A Reader on Reading

According to Novalis, when Adam was sent out of Eden, the shattered remains of Paradise were scattered all over the earth, and that is the reason why Paradise is so difficult to recognize. Novalis hoped that these fragments would somehow be brought together, its skeleton filled out. Perhaps the young Friedrich had entertained the same hope since Voltaire had taught him to believe in the uttermost importance of philosophy and art that sought, in a practical, empirical way, to know the world and the human condition. But the older statesman Friedrich had little faith in such cultured notions. For the student prince, gardens, like books, were ordered fragments of Paradise, reflections of what we know of the world, artificial creations that were nevertheless alive and fruit bearing, ordered spaces for our imagination to roam and for our dreams to take root, the means by which our arts and crafts transcribed the story of creation. If all flesh was as grass, as the Bible told us, then the warning could also be read as an exultation, as the revelation that we too had in us some of the grass’s ability to come into being summer after summer, to conquer death by covering the dirt-filled graves, to lead a multitudinous, exuberant, and orderly existence in leaves as numerous as those of the books in the Universal Library. For the middle-aged King Friedrich II, only the political order seemed to matter.

And yet something of Voltaire’s teachings must have taken secret root. Four years after the victory of Rossbach that won Friedrich the epithet “Great,” the king, aged thirty-nine, reverted to his early literary ambitions and composed a poetic fable which he called “Le Conte du violon” (The Tale of the Fiddle). Jotted down in Breslau, far from the quiet and beauty of Sanssouci, in the last days of 1751, it tells the story of a gifted fiddler who is asked to play on only three strings, then two, then one, and finally on none, with the obvious results. The fable ends like this:

Through this story, if it please you,

May you now this wisdom glean:

That however skilled you may be

Art falls short without the means.

The Gates of Paradise

“Come, we shall have some fun now!” thought Alice.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 7

ONE OF THE OLDEST VERSIONS of Beauty and the Beast, told in Latin by Apuleius sometime in the second century, is the story of a princess ordered by an oracle to become the wife of a dragon. Fearing for her life, dressed in mourning, abandoned by her family, she waited at the top of a mountain for her winged husband. The monster never came. Instead, a breeze lifted her and bore her down into a peaceful valley, in which stood a house of gold and silver. Disembodied voices welcomed her, and offered her food and drink, and sang to her. When night fell, no lights were lit, and in the darkness she felt someone near her. “I am your lover and your husband,” a voice said, and mysteriously she was no longer afraid. The princess lived with her unseen spouse for many days.

One evening, the voices told her that her sisters were approaching the house, searching for her, and she felt a great desire to see them once again and tell them of the wonderful things that had taken place. The voices warned her not to go, but her longing was too great. Crying out their names, she hurried to meet them. At first the sisters seemed overjoyed, but when they heard her story they cried and called her a fool for allowing herself to be deceived by a husband who required the cover of darkness. “There must be something monstrous about him, if he will not show himself to you in the light,” they said, and felt pity for her.

That night, steeling herself for a hideous revelation, the princess lit an oil lamp and crept to where her husband was sleeping. What she saw was not a dragon, but a young man of extraordinary beauty, breathing softly into the pillow. Overjoyed, she was about to extinguish the lamp, when a drop of hot oil fell on the sleeper’s left shoulder. He awoke, saw the light, said not a word, and fled.

Eros vanishes when Psyche tries to perceive him.

As an adolescent, reading about Eros and Psyche one hot afternoon at home in Buenos Aires, I didn’t believe in the moral of the story. I was convinced that in my father’s almost unused library, where I had found so many secret pleasures, I would find, by magic chance, the startling and unspoken thing that crept into my dreams and was the butt of schoolyard jokes. I wasn’t disappointed. I glimpsed Eros through the chiffonnerie of Forever Amber, in a tattered translation of Peyton Place, in certain poems of Federico García Lorca, in the sleeping-car chapter of Alberto Moravia’s The Conformist, which I read haltingly at thirteen, in Roger Peyrefitte’s Particular Friendships.

And Eros didn’t vanish.