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This town is so small that after one walk, every corner is familiar. I have already discovered an old, very pretty courtyard behind the church, and the best barber here who lives in a cobbled side street. I walked a few paces from his shop and I was suddenly on the edge of town:there were just a few red-brick villas, and a street that was sandy and looked like a cart track. Beyond this began the woods. I turned around, went back past the church and already knew my way around very well. The old courtyard leads you to the main street, and now I am sitting in the cafe Zum Rotem Adler to write for awhile. In my hotel room, I am always tempted to throw myself down on the bed and spend the brief hours of daylight idle. It requires great effort for me to write as I have a fever and my head is pounding as if from hammer blows.

I think if I knew someone here, I would soon lose my composure; but as it is, I don’t speak a word to anyone, and walk around unclear about my emotions.

The cafe seems quite an odd place to me. It appears to be a patisserie, with cakes displayed in vitrines and a shop girl wearing a black woollen dress and a white apron. In the corner, there is a light blue tiled stove, and sofas with upright, cushioned backrests lining the walls .A young puppy runs around yapping loudly, an unkempt, wretched creature. A grey-haired woman tries to stroke him but he runs away from her, his back arched in fear.The old woman follows him, coaxing him with a lump of  sugar and speaking loudly to him all the time.

I think she is insane. No one in the cafe seems to take any notice of her.

I have only written two pages so far and the pains are already beginning again, stabbing pains in my right side that cease as soon as I lie down or drink strong liquor. But I don’t want to lie down. I could write so well now, and it makes me terribly low to be so idle and all alone.

The insane old woman has left. I’d like to see how she crosses the street and if she talks aloud to herself outside too, like the grey-haired beggar women in Paris.

I never used to be able to tell the difference between insane people and drunkards; I would watch them in a kind of awestruck horror. But I’m not afraid of drunkards any more. I have often been drunk myself; it is  a beautiful, sad state in which we gain clarity on many things we would otherwise never admit to ourselves,emotions that we seek to hide, and that are not the worst in us after all.

I feel a little better now. I ask the reader to forgive me for what I write today; nevertheless, Sibylle said that even the bitterest experiences and the forlornest hours in my life shouldn’t be completely futile. This is why it’s so important to me, even in this hopeless state, to give in to my weakness and later, to put these pages to the only test that matters to me: whether I succeed, just once, in any way, to be taken seriously by Sibylle.

This extract has been taken from Lyric Novella

by Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Translated by Lucy Renner Jones

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People have very surprising as well as curious natures. Each person is a mixture of many and variegated traits. The same person’s character may have greed, contempt, ferocity side by side with compassion, sympathy as well as empathy. All of these remain mixed; people are, in most cases, hardly entirely good or bad. But in those who have a strong character (a straight and strong backbone, so to speak) and who have developed a set of values, ideals will keep the negative traits under control. These are the people in whom decency prevails. Moreover, this is as true of people as it is of individuals. I have seen this in Delhi, in Calcutta and in Santiniketan. It is, in fact, true everywhere. Nevertheless, the nature of a particular place, the mentality and lifestyle of its residents, the economic and political conditions—all these contribute to the special character of the life and mentality of its people. To say nothing of the changes time brings about. When I first went to Delhi, what used to strike me was the sheer number of cycles on the road. They were the very symbol of movement. These days, the number of motorcycles and cars must have increased vastly. Speed has obviously gone up, but this fast-moving life allows less peace and relief while competition grows ever sharper. Yet the sheer speed of life gets rid of pettiness and inertness; the draw of the life force increases. Thus speed has made a special and positive contribution to Delhi life. It did even in those days. But the excessive cultivation of success and the placement of monetary success above all else means that there were obstacles to achieving a mature and profound philosophy of life in Delhi. That’s how it seemed to me, to us. That difficulty is now universal.

