A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel Read Free Book Online Page A

hookah-smoking Caterpillar in
Alice in Wonderland:
“Who are You?” The active form of that question appears halfway through
Kim:
“What am I?” And then, a few chapters later: “Who is Kim-Kim-Kim?”
    Kipling: “A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves into a mazement as it were by repeatingtheir own names over and over again to themselves, letting the mind go free over speculation as to what is called identity. When one grows older, the power, usually, departs, but while it lasts it may descend upon a man at any moment.”
    Identity and place dissolve into what I remember or think I remember. As soon as I turn my head, it all becomes memory and changes accordingly. After the nightmarish tests in the house of Lurgan Sahib, Kim must use all of his will to affirm the reality he knows (“It is there as it was there,” he insists). Reality is that which Kim knows he sees (even if his eyes deny it), in all its kaleidoscopic strangeness.
    A brilliant touch: the woman who stains Kim’s skin to darken his colour “for protection” in the Great Game (thereby changing his outer identity) is blind.
TUESDAY
    Other than my Bombay Edition, I have a number of Kipling books collected over time in many places. Two items I’m particularly fond of: a slim, badly tattered copy of
Under the Deodars
, Nifi 4 in Wheeler’s Indian Railway Library, costing one rupee and published in Allahabad in 1888, when Kipling was twenty-three years old; and a red-bound pocket edition of
Stalky & Co
. which the twenty-five-year-oldBorges had bought upon his return to Buenos Aires in 1924, and which he gave me as a parting gift when I visited him in 1973.
    A sort of autobiography could be written following the objects that have been given to me by friends. Here, in my writing room:
a bronze statuette of Ganesh, elephant-headed god of beginnings, given to me by a long-lost friend after I received my first computer in 1984
a glass pear which belonged to C.’s grandmother, which he gave me when we first met
an Indian woven-metal pencil holder, a gift from Rohinton and Freny
a Vietnamese stone box inlaid with signs I can’t read, from Isabel Huggan, for my fiftieth birthday
a paper column painted like a sky, from a set designed by Michael Levine for
Frühlings Erwachen
two pens—one a quill, the other a dipping pen—given to me by my two daughters
a small clay snake made by Liza Detrick
a leather book-weight given to me by Barbara Moon
a stone coaster which Lenny Fagin brought me back from India
an incense dish made by Bodge Hall, which she gave me on the death of Rob Read, which now carriesstones from the Sybil’s cave near Naples, from the Tessellated Pavement in Tasmania, from Colpoy’s Bay in Ontario, from a path in the Vosges Mountains and from the road outside my house in Calgary, as well as a ceramic bean given to me by Katherine and a Maya clay pendant that Ron Wright brought back for me from the Yucatán
a small ebony arm, said to be part of the model followed in carving one of the gigantic Moors holding torches inside the Church of San Zaccaria in Venice
a box holding postcards, hand-painted by the owner of the
tabac
across from our flat in the Alsatian village of Selestat, where I spent a year researching in the humanist library
    In his autobiography, Kipling lists the objects he keeps on his writing-desk. “Like most men who ply one trade in one place for any while, I always kept certain gadgets on my work-table, which was ten feet long from North to South and badly congested. One was a long, lacquer, canoe-shaped pen-tray full of brushes and dead ‘fountains’; a wooden box held clips and bands; another, a tin one, pins; yet another, a bottle-slider, kept all manner of unneeded essentials from emery-paper to small screwdrivers; a paperweight, said to have been Warren Hastings’; a tiny, weighted fur-seal and a leather crocodile sat on some of the papers;an inky foot-rule and a Father of Penwipers which a