few weeks and who now has a markedly religious world view very different from his own.
Celia thinks she can guess what he’s thinking, and calms him down. She says he mustn’t worry, because Buddhism is gentle, it’s good, and what’s more, Buddhism is just a philosophy, a way of life, essentially just a technique for personal improvement.
One of Buddhism’s meditation themes, Celia explains, is the idea that there is no subject, but rather a series of mental states. Another theme is that our past life is illusory. He should calm down, Celia tells him. Riba doesn’t know what to reply, and says he’s prepared to calm down but he’s not inside a novel.
“I don’t understand,” Celia says.
“Nor I you.”
“But let’s see if you at least understand this. If, for example, you were a Buddhist monk, you’d think at this moment that you’ve started to live now. Are you listening?”
“I’ve started to live now?”
“You’d think that all of your life before now, that alcoholic period of yours and the very one you hate so much and feel so proud of having escaped, was a dream. This is what you’d think, do you follow? You’d think this and also that all of universal history is a dream. Are you listening?”
He is, sort of. The irruption of Buddhism into his life has overwhelmed him. The truth is he preferred her when she used to talk to her mother on the phone every evening, or to her siblings, or her work colleagues about the problems at the museum. Buddhism has come to complicate everything.
“You’d gradually liberate yourself by doing mental exercises,” Celia continues. “And once you understood for real that the I doesn’t exist, you wouldn’t think that the I can be happy, or that your task is to make it happy, you wouldn’t think any of that.”
He thinks that all that remains for her to say is: And don’t get so excited about your trip to Dublin, or your search for enthusiasm and lost genius, or about New York, which represents your hope of abandoning your mediocre life, or about the idea that you’re not that old, or about the English leap.
But being a Buddhist, he wonders, would she be able to say something so incredibly cruel? He prefers to think not. Buddhism isn’t merciless. Buddhism is gentle, Buddhism is good. Isn’t it?
His eyes round as saucers, he’s sitting in front of the computer. He doesn’t know how many hours he’s been here. Relentless insomnia. He gets the impression he’s being observed. Maybe by someone not visible. By someone who has faded into impalpability, whether through death or through a change of manners.
It’s well known that every man shows a different face when he feels he’s being spied on, and now Riba, sensing he might be watched, changes even his gestures. He should go to bed, maybe that’s all it is. Tiredness. It’s almost five o’clock in the morning. He should get some rest, but he’s not convinced it’s the right thing to do. He turns back to the computer.
He discovers via Google that on February 2, 1922, the day his father was born, other things happened in the world. One of them is astonishingly related to a very important event for Dublin. On this day Sylvia Beach, the publisher of Ulysses, was walking restlessly along the platform of the Gare de Lyon in Paris for a long time. Shrouded in the chilly morning air, she awaited the arrival of the train from Dijon. The express arrived at seven o’clock on the dot. And Sylvia Beach ran toward the ticket inspector who was holding a packet and looking for the person to give those first two copies of Ulysses to, sent by the printer Maurice Darantière, who had worked his fingers to the very bone on every correction of every paragraph of every galley that had been crossed out, rewritten, and manhandled to ridiculous extremes. There were the first and the second copies of the first edition, with their Greek blue cover and the title and author’s name in white lettering. It was James Joyce’s birthday, and Sylvia Beach’s present to him would be unforgettable. Perhaps this was one of the great secret moments of the age of print, of the Gutenberg galaxy.
That same day, at the same time that Joyce received his first copy of Ulysses, at a strange age — he’d been in the world a mere four hours — Riba’s father let out a huge resounding grunt, which went right through the walls of the house where he was born.
He writes a really long email to Nietzky to say that every day he feels more predestined to go to Dublin, but in the end he doesn’t send it. He goes back to Google and after looking at a few random pages ends up with the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi on the screen, which leave him even more wide awake than he was before. He always finds this Danish artist immensely hypnotic, a man who for his entire career limited himself to a few motifs: portraits of his relatives and close friends, paintings of the inside of his home, monumental buildings in Copenhagen and London, and Sjælland landscapes. He likes these canvases where the same motifs appear again and again. And although their creator projects great peace and calm in all of them, Hammershøi might be reproached for being obsessive. But he thinks that in art this is often precisely what matters, unbridled obsession, the fastidiousness behind the work.
In Hammershøi’s works the painter is always present, with his persistent images circling around his insistent empty spaces, and nothing apparently happens though nevertheless, a lot does — what happens — unlike a subject in a painting by someone like Edward Hopper for example — would never catch on as material for an orthodox novelist. There is no action in his paintings. And without exception, they are all impregnated with a very solid atmosphere: behind the extreme calm and motionlessness, one senses something indefinable and maybe threatening lying in wait.
His palette is very limited and is dominated by a range of gray tones. He’s the painter of what happens when it looks like nothing’s happening. All this turns his interiors into places of hypnotic stillness and melancholic introspection. Happily, in these paintings there is no place for fictions, for novels. One can relax comfortably in them, however much an obsessive mind sweeps over all the canvases.
But what’s more, Riba likes this painter precisely because, in the midst of the lethargic stillness of his empty spaces, everything in him is obstinate, insistent. Hammershøi lives in a permanent state of quiet obsession — to use the title of one of Vok’s books, given in English. The peaceful man’s universe seems to revolve around his restrained fascination.