What would a true philosophy of life be like? Would it not be one that looks not just for success but also for fulfillment? Success is not the same thing as fulfilment. The message of fulfilment goes far deeper. People want to improve their lives, to look for pleasure, and to this end they work. The desire to enrich their life provides zeal and perseverance. The ingredients and objects of sensual pleasure are limited in nature, which is why the desire for such leads one into the world of severe competition. It is only by fighting tooth and nail that one gets the taste of victory. But does the conquest of success give one everything? For dissatisfaction and want exist in the midst of success and the joy of advancement. We cannot find completion or fulfilment through worldly success or consumption. Indeed, frequently enough that road becomes increasing convoluted. In the same way, worldly success and fulfilment are separate in both an artist’s work and life. Very large earnings, great fame and recognition do not necessarily bring an artist significance or aesthetic achievement. The achievement of aesthetic realization through unrelenting devotion to one’s art is a rare and almost quasi-divine experience. During the time I’m speaking of, worldly success was not only a rare commodity in artistic endeavour but its extent was far more limited, especially in West Bengal. Now it is much more widespread, indeed to a hitherto unimaginable degree. This is what, in my opinion, one saw to some degree in Delhi those days. Similarly, the great number and variety of work results in a positive lively aspect but also has a problematical side. I am firmly convinced though, that all this churning will give rise to wonders. The very fact that so many are working in so many different ways is itself a matter for rejoicing.

After five or six years in the city, we had become a part of Delhi life, working and remaking our lives through all the cut and thrust. I had in the meantime joined the St Thomas School, on a part-time basis, and was enjoying it. It seemed a full life, with work, with occasional time spent at my parents’, with visiting historical places around Delhi like Agra, Mathura, Rishikesh, and the odd solo show (once Somnath’s, once mine). Once we returned from a visit to Calcutta only to finish the remainder of our holiday in Shimla. I enjoyed it immensely and I lost a lot of weight going up and down the hills in those four or five days. A few days later I fell rather ill and it was only afterwards that I realized I was pregnant. By then I was 36 or 37 and Somnath was 41 or 42. Chandana came late, and I suffered because of my age. Ma insisted we stay with them, even though she was quite ill herself. Despite her condition, she would make all sorts of arrangements to make sure I was comfortable. I still find it difficult to believe how much care she took of me. God knows how she managed! My parents were very close to Justice Hidayatullah of the Supreme Court and his wife Pushpa—they shared a deep and abiding friendship. I realized how close they were and how fond they were of me during Chandana’s birth, when their support proved crucial. Severe complications arose but, in the end, Chandana was born without any surgical intervention (thanks to the skills of Dr Pathak and Ma’s constant care). This little infant, with her pink face, a head covered with black curls, two inquisitive bright eyes and an unending hunger, first kept Safdarjang Hospital, then my parent’s house (for the next week) and, finally, our new flat at Hauz Khas, agog.

When he learned that Chandana was due, Somnath located and rented the flat at Hauz Khas. Our previous flat at Kamla Nagar was more than adequate for our purposes but its one drawback was that not a beam of sunlight would enter. This made little difference to us, since our time was spent working, wandering about and staying out of doors. But a baby had different requirements: she needed the sun, especially during the Delhi winter. This house was absolutely perfect: two storeys, with a courtyard and a pocket-handkerchief-sized garden. The ground floor, with two large rooms, kitchen, etc., was ours. It had plenty of sunshine and fresh air and was in a nice secluded area. On one side was a wall from an earlier era, and peacocks would step down from it and come into our courtyard. Above us lived a Bengali couple. We became fast friends in a short while and would stand by one another at times of need. I remember hose days clearly. Chandana’s presence changed our lives; she was the centre of our universe. Her first requirements were food and sleep. Between nursing her, caring for her, as well as constantly keeping an eye on her, I did manage to save a few bits of time for my work. A well-wisher told me, ‘Forget about work for the time being.’ As it happens, this was not true in my case. The mixture of joy and love which occurs when one is holding one’s child and which occasionally spreads to other relationships as well, would seek release. In any case, weariness seems to decrease if I work. So even in the middle of a thousand chores I would find time to do some drawings or small paintings on the roof. And my child’s many excitements and abilities—one never knew what she would do next! So many amusing incidents! Through all this I still wanted to paint. With parenthood, another sort of experience came into our lives. Everyone who has been a parent at some time in their life will know what a different feeling this is. Chandana was an active, happy-go-lucky child. Her mother never had to worry unnecessarily about her. She would spend time on her own, drawing. And this would give me time as well. I’d be at sixes and sevens, however, if she fell ill. It’s difficult not to feel very distressed when such a frail tiny creature feels pain or discomfort. All rational thoughts cease at such moments. But even then there would be friends to stand by us so far from home. I’m not even thinking of my parents—they were our principal support. Apart from them, in times of distress, especially if Chandana fell ill, the Nanda family were always there to help look after her. Mrs Nanda—Leela—was particularly fond of Chandana. Many of the other neighbours, Bengali and non-Bengali, were also very supportive. It was as though by becoming parents we had got integrated into a larger community. Ma used to call it ‘passport’. And, in truth, Chandana was, in those days, our ‘passport’, both to other people and to the world of feelings.

