A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel Read Free Book Online

with disapproval the motto Balzac had engraved on his walking-stick: “Je casse tout obstacle” (“I shatter every obstacle”). Kafka then added his own motto: “Every obstacle shatters
me.”
    Natural obstacles and political obstacles: Kipling obviously despises the white man who knows nothing of the land he lords it over. The boy who is placed in charge of looking after Kim at the barracks beats him out of contempt and ignorance. The boy “styled all natives ‘niggers’; yet servants and sweepers called him abominable names to his face, and, misled by their deferential attitude, he never understood. That somewhat consoled Kim for the beatings.”
    “There is no sin so great as ignorance,” Creighton Sahib says later.
FRIDAY
    Years ago, Michael Ondaatje asked if I remembered the name of a certain British sergeant in Kim, because he wanted to use it in the novel he was writing.
    “Read him slowly,” says the English Patient to Hana, “you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot.”
    On page 20 of my edition of
The English Patient
a French gun is mentioned, made in “Châttelrault.” It should be “Châtellerault,” a town famous for its arms factory, close to which I now, years later, live. Unfortunately, the greed of local authorities has turned Châtellerault into a bleak commercial centre, ignoring the beautiful sixteenth-century buildings (the house in which Descartes’s father lived, for instance) and the elegant bridge over the Vienne, and laying out a huge parking lot, after cutting down all the trees.
SATURDAY
    Kipling constantly turns the story to the point of view of the native characters: in
Kim
the British are outsiders attempting to rule, most of the time lost among the ancient alien cultures. He also understands that those over whom foreignrule is imposed (whether by Britain or by Rome) will always attempt to “drag down the State.” In “A Pict Song” he wrote:
    Rome never looks where she treads.
Always her heavy hooves fall
On our stomachs, our hearts or our heads;
And Rome never heeds when we bawl
.
    The contempt shown by the invader renders all collaboration suspect. Rabindranath Tagore, in a letter addressed to the Viceroy of India, relinquishing his knighthood after the Amritsar Massacre of 1919: “The universal agony of indignation roused in the hearts of our people has been ignored by our rulers. … The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand shorn of all special distinctions by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so-called insignificance, are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings.”
    In August, the newspapers seem devoid of news.
MONDAY
    In my dreams, I’m never older than eighteen. The sixty-nine-year-old Mme du Deffand, writing to Horace Walpole: “I forget that I have lived, I am only thirteen.”
    I have the sense of having learned nothing since my late adolescence. The discoveries I made before are the ones that still hold; the rest seems trivial, unessential or at best a gloss. Kipling speaks of “the first rush of minds developed by sun and surroundings, as well as … the half-collapse that sets in at twenty-two or twenty-three.”
    Outside, the heat is fierce. Inside the house, because of the thick walls, it is wonderfully cool. I remember the same sensation in the hot Buenos Aires summers, lying in the almost dark, behind the grated iron shutters that allowed the air to blow through. Even sensations like these, felt now, are not new.
    Adulthood defined by Kim’s friend, the horse dealer: “When I was fifteen, I had shot my man and begot my man.”
    Looking back at my adolescent readings, the essential, the most frightening question I remember is spoken “in a languid, sleepy voice” by the