The appearance of a long and very thorough review of Apple Thieves in the LA Review of Books prompted me to reread a sort-of-essay I published in 2018 in PNReview. I still like it, coming upon it out of the blue, after six years. There’s a paywall, so I thought I would repost it here.
Meanwhile, update: colder but still sunny here. If we leave to go cycling right after lunch there is still sun at the top of Alpine Road an hour and a half of riding or so later But the pavement was wet and a little slippery what with the fallen leaves and overnight fog. We head for Paris soon.
Darning (PN Review 241) by Beverley Bie Brahic
Roaming the library stacks makes me uneasy. Too many books I haven’t read. The flesh is sad? Alas. But I’ve read all the books? Not even close. Getting my bearings in the third (literature) floor’s musty pulp-and-paper-smelling undergrowth, I file down a narrow path between stacks to tip a few more books from the shelf.
My husband’s sabbatical at a California university has stretched into years. I miss the street corner stink of piss, the damp zinc and glitter of life in Paris. I miss the newsstands. I miss the bookshops. The campus bookstore has been taken over by sportswear with the university logo; books relegated to the caves and eaves. In Paris, the flâneur is forever being lured into small shops still in business because French law restricts discounting and free shipping (no help, unfortunately, for Paris’s English bookshops, like the much-regretted Village Voice, which must still compete with the online trade).
But the campus dweller life allows me to indulge an old fantasy: plugging the holes in my education. Sure, this feels like one of those math problems in which the student is asked to calculate how long it will take to fill a bathtub that is simultaneously draining at a different rate. Still I persist. A card swipe gets me into the university’s Babelian library, its hushed reading rooms with rows of shiny new books (English spines one way, French the other) and the ferny canyon-like stacks. I can audit classes – heaven in my theology will be reading Dante’s Inferno / Calvino’s Cosmicomics in the dauntingly articulate company of students toting laptops on skateboards. I’ve screwed my courage to the sticking point for ‘Philosophy and Literature’, with readings from Aristotle to Lydia Davis’s radically short story (‘It has been so long since she used a metaphor!’): a course so rife with the stuff of thought that when I scrolled through the online catalogue recently and saw it was being offered again with what looked like a fresh slate of readings I messaged the teaching team – a Proust scholar and a historian of late modern philosophy – to beg permission to repeat. ‘The good news,’ my friend the philosopher shot back with characteristic Californian generosity, ‘is that you are most welcome… the bad news is that the syllabus will be exactly the same. Even the jokes.’
I’ve never fathomed why the ‘autodidact’ in Sartre’s Nausea was conceived as a comic figure. Was it a European thing: there are those born to education and the rest should lose their illusions and do something useful?
My useful task at the moment is translating a collection of poems by the French poet Yves Bonnefoy. In one poem a student sits late at night ‘in an isolated house in the middle of a big garden’ reading Augustine. Nodding off, he dreams he is back in his childhood room, where trains would rumble past the bottom of the garden in the middle of the night. Suddenly – is he dreaming? is he awake? – he is startled by the sound of a pebble tossed against the window; stepping outside he finds a ragged old woman he’s seen before, but can’t place. ‘He knows he has already taken those thin hands / in his, on a table.’
The poem’s late night fireside setting brings Coleridge to mind; searching for the words to make Bonnefoy’s poem shimmer to life in English I raid ‘Frost at Midnight’. I like dipping into Coleridge, Wordsworth and Yeats for words and images to help translate Bonnefoy who has himself translated into French English poets from Shakespeare to Yeats – bringing writers together across time and languages is one of translation’s particular delights. But the importance of the old woman in the poem and her connection to Augustine, if connection there is, remain mysterious to me. The words in their dictionary dress are familiar, but my translation feels thin, lacking in the visceral understanding that comes when one’s experience and the poet’s find a common ground. Perhaps the philosophical concepts underpinning the poem elude me? My knowledge of philosophy is spotty.
Perusing the university course catalogue I discover, what luck, that the Classics Department is offering a seminar on Augustine, and I am welcome to sit in. I request the reading list. Whether it will help me translate Bonnefoy’s poem is unclear, what I do know is that I relish spending an afternoon a week reading Augustine under the tutelage of a specialist.
The class also shows me how thin my knowledge of history is. One evening, reading a biography of Augustine, distracted by the squirrels racing effortlessly up and down redwood trees, I light on the words ‘Sack of Rome’ – an event of which I have only the vaguest notions. Reluctantly – so many books wait to be read! – I set the Confessions aside and take time to gather some moss on the internet. Rome, it turns out, was sacked not just once (Berlusconi rates a mention on Wikipedia’s ‘disambiguation’ page); in Augustine’s day it sent boatloads of Romans fleeing to North Africa. Mass slaughter, refugees… ‘The lamb?’ asks Bonnefoy in a poem, ‘Only ever / the knife and the blood’. Here, at least, is some familiar ground.
An hour slips past. Two. Finally, I retrace my footsteps, linger at the Visigoths who sacked Rome on the 24 August AD 410 – what precision! (‘The barbarians are coming today’, Cavafy wrote). Reading about the death and burial of Alaric, the Visigoth leader, makes me wish I knew more about Alaric.
Everything leads to something else. I am not advancing my quest to understand Bonnefoy’s poem. Or perhaps I am. This kind of amplification and qualification explains how Tristram Shandy took so long to be born. How Liebniz, writing the history of the House of Brunswick, tunnelled deeper and deeper, angering his patrons who only wanted a fairytale… how Proust burrows into his childhood and resurfaces a lifetime later. ‘A dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times’ (Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths).
Bonnefoy’s poem and Augustine recede. In their place, in a cobwebby corner of my mind, I see our long dead neighbour in the south of France. She lived with her unmarried son, our friend P––, in the farmhouse that adjoins my husband’s family’s ancestral homestead. In the evening we’d find her in the kitchen, the hearth over which she had cooked still glowing. She’d be darning. She was proud of her handiwork – thick work socks that were more darn than sock. Now her small bent body, that I never saw out of mourning, diminishes up the stairs. Tomorrow she’ll get on with her darning. I close my computer. Tomorrow I’ll have another go at the holes in my education. And Bonnefoy’s poem.
