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

much-loved housemaid of ours presented yearly, made up the main-guard of these little fetishes.”
THURSDAY
    A letter with a return address I don’t recognize, forwarded by my American publisher. Out of nowhere, someone whose name now means nothing to me writes to say that we met when I was eleven or twelve years old and that something I did then has stayed with him all these years. I wonder at the long, late results of things I have forgotten doing or saying—unimportant, casual things.
    Half an hour later, I pick up
Kim
where I left off reading yesterday and find these words spoken by the Lama: “Thou hast loosed an Act upon the world, and as a stone thrown into a pool so spread the consequences thou canst not tell how far.”
SATURDAY
    The last day of the month.
    In Spanish the word for “waiting,”
espera
, shares the same root as “hope,”
esperanza
. Gide in his
Journal
says this:
“Sala de espera
. What a beautiful language, one that confuses waiting with hope!”
    The end of
Kim
is about waiting, and finding that one has achieved what one has been striving for almost without knowing it. The Lama’s final vision is like that of Saint Benedict of Nursia, who, sometime in the sixth century, looked up from his prayers and saw in the darkness outside his window that “the whole world appeared to be gathered into one sunbeam and thus brought before his eyes.”
    The last line in Patrick White’s
The Tree of Man:
“So that, in the end, there was no end.”

September
Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
SATURDAY
    C. accompanies our neighbour, Mme H., to the cemetery of our village, to look for the tomb of the marquis who lived in the castle here during her childhood. She is seventy-seven years old and has trouble keeping her balance when walking. The cemetery is a small enclosure, transferred to the outskirts of the village during the eighteenth century. When they find the mausoleum, C. helps her descend the narrow stairs and switches on a flashlight to help her read the dates. His death is later than she thought. “Mon
dernier marquis!”
she sighs.
    What I remember most of Chateaubriand’s
Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
is not his mourning for the passing of the French aristocracy but the sustained elegiac tone. And the vastness. The two volumes of La Pléiade are daunting; to feel more comfortable amidst two thousand pages, I refer to my pencilled notes at the back.
    I always write in my books. When I reread them, most of the time I can’t imagine why I thought a certain passageworth underlining, or what I meant by a certain comment. Yesterday I came across a copy of Victor Segalen’s
René Leys
dated Trieste, 1978. I don’t remember ever being in Trieste.
    Encouraged by Mme Récamier to write his memoirs, Chateaubriand sets out to cover almost an entire century, from his birth in 1768 to 1841, barely seven years before his death. His is a daunting project: to recall his childhood in St-Malo, his adolescence in Combourg, his military career in Paris and his witnessing of the French Revolution, his voyage to the New World, his painful exile in England, his early sympathy for Napoleon’s ambitions, his later disenchantment with the emperor and his final role as Foreign Affairs minister under the Bourbons. Above all, his attempt to establish possession over the years gone by.
    Few autobiographers allow time itself to hold the foreground; most are too fascinated by the progress of their own fond person. To read Chateaubriand is to witness the subjective and yet comprehensive unfolding of a society’s change: of customs, prospects, ethics, conventions. He stands (as in the famous portrait by Girodet) on the farther shore, looking at the aristocratic trappings that have been taken from him, and I can’t sympathize with that loss. But at the same time he tells of a deeper loss due to age, to experience, to a twist in desire, and to this loss I feel intimatelyclose. In his youth, he recalls, he was “troubled by a