This extract has been taken from the catalogue published on the event of Reba Hore’s current exhibition running at the Seagull Foundation for the Arts.

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Notebook 2. Wednesday, 4 October. Noon.

My heart is already pitching towards Montreal and it’s only Wednesday noon. It was in Montreal that I emerged from my chrysalis: there I became the man I am now. In that metropolis I found everything that makes up the everyday fare of an enviable life: an angelic woman, a job, a roof, friends. I feel as if I were born in Montreal, as if the first eighteen years spent with my family and my twin brother (who is invisible today) didn’t count at all.

As a child I dreamed of being an only son so as to get all of my mother’s attention. To no avail. I saw my childhood and adolescence go by at lightning speed without getting an ounce of the affection I longed for. Many times people in the family—but not my mother—told me I was sensitive, irritable and unpredictable. But also humble, ambitious, unloved and instinctive and creative, too. As an adult, I can be humble, clever, full of complexes, or not loving enough. And the veil that hid the origin of my violent, compulsive urges, first against my brother and then against myself, is slowly lifting. In Montreal I learned to put up with myself, to like myself, if possible, in order to sleep peacefully inside my skin. It is only at this price that I can move forward in life. Live life to the fullest. Love others.

For a long time I dreamed I had no mother. In reality, it’s as if I had lost her when I was very young. I hardly knew her. I was raised by a strict grandmother who inculcated in us the few rules I have assimilated. I have forgotten everything about my mother, as if she had no face. She had forgotten me first when she set her heart on my twin brother, giving all her attention only to him, showering kisses only on him. In moments of high anxiety, I used to tell myself it was my mother who separated me from my brother early on. She’s the one who turned him into my enemy, I would say to myself bitterly before coming back to my senses.

No concrete memory connects me to my mother. Not one story, caress, slap or hug. I have a hungry vacuum in the hollow of my chest that only the warmth of a maternal body against mine could fill. That was the time when I decided to provoke my brother and defy my father before breaking out of the family web. To follow my own path, alone, no matter what. The only sweet memory of my childhood: my encounter with a stranger—an orphan named David. I think we liked each other a lot, he and I. We rapidly became very close. Together we admired the junk dealers on Place Arthur-Rimbaud. We were inseparable. We often met on Siesta Beach. We used to run after the fish that were bold enough to swim near the beach, especially the skates.

Years later, I earned my pocket money by assisting the projectionist of the Odeon Cinema, in the heart of the European part of the city. I was already interested in the media, unlike my brother, who spent his time devouring books. When I went out into the fresh air he would lounge about in the half-light of our room with a book near at hand.

At that time the French infantry and naval bases were in full swing. The draftees were regular customers of the movies and the many bars. They weren’t men but human packs who stormed the two rooms of our cinema, the most imposing of the capital. Some discontented spirits from Algeria wanted   to baptize it Lagardeville, after the first governor of that territory, Viscount Léonce Lagarde de Rouffeyroux, and also rename the Olympia Cinema, our main competitor, in the same way.

