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My daughter and I have caught the stomach flu, been vomiting non-stop. The Thanksgiving over-eating session is in doubt this year, as my doctor told me to limit myself to rice, apple sauce, clear liquids, etc. (Vodka’s a clear liquid drink, right) My wife, thankfully, did not catch the bug, and have been taking care of us. Two nights ago, she didn’t get to sleep much, watching over our daughter. Watching her made me think of William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Ivy Crown,” in which the poet says that his love for his wife is not like young love, which is obtuse, blinded by light, but is something they will past all accident, a cruelty which by their wills they transform to live with each other. But why even attempt to define love As Henry Fielding tells us in his great Tom Jones, it might be all in vain -

To treat of the Effects of Love to you, must be as absurd as to discourse on Colours to a Man born blind; since possibly your Idea of Love may be as absurd as that which we are told such blind Man once entertained of the Colour Red; that Colour seemed to him to be very much like the Sound of a Trumpet; and Love probably may, in your Opinion, very greatly resemble a Dish of Soup, or a Sirloin of Roast-beef.

Happy Thanksgiving to you & your loved ones.

Today’s sentence is dedicated to my friend, Terry, whose blog, Vertigo, is most likely the finest blog devoted to everything related to W. G. Sebald. A month ago, Terry wrote a great post on the role of women in Campo Santo, about the moment when Sebald notices the cashier at Casa Napoleon dozing off in her leather chair. When she rises from the chair, Sebald imagines her singing a closing aria, perhaps “Lasciate mi morire.” Sebald writes that this moment of his notice was “one of those moments strangely experienced in slow motion that are sometimes remembered years later.” I’d never really paid much attention to the import of that aria, but Terry mentions in his post that the aria is from Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna - Ariadne’s Lament. (Also, think of Richard Strauss’s exquisite Ariadne auf Naxos.) In the post, there is a fine meditation on the significance of women in Campo Santo as Ariadnic figures - messengers of the past who hold aloft the “flame of remembrance.”

In Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900, there is Benjamin’s Proustian recollection of Tiergarten, in which Benjamin, as a child, would relish the sensation of being lost, before finding his way again. The aleatory wandering of the writer as a child, through the verdant mazes and esplanades of the park, mirror the mental process of the older writer, feeling his way through and past the labyrinthine years, trying to recollect his younger self. It is the statue of Ariadne which guides the young Benjamin through his walk, and so it is the spirit of Ariadne (which is the spirit of love) who guides the older Benjamin back to his childhood through his remembrance, just as she had once guided Theseus out of Minotaur’s labyrinth -

Here, in fact, or not far away, must have lain the couch of Ariadne in whose proximity I first experienced what only later I had a word for: love.

(Image - a page from Walter Benjamin’s datebook)

What is the only meaningful 600-pp novel in the history of modern mankind that is narrated by a single cat I would guess that it might be the aptly titled I Am A Cat by Soseki Natsume. If there are other great novels narrated by cats or dogs, please let me know because I love nothing more than reading about the world through the pristine and prismic consciousness of a domesticated animal. Especially if it’s through the eyes of a cat who is perceptive to classical Chinese philosophy, and to the erosion of the traditional society in the Meiji Japan. Soseki’s novel, according to the author himself, was structurally inspired by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and like Sterne’s book, I Am A Cat is rambling, funny, and light-on-its-feet, even as it deals with nothing less than the ramifications of a modernizing society, the eradication of the cultural memory.

Before I give you Today’s Sentence, I’d like to digress a bit about something that just occurred to me. I just remembered that Dave Eggers wrote a luminous story a few years ago, called “After I Was Thrown Into A River and Before I Drowned,” narrated by a dog named Steven. As you might have guessed, at the end of the story, Steven drowns in the river. In the coda to the story, Steven has a transcendental moment of realization in the brief inception of his afterlife. I wonder if Eggers was influenced by I Am A Cat, as the anonymous Cat in Soseki’s novel also dies by drowning in the end: “I am dying, Egypt, dying,” the Cat says. “Through death I’m drifting slowly into peace. Only by dying can this divine quiescence be attained. May one rest in peace! I am thankful. Thankful, thankful, thankful.” I love it. But am I the only one that sees the eerie similarity in the Eggers’ story, the specific tone of its ending

Sorry for the long digression. But to set up Today’s Sentence: the Cat is thinking about the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) that is raging. As he ponders on how to strategically cut off the rats as they emerge from the kitchen cupboard, he thinks about how Admiral Togo of Japan similarly excruciated over how to cut off the Russian Baltic Fleet, whether to anticipate the fleet’s passing through the Straits of Tsushima, or the Straits of Tsugaru, or through the Straits of La Pérouse between Hokkaido and Sakhalin. As he waits for the rats, he notices the moonlight slanting in “from the transom like a woman’s broad white sash stretched out along the air.” Remaining motionless, the Cat thinks about his enemy and the nature of his stupid warfare, which should resonate with at least some of us today -

When, unexpectedly, one’s enemy turns out to be so pettily paltry, the sense of war as an honorable activity cannot be sustained and one is left with nothing but a feeling of naked hatred.

This is one of those sentences which needs no context. It comes from the first volume of Javier Marias‘ multi-volume novel, Your Face Tomorrow, called Fever and Spear, fluidly translated by the always excellent Margaret Jull Costa. I’m not even going to try to sum the novel up with a by-line; Wyatt Mason had a sympathetic appraisal of Your Face Tomorrow in The New Yorker a couple years ago, but it seems that the link is dead.

