It is mutability, then, that animates a face for a poet, that reverberates almost palpably in Yeats's famous lines:
How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
That a reader can empathize with these lines proves him to be as susceptible to the appeal of mutability as the poet. More exactly, the degree of his lyrical appreciation here is the degree to which he is removed from that very mutability, the degree to which he is confined to the definite: features or circumstances or both. With the poet, he discerns in that changing oval far more than just the seven letters of Homo Dei; he discerns there the entire alphabet, in all its combinations, i.e., the language. That is how in the end the Muse perhaps indeed becomes feminine, how she gets photographed. The Yeats quatrain sounds like a moment of recognition of one form of life in another: of the poet's own vocal cords' tremolo in his beloved's mortal features, or uncertainty in uncertainty. To a vibrating voice, in other words, everything tentative and faltering is an echo, promoted at times to an alter ego or, as gender would have it, to an altra ego.
XIII
Gender imperatives notwithstanding, let's keep in mind that an altra ego is no Muse. Whatever solipsistic depths a carnal union may avail him, no poet ever mistakes his voice for its echo, the inner for the outer. The prerequisite of love is the autonomy of its object, preferably within arm's reach. The same goes for an echo that defines the range of one's voice. Those depicted in the exhibition—women and, moreover, men—were not themselves Muses, but their good stand- ins, inhabiting this side of reality and sharing with the older women their language. They were (or ended up being) other people's wives; actresses and dancers, schoolteachers, divorcees, nurses; they had a social station and thus could be defined, while the Muse's main trait—let me repeat it—is that she is undefinable. They were neurotic or serene, promiscuous or strict, religious or cynical, great dressers or slovenly, highly sophisticated or barely literate. Some of them couldn't care less for poetry and would embrace a common cad more eagerly than an ardent admirer. On top of that, they lived in different lands, though at about the same time, spoke different tongues, and didn't know of each other. In short, nothing bound them together save that something they said or did at a certain moment triggered and set in motion the machinery of language, and it rolled along, leaving behind on paper "the best words in the best possible order." They were not Muses, because they made the Muse, the older woman, speak.
Caught in the gallery's net, I thought, these birds of bards' paradise had at least got their proper identification, if not actual rings. Like their bards, most of them were gone now, and gone were their guilty secrets, moments of triumph, substantial wardrobes, protracted malaises, and peculiar affinities. \Vhat remained was a song owing to the birds' capacity to flutter off no less than to the bards' to chirp, yet outlasting both—the way it will outlast its readers, who, for the moment of reading at least, share in a song's afterlife.
XI Y
Herein lies the ultimate distinction between the beloved and the Muse: the latter doesn't die. The same goes for the Muse and the poet: when he's gone, she finds herself another mouthpiece in the next generation. To put it another way, she always hangs around a language and doesn't seem to mind being mistaken for a plain girl. Amused by this sort of error, she tries to correct it by dictating to her charge now pages of Paradiso, now Thomas Hardy's poems of 1912-13; that is, those where the voice of human passion yields to that of linguistic necessity—but apparently to no avail. So let's leave her with a flute and a wreath of wildflowers. This way at least she might escape a biographer.
How to Read a Book
The idea of a book fair in the city where, a century ago, Nietzsche lost his mind has, in its own turn, a nice ring to it. A Mobius strip (commonly known as a vicious circle), to be precise, for several stalls in this book fair are occupied by the complete or selected works of this great German. On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future which we all prefer to regard as unending.
On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors— mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust. Yet even this form of the future is better than the memory of a few surviving relatives or friends on whom one cannot rely, and often it is precisely the appetite for this posthumous dimension which sets one's pen in motion.
Delivered at the opening of the first book fair in Turin, Italy, in May ig88.
So as we toss and turn these rectangular objects in our hands—those in octavo, in quarto, in duodecimo, etc., etc.—we won't be terribly amiss if we surmise that we fondle in our hands, as it were, the actual or potential urns with our returning ashes. After all, what goes into writing a book—be it a novel, a philosophical treatise, a collection of poems, a biography, or a thriller—is, ultimately, a man's only life: good or bad but always finite. Whoever said that to philosophize is an exercise in dying was right in more ways than one, for by writing a book nobody gets younger.
Nor does one become any younger by reading one. Since this is so, our natural preference should be for good books. The paradox, however, lies in the fact that in literature, as nearly everywhere, "good" is not an autonomous category: it is defined by its distinction from "bad." What's more, in order to write a good book, a writer must read a great deal of pulp—otherwise he won't be able to develop the necessary criteria. That's what may constitute bad literature's best defense at the Last Judgment; that's also the raison d'etre of the proceedings in which we take part today.
Since we are all moribund, and since reading books is time- consuming, we must devise a system that allows us a semblance of economy. Of course, there is no denying the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving, mediocre novel; still, we all know that we can indulge ourselves in that fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake but to learn. Hence the need for concision, condensation, fusion—for the works that bring the human predicament, in all its diversity, into its sharpest possible focus; in other words, the need for a shortcut. Hence, too—as a by-product of our suspicion that such shortcuts exist (and they do, but about that later)—the need for some compass in the ocean of available printed matter.
The role of that compass, of course, is played by literary criticism, by reviewers. Alas, its needle oscillates wildly. What is north for some is south (South America, to be precise) for others; the same goes in an even wilder degree for east and west. The trouble with a reviewer is (minimum) threefold: (a) he can be a hack, and as ignorant as ourselves; (b) he can have strong predilections for a certain kind of writing or simply be on the take with the publishing industry; and (c) if he is a writer of talent, he will turn his review writing into an independent art form—Jorge Luis Borges is a case in point—and you may end up reading reviews rather than the books themselves.