For a while that’s where I found a true family. Warm. Carefree and joyful. That’s where I lived through my first exile—an exile that was French in every way. On the thin skin of my memories, I’ve kept a few caresses from that exile. You might think soothing people’s pain and treating them is a nurse’s job but, believe it or not, that’s exactly what I did as a projectionist. I used images to treat all those young men torn away from their farms or housing projects and thrown under the vertical sun of Djibouti. I loved that job and its small pleasures. I loved the moments before the screening, like the twilight which gives minarets their imposing silhouette. I loved the call to evening prayer that would rise from the nearby mosque. I loved everything about those transitory moments when the city shook itself off after the long lethargy of the afternoon. The horns of taxis and the clamour of street vendors filling the streets. And the seedy crowds of the night mixing together till dawn. No more rank, no more hierarchy. Just animal warmth, the pulsation of the night, the gleam of smiles. Just men and women glued to the bars, busy eating and drinking, or laughing, sprawled out under the pergolas. I loved nightlife there. I would even tolerate the senseless howling of the legionnaires. I’d take a shower before putting on my legendary outfit: lagoon blue Bermuda shorts, light sandals and flowery shirt open to the solar plexus. This was my uniform. My diver’s suit for plunging into the night and seeking out its spicy amber. I would have a little twinge of anxiety every time I opened the projection booth door at 6.40 p.m. Gripped by a mixture of apprehension and exultation when the first reel began and the wall became covered not with the first images of the film but with the pictures of the newsreels and commercials that had arrived from Paris the previous week. That excitement remained as strong as it had been on the first day. The cinema filled up quickly, ready for a new evening of adventure and dreams.

All that is so far away. But the sight of that cinema is enough to bring up the fragrance of the past up to the surface. My investigation is progressing very slowly. I’m stumbling over many obstacles. I’m waiting for the turning point. It’s always like that when I’m on the job. To be honest, I had some doubts from the very beginning. I thought of giving up a number of times. I hadn’t reckoned with Denise: she got me back in the saddle every time, explaining that I was going through a stretch of desert which felt like a waste of time, but no, it wasn’t a waste of time, not at all. I was unconsciously gathering a bundle of impressions and sensations—and thus, precious information.

Denise had only half convinced me. So why on earth did I leave the satin skies of Montreal? Did I really have to return to the land of my childhood? They say that the only true mysteries are the ones we invent for ourselves. That we take great pains to confuse nightmares and reality. I studied science—chemistry and physics—in order to stop dreaming—contrary to my brother who loved literature. Physics for its precision. Chemistry for its perpetual invention and magical finds. Not forgetting maths as a foundation. I needed powerful rails and a steady base so that life would cease to be something that merely floated around me.I studied all that in Montreal. That city saved my life; I would have gone astray, just drifting aimlessly along. Rubbing shoulders with shady people, doing just about anything to escape a pointless life. Montreal gave a meaning to my existence and, more prosaically, a doctorate in computer science. Montreal had a face when I met it for the first time. An oval face, with sky-blue eyes. Pearly skin. A turtleneck sweater. That was Denise, sitting on a bench in the garden of the centre for foreign students in Paris, the Cité Internationale on Boulevard Jourdan.

I had been dragging myself around feeling miserable for weeks and months. I shot out calls to everyone like signals from a beacon. Denise was the only one who smiled at me. And it was love at first sight. Despite her Quebecois accent, Denise was born in Paris in 1968. She is nine years older than I am. Her father, Isaac Rosenzweig, an Austrian from Vienna, had enlisted in the Foreign Legion and was wounded in North Africa in 1961. I have no idea if he’d knocked around my native land, which was then called Côte Française des Somalis, or French Somaliland. A year later he married a fiery woman, half Norman, half Panamanian, a native of Trouville: Elvira Triboulet. He became a waiter in a cafe; she  became an actress and a stripper. They lived with their daughter in a sordid little hotel on Boulevard Ornano in the 18th arrondissement. The Rosenzweig family emigrated to Quebec right in the middle of the Velvet Revolution. They adopted Quebec and never left it except for excursions to Paris in winter. That’s how Denise knows every little street, every neighbourhood, every piece of its history.

