I cried, I could not hold back the tears. I cried before the unexpected return of the past. Something very similar occurs in a passage from Sebald’s Vertigo. The narrator of “All’estero,” a chapter in that book, travels with a friend, Clara, who succumbs to the temptation to enter the school she had been to as a child: “In one of the classrooms, the very one where she had been taught in the early 1950s, the selfsame schoolmistress was still teaching, almost thirty years later, her voice quite unchanged — still warning the children to keep at their work, as she had done then […]. Alone in the entrance hall, surrounded by closed doors that had seemed at one time like mighty portals, Clara was overcome by tears […]. We returned to her grandmother’s flat in Ottakring, and neither on the way there nor that entire evening did she regain her composure following this unexpected encounter with her past.”
Here Sebald seems to be telling us that the past, all past, is still happening, surfacing, is there, doing its own thing. Without handing out a calling card or needing us to invoke it, the past, our past, is happening in the present. It’s thrilling, it’s terrifying. It reminds me of Emily Dickinson begging the Lord not to leave her alone down here. I believe that she sensed that we are completely alone, without anybody, in a world that is only a dark basement, where we may have been put for good.
JANUARY 23 OR MONTAIGNE’S MALADY
You aged twenty years in one go, one evening in Budapest, and now you’re lying on the bed and a voice talks to you in the dark. I am not, it tells you, exactly a human voice, I am the one who has always been with you, I am the voice that causes you to be alone, that tells you now there’s still something to say, I am Tongoy, I know very well who I am, the afternoon is flat, I am Tongoy, seated beside you, head in my hands, seeing myself right now rise and go, go out in search of the byroad, I am Tongoy, I see myself first rise and stand holding on to the chair and then sit down again and then rise again and stand again holding on to the chair, here I am, I know who I am, I am with you, I am alone, I am Tongoy, I have Montaigne’s malady, I like to assay, I assay, today I just assay.
JANUARY 24
I am the one who has always been with you, the voice that causes you to be alone, that tells you it may still be possible to name something, there may still be words to say, I am Tongoy, I know who I am, the afternoon is sad, the afternoon is flat, I am Tongoy, seated beside you, I am the one who has always been with you, look at me, my head is sunk on crippled hands and I see myself right now rise and come closer to you, I am Tongoy, a leaden light illuminates me, I am enormously tired, possibly because I have been conceived by a man I guess is vulnerable in everything except his writing: I’m sure that, if the world collapsed, he would keep up the work he has to do, without changing the subject, he would carry on talking about all that he will identify with until he finishes the book he is writing, he will identify fully with it only until then, so that, if the world collapsed now, he would carry on talking about the threat to the literary and how he conspires against the enemies and survives in the pages of books. He would carry on talking about all this, waiting to come across unexpected frontiers and find in them the prized formula to disappear completely one day. Said formula — the vulnerable man has an idea — may consist in saying, “disappear,” naming the word disappear, it may consist only in this, in saying, “disappear,” never despair. Or it may consist only in saying that I am Tongoy and I know very well who I am. In saying, for example, leaden light. Or saying leaden light on my body. Or saying head sunk on crippled hands. And then saying that it isn’t possible to name or say anything. And then what. I don’t know, I am Tongoy, the afternoon is flat; I know, there may not be anything to name, nothing, I don’t know, I shouldn’t have started. Once something begins, that something can no longer vanish. God, what will we do to disappear? We are immeasurable distances away from achieving it. But I plan to try, I shall go to the limits of the limitless void. With my head sunk on crippled hands.
JANUARY 25
A few minutes ago I was lying on my back, with my legs in the air, as if they wanted to hit the ceiling, my eyes closed, my face full of tears. It was surprising, but even crying and in this pathetic or ridiculous posture I confirmed once again what the great secret of everything is: to feel oneself the center of the world. This is exactly what every individual does.
FEBRUARY 23
“Switzerland: admirable source of energy. If the mountain makes a fir of the tree, it’s possible to guess what it can make of man. Aesthetics and morality of conifers.”
— ANDRÉ GIDE, Journal
Aesthetics of cypress, pine, and savin.
All morning on the byroad, under the constant weight of what I was reading by Kafka. Although I was reading at home, I had the vaguely disturbing sensation of being at home and feeling that I wasn’t.
“So he carried on; but the way was long. The road, that main street of the town, did not lead to the castle mound; it only approached, but then, almost deliberately, it took another direction, it didn’t move away from the castle, but it didn’t go any closer to it either.”
This is what I read this morning. And all the time I was lost on the byroad, where I got even more lost in the afternoon, when I traveled across a high ridge, where bluish-black boulders advanced in sharp wedges toward the train, and I looked out of the window, searching in vain for the peak. At dusk I suddenly saw snow-covered valleys, narrow and uneven, and with my finger I traced the direction in which they disappeared.
To avoid growing more anxious, I thought about the snows of yesteryear, about Christmas past, Christmas in Barcelona in 1962, the year of the Great Snowfall. And I picked up Josep Pla, hoping to find myself back at home, I started reading the Catalan writer, I searched for a passage from his diary in which he spoke of his strange feelings toward Christmas. I tried to put Kafka out of my mind.
On such a date, the 23rd, but in the month of December, in a year long ago, 1918, Josep Pla noted down in his diary his concern for the dryness of his heart and the sterility of his sentiment at Christmastide.
If Pla was worried by this dryness, I have once again been concerned all day with the difficulty of disappearing from the world, of disappearing even from this passage that I sense will always be unfinished, since it has neither a middle nor an end, nor any chance of dissolving, disappearing fully from the moment it began.
This, however, did not worry Pla, writer of passages. It was a relief to read him for a while, to cross a street and escape from Kafka. Pla was worried by other affairs. His cold attitude toward sentimental Christmas, for example. Had Kafka heard about Pla’s concern, he would have said of him that “the breath of his coldness toward Christmas made the faces of the others shudder.”