A Reader on Reading

Whether against rats or dictators, writers can bring about a wild form of justice in their role as God’s spies. “Many brave men lived before Agamemnon’s time,” wrote Horace in the first century B.c., “but they are all, unmourned and unknown, covered by the long night, because they lacked a poet.” As Horace implied, we are luckier. Poems and stories that will redeem us (or in which we will find redemption of a kind) are being written, or will be written, or have been written and are awaiting their readers and, throughout time, again and again, assume this: that the human mind is always wiser than its most atrocious deeds, since it can give them a name; that in the very description of our most loathsome acts something in good writing shows them as loathsome and therefore not unconquerable; that in spite of the feebleness and randomness of language, an inspired writer can tell the unspeakable and lend a shape to the unthinkable, so that evil loses some of its numinous quality and stands reduced to a few memorable words.

Once Again, Troy

Tweedledum looked round him with a satisfied smile. “I don’t

suppose,” he said, “there’ll be a tree left standing, for ever

so far round, by the time we’ve finished!”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 4

my geography is mapped by my readings. Experience, memory, desire color and shape it, but my books define it. My Oregon belongs to Ursula K. Le Guin, my Prague to Gustav Meyrink, my Venice to Henry James, my Algeria to Rachid Boudjedra. But when I think of Beirut, three images come to mind. The first is the one my mother described to me after visiting the city in the early fifties. She had been to Paris, to Rome, to Venice: she thought there was no city as lovely as Beirut, as elegant, as welcoming. Whenever things would go wrong in Buenos Aires (and they would go wrong often) she would complain and shake her head and, instead of repeating “Moscow, Moscow!” like one of Chekhov’s three sisters, she would sigh, “Beirut, Beirut!” as if her life in that paradise would have been different had she stayed. Perhaps it would have, because Beirut was for her an impossibility. Impossible things tend to be perfect.

The second is the city I visited in 2004. The friendship of the people, their extraordinary courtesy, the constant shift in tone bred from the variety of cultural backgrounds, the pride and relief in seeing their city built up again after the war, the lack of shame with which they showed the scars, their ingrained and shared belief in the vital importance of poetry, music, good food, intelligent conversation left me, as I returned home, with a sudden nostalgia for what I had experienced as civilization.

The third is the bombed city shown on the evening news in 2008. Like any ravaged city, it is both a place of incommunicable daily personal suffering and also the image of every city in no matter what war: a place in which walls that took so long to build lie crumbled in the streets and someone stares at a fallen roof underneath which lies a brother, a sister, a friend, a parent, a child, and soldiers race past.

But there is a fourth Beirut, I think. It is made less of stones rebuilt and stones demolished than of the perseverance of memory. One of the most moving aspects of the Iliad for someone reading it today is the sudden realization that, though the teller’s voice is Greek, the tragedy is shared. That is to say: the excuse for the conflict is a kidnapping (of Helen by Paris), and the allied forces, under the insistence of the most powerful of the warlords (Agamemnon), agree to continue the siege and the fighting until their property is restored, but, as the poem makes it very clear, the awful consequences of the war are felt on either side, and both Patroclus the Greek and Hector the Trojan are victims of its savagery. The author (or authors) of the Iliad has felt that his allegiance lies with both.

The Greeks exalted war as a heroic activity, relished by the gods who sit watching the show (book 7 tells us explicitly, in Robert Fagles’s translation) “for all the world like carrion birds, like vultures.” But the fact that it was (or could be) heroic did not blind them to the horror or the suffering. And against the bloodthirsty whims of the gods, the Greeks never failed to recall that human beings are (or can be) compassionate. In Sophocles’ play Ajax, after Athena gleefully tells Odysseus, her protégé, that his foe is cursed with endless misfortune, Odysseus speaks a few heartbreaking words which suddenly render the Greek hero far nobler than the wise and gory goddess: “The unfortunate man might well be my enemy,” he says, “yet I pity him when I see him weighed down with misfortune. Indeed, it is towards myself more than towards him that I direct my thoughts, since I see clearly that we are, all of us who live upon this earth, nothing but ghosts or weightless shadows.” Memory of who he is dignifies both Ajax’s destiny and Odysseus’s own.