It was also in Paris, on another bench of the Cité Internationale, that Denise talked to me about another great walker in the City of Light. A philosopher of the past century: Walter Benjamin. She religiously kept his photo by Gisèle Freund tucked in her wallet, between Metro tickets and her coupons to the student cafeteria where we had our meals. It was Denise who introduced me to the secret life of this Walter Benjamin. Luckily, I was won over, not right away but much later. By his encyclopedic mind, his intuitive method and, above all, by his conception of history, which was not theoretical or arid in the least. It appealed to me because it seemed as sensitive to human beings as the stories my Grandpa Assod used to tell. I, too, have adopted the ‘angel of history’ and made it mine. Here is its description, as the German Jewish philosopher restores it for us:

There is a painting by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he is staring at. His eyes are wide open, his mouth is agape, his wings are spread. This is how the Angel of History must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, wake the dead, and make whole what has been shattered. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

I am sure Grandpa Assod would have appreciated this fable. As for me, I began to identify with Klee’s angel.

From Passage of Tears by ABDOURAHMAN A. WABERI

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Books burn. The history of the book runs parallel to the history of its destruction by fire. From Ptolemy’s library in Alexandria, which went up in flames accidentally because Caesar didn’t take sufficient care when destroying enemy ships, to the library of the Belgian town of Louvain which was set on fire by German soldiers in both World Wars, libraries have repeatedly been burnt, intentionally or coincidentally, reducing the world’s stock of ‘invaluable’—symbolic—as well as less valuable documents. The names of the librarians of Alexandria—Aristarchos of Samothrace, Aristophanes of Byzantium or Apollonius of Rhodes to mention but three—are still known, though opinions vary as to how many of the 700,000 scrolls they edited, which represented something like the first encyclopaedia in the world, were consumed in the flames. What, on the other hand, is not known at all is whether the knowledge recorded on the scrolls and wiped out in Alexandria 48 years before the birth of Christ—the reflections of Aristotle but also detailed descriptions of agriculture, shipbuilding, geography and history—was missed or whether it was the value of the scrolls, for the scrolls themselves had a value that was often greater than that of their contents. We do not know whether it is merely a legend that in Alexandria 72 scholars translated the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, in 72 days, but we can imagine the value the scrolls once had. When, in the seventh century, the Caliphate occupied Alexandria, Omar ibn al-Khattab had all the books which contradicted the Koran removed from the library (and, so legend has it, sent to be used to heat the baths), a practice that continues to this day and has found many imitators, especially in the Christian tradition. If God knows and decides everything, then there can be no objection. Even the divine first emperor of China got rid of all knowledge about his predecessors and his adversaries from the libraries in order to eliminate any outside influence; but not even the construction of a solid wall round his empire could prevent knowledge from beyond the wall finding its way into his subjects’ heads. He would have had to behead them all.

Whether a fire was started deliberately or accidentally, books were easy victims of the flames. It remains an open question whether the knowledge was burnt along with the books, that is, whether something irreplaceable, something that cannot be reconstructed, was turned to ashes. It is up to the masters of black magic and esoteric philosophy to reflect on whether the world would have been any different if EVERYTHING written down in the books of esoteric doctrine and heretical pamphlets had remained in the world and in people’s consciousness. Would music, for example, have developed differently, mathematics, philosophy? Had historical contingency been eliminated, would there have been a different chronology if the clandestine proposals in the burnt books could have spread their influence?

Today these questions, which were still being debated in the eighteenth century, have become irrelevant. The guiding principle of efficiency on the one hand the electronic means of communication on the other allow the plausibility or usability of ideas and inventions to be reviewed so quickly that we can gradually get ready to say farewell to books as the storehouses of positive or negative knowledge.

The age of the library of Alexandria, the age of Petrarch and his complaint about the too many books that distract us, the age of Leibniz and his idea of an imaginary universal library on the one hand and a Mathesis universalis portabilis on the other, a formula for the world that went on one sheet of paper, the time of Mallarmé and his interpreter Valéry who dreamt of a huge anonymous work containