A Reader on Reading

So wrote the seventeen-year-old Arthur Rimbaud to his friend Paul Demeny, two years before composing Une Saison en enfer, beginning the letter with the inevitable conclusion: “Car JE est un autre” — “Because I is someone else.”

This is the truth that the reader must always bear in mind.

Final Answers

“May it please your Majesty,” said Two, in a very humble tone,

going down on one knee as he spoke, “we were trying—”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 8

A la mémoire de Simone Vauthier

ON 19 APRIL 1616, THE DAY after having been given extreme unction, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra penned a dedication of his last book, The Labors of Persiles and Segismunda, to Don Pedro Fernández de Castro, Count of Lemos, a novel which, in his opinion, “dares to compete with Heliodorus.” Heliodorus was a Greek novelist, once famous and now forgotten, whose Aethiopica Cervantes much admired. Three or four days later (historians remain undecided) Cervantes died, leaving his widow in charge of publishing the Persiles. His Quixote, if we can credit at least in part the modest disclaimer placed at the beginning of the first volume, was for Cervantes something lamentably minor. “What could this barren and ill-cultivated spirit of mine produce but the story of a dry, wizened son, whimsical and full of all manner of notions never before conceived?” he asks the reader. On his deathbed, intent on judging his own labors, Cervantes concludes that the Persiles, or perhaps his long, poetic unfinished Galatea, is to be his literary testament. Readers have decided otherwise, and it is Don Quixote that lives on as our contemporary, while the rest of Cervantes’s work has largely become fodder for scholars. Don Quixote now stands for the whole of Cervantes’s work, and perhaps for Cervantes himself.

Like Cervantes, we are mostly unaware of our destiny. Cursed with consciousness, we understand that we are on this earth on a journey that, like all journeys, must have had a beginning and will no doubt reach an end, but when was the first step taken and which will be the last, where are we meant to be traveling to and why, and in expectation of what results, are questions that remain implacably unanswered. We can console ourselves, like Don Quixote himself, with the conviction that our goodwill and noble suffering mysteriously justify our being alive, and that through our actions we play a role that holds the secret universe together. But consolation is not reassurance.

Jews believe that thirty-six righteous men, the Lamed Wufniks, justify the world before God. No man knows that he is a Lamed Wufnik, nor does he know the identity of the other thirty-five, but, for reasons clear only to God, his existence prevents this world from crumbling into dust. Perhaps there is no act, however minuscule or trite, that does not accomplish a similar purpose. Perhaps each of our lives (and that of every insect, every tree, every cloud) stands like a letter in a text whose meaning depends on a certain sequence of appearing and disappearing letters, in a story whose beginning we ignore and whose end we will not read. If the letter L in this paragraph had consciousness, it might then ask itself the same questions and, unable to follow the page on which it is written, equally receive no answers.

Not knowing what they are meant to do but feeling that they must know when they have done it: this paradox haunts artists from the beginning of time. Artists have always been aware that they engage (or have been recruited for) a task whose ultimate purport must escape them. They may realize, sometimes, that they have achieved something without understanding exactly what or how, or may guess that they are on the verge of achieving something that will, however, escape them, or that they have been allotted a task defined by the very impossibility of being achieved. Countless unfinished monuments, paintings, symphonies, and novels testify to their artistic hubris; a few others bravely proclaim that accomplishment is (though rarely) also within the human scope.