But no matter -

And it is that known ending which allows us to dub everyone ingenuous and futile, the clever and the stupid, the totally committed as well as the slippery and the evasive, the unwary, the cautious and those who hatched plots and set traps, the victims and the executioners and the fugitives, the innocuous and the malicious, from the position of false superiority - time will see it off, it will be time, time that will cure it - of those who have not yet reached their end and are still groping their way uncertainly forwards or walking lightly with shield and spear, or slowly and wearily with shield all battered and spear blunt and dull, without even realising that we will soon be with them, with those who have been expelled and those who have passed and then… then even our sharpest, most sympathetic judgements will be dubbed futile and ingenuous, why did she do that, they will say of you, why so much fuss and why the quickening pulse, why the trembling, why the somersaulting heart; and of me they will say: why did he speak or not speak, why did he wait so long and so faithfully, why that dizziness, those doubts, that torment, why did he take those particular steps and why so many

(Image: painting of Ulrike Meinhof, by Gerhard Richter)

Henry Green once wrote that “prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.” Sentence by sentence, Green’s writing is at once mercilessly clear-eyed and full of empathy, its rhythm supple, swiftly modern, perfectly balanced. I do so many double-takes when reading Green, wondering how, in a flash, so much flew into me and past me.

This masterly sentence about girls waltzing (”wheeling wheeling in each other’s arms heedless at the far end…”), from Loving (1945):

Above from a rather low ceiling five great chandeliers swept one after the other almost to the waxed parquet floor reflecting in their hundred thousand drops the single spark of distant day, again and again red velvet panelled walls, and two girls, minute in purple, dancing multiplied to eternity in these trembling pears of glass.

Image: Audrey Beardsley’s “Peacockskirt” (1892)

Charles Lamb was a writer who wrote highly idiosyncratic personal essays in the early 19th century as “Elia,” an adopted guise. He was a close friend of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Hazlitt, among others. The fact that he wrote about himself as a created persona might have been clinically natural for Lamb; in December of 1795, despondent over the end of a love affair with Ann Simmons, Lamb became convinced that he was a hero of a popular stage tragedy and ended up spending six weeks in a private madhouse in northern London. More infamously, his sister Mary suffered a much graver psychotic breakdown. While Charles was in the madhouse, Mary picked up a carving knife from the family dinner table and stabbed her mother in the heart.

Charles Lamb was a distinctive prose stylist who looked to the writers of previous centuries to model his sentence writing. As Elia, he wrote beautifully layered, long airborne sentences which owed a clear debt to the English essayists of the 17th century, namely, Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne. Yet it is a clear testament to the originality of Charles Lamb as a writer, that such a prose style seemed so uniquely suited to lending a voice to Elia, a character who is very much a light-hearted and often-cantankerous London bourgeois intellectual of the 19th century. Dickens professed Lamb’s deep influence on his own writing. Virginia Woolf wrote letters in which she fretted forlornly of not being able to write as well as Lamb. (For a deeper appraisal of Lamb’s life and work, everyone should read Lorin Stein’s perspicacious essay that was published in NYRB a few years ago.)

Lamb’s Essays of Elia might as well be one of the first autobiographical works that took on “modern subjectivity,” as Walter Pater suggested once. The following sentence is from Lamb’s essay, “Dream Children: A Reverie,” which is as dark and grief-stricken as it is lovely. The essay eulogizes Lamb’s real brother, John, who is referred to as James Elia in Essays of Elia. (His sister Mary appears as Bridget.) In “Dream Children,” Lamb - as Elia - daydreams about the imaginary children begotten from an imaginary marriage with Alice W (in real life, Ann Simmons). But this reverie turns ominous as the imaginary children keep receding until they are only “two mournful features seen in the uttermost distance.” And they pull off the shroud of authorial guises to reveal the real grief of the real person, Charles Lamb, mourning the death of his brother John (and not James Elias). I know of no other passages in literature where real life confronts fiction so starkly, with such a sudden, breathtaking force of melancholy.

and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and still receding till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech; “We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all… We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name” - and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side - but John L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever.

I’d say most of the phenomena in life require some explanation in order for their mysterious impacts to be fully understood or felt. Like why Baltimoreans pour a bushel of Old Bay on already-salty steamed crabs. Or how Britney without K-Fed became even creepier than Britney circa the Federline era. But there are still a blessed, few things left in our experiential world whose powers we just get, bada-bing, a priori. For instance: orgasm. Or: this following sentence from Distant Star by the incomparable Roberto Bolano -

He moved to France where he scraped together a living teaching Spanish and English, and translating for small presses, mainly books by eccentric, early twentieth-century Latin American writers with a bent for fantasy or pornography, or both, as in the case of Pedro Pereda, an obscure novelist from Valparaiso, the author of a startling story in which a woman finds vaginas and anuses growing, or rather opening, all over her anatomy, to the understandable horror of her friends and family (the story is set in the ’20s, but I don’t suppose it would have been any less shocking in the ’70s or the ’90s), and who ends up confined to a brothel for miners in northern Chile, where she remains, shut up in a room without windows, until in the end she becomes a great amorphous, uncontrollable in-and-out, finishes off the old pimp who runs the brothel along with the rest of the whores and the terrified clients, goes out onto the patio, and sets off into the desert (walking or flying, Pereda doesn’t say), finally disappearing into thin air.

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