lick it. And histongue freezes to the ice. I thought about that when I screamed in
Oedipus.”
An absolute grasp of a moment of truth.
“These analogies,” says Charlotte, “are effective and entertaining, and who would not gladly amuse himself with such similarities?”
THURSDAY
This morning, I read in the Calgary paper that once again the provincial government intends to cut all manner of social programs, including support for handicapped people. A legally blind man, whose wife was suffering from multiple sclerosis and couldn’t work, was threatened with having his government payments cut off because he had taken a part-time job. His disability benefit amounted to $800 Canadian a month; no one can live on that amount, paying for rent and food. The statistics of child poverty in Alberta are astounding, especially in one of the richest provinces in one of the richest countries on earth. In 1996, for instance, the number of children living below the poverty line was 148,000.
What did I do about any of this?
I feel like Mittler, the fifth character in
Elective Affinities
, the outsider who, on the one hand, will not “waste his timein any household where there was no help to give and no quarrel to resolve,” and, on the other, haughtily refuses to help out his best friends. Even though he fails, he seems to me to be a worthy
Mittler
(the word means “mediator”). “Those who are superstitious about names,” we are told, “maintain that the name Mittler had obligated him to take on this strangest of all vocations.” If so, my name would echo perhaps my countless
Mangeln
(“faults” in German), if
Mangelhaftigkeit
(“inadequacy”) is my lot. The English etymology is kinder, associating my name with “among” or “a person among many”—in other words, one of Dr. Johnson’s “common readers.”
SATURDAY
Back home to France. Every time I return, I’m astonished to see, after the immense prairie skies, the stinginess of the skies in European cities.
Goethe seems to be always thinking; anywhere you go in his writing, there is never pure narration, there’s always conscious, articulated thought, permeating every room like the smell of fried onions. I enjoy this pervasiveness; a character can’t make a simple gesture without it being reflected upon, after being caught in the all-seeing eye of this minor god. The omniscient Goethe; this reminds me of a calligraphic sign that hung in the bedroom of aschoolmate of mine when we were both nine or ten, in Buenos Aires:
Remember that God is watching you,
Remember He’s watching, then,
Remember that you are going to die,
And remember, you don’t know when
.
Both observer and observed are present in the brief scene (and intellectual reflection) in which Eduard, reading out loud, crankily complains of Charlotte reading over his shoulder. “If I read to someone, isn’t it just the same as if I were explaining something orally? The written or printed words take the place of my own feelings and intentions, and do you think I would take the trouble to talk intelligibly if there were a window in my forehead or my breast, so that the person to whom I wish to relate my thoughts and feelings one by one knew in advance what I was aiming at? When someone reads over my shoulder, I always feel as if I were split in two.”
Here speaks a true reader, aware of the protocols of reading and jealous of his reading space, which must be one of three: either entirely private, silent and collected; or shared, silent as well, like the reading of Dante’s Paolo and Francesca, whose eyes and then lips meet across a page; orshared through reading out loud, when the possession of the page is that of the reader exclusively, never that of the listener. The duplicity that Eduard feels—“split in two”—is that of simultaneous modes of reading that contradict one another. Ottolie writes in her diary, “Each word that is spoken gives rise to its opposite.”
Also, the question
Oedipus.”
An absolute grasp of a moment of truth.
“These analogies,” says Charlotte, “are effective and entertaining, and who would not gladly amuse himself with such similarities?”
THURSDAY
This morning, I read in the Calgary paper that once again the provincial government intends to cut all manner of social programs, including support for handicapped people. A legally blind man, whose wife was suffering from multiple sclerosis and couldn’t work, was threatened with having his government payments cut off because he had taken a part-time job. His disability benefit amounted to $800 Canadian a month; no one can live on that amount, paying for rent and food. The statistics of child poverty in Alberta are astounding, especially in one of the richest provinces in one of the richest countries on earth. In 1996, for instance, the number of children living below the poverty line was 148,000.
What did I do about any of this?
I feel like Mittler, the fifth character in
Elective Affinities
, the outsider who, on the one hand, will not “waste his timein any household where there was no help to give and no quarrel to resolve,” and, on the other, haughtily refuses to help out his best friends. Even though he fails, he seems to me to be a worthy
Mittler
(the word means “mediator”). “Those who are superstitious about names,” we are told, “maintain that the name Mittler had obligated him to take on this strangest of all vocations.” If so, my name would echo perhaps my countless
Mangeln
(“faults” in German), if
Mangelhaftigkeit
(“inadequacy”) is my lot. The English etymology is kinder, associating my name with “among” or “a person among many”—in other words, one of Dr. Johnson’s “common readers.”
SATURDAY
Back home to France. Every time I return, I’m astonished to see, after the immense prairie skies, the stinginess of the skies in European cities.
Goethe seems to be always thinking; anywhere you go in his writing, there is never pure narration, there’s always conscious, articulated thought, permeating every room like the smell of fried onions. I enjoy this pervasiveness; a character can’t make a simple gesture without it being reflected upon, after being caught in the all-seeing eye of this minor god. The omniscient Goethe; this reminds me of a calligraphic sign that hung in the bedroom of aschoolmate of mine when we were both nine or ten, in Buenos Aires:
Remember that God is watching you,
Remember He’s watching, then,
Remember that you are going to die,
And remember, you don’t know when
.
Both observer and observed are present in the brief scene (and intellectual reflection) in which Eduard, reading out loud, crankily complains of Charlotte reading over his shoulder. “If I read to someone, isn’t it just the same as if I were explaining something orally? The written or printed words take the place of my own feelings and intentions, and do you think I would take the trouble to talk intelligibly if there were a window in my forehead or my breast, so that the person to whom I wish to relate my thoughts and feelings one by one knew in advance what I was aiming at? When someone reads over my shoulder, I always feel as if I were split in two.”
Here speaks a true reader, aware of the protocols of reading and jealous of his reading space, which must be one of three: either entirely private, silent and collected; or shared, silent as well, like the reading of Dante’s Paolo and Francesca, whose eyes and then lips meet across a page; orshared through reading out loud, when the possession of the page is that of the reader exclusively, never that of the listener. The duplicity that Eduard feels—“split in two”—is that of simultaneous modes of reading that contradict one another. Ottolie writes in her diary, “Each word that is spoken gives rise to its opposite.”
Also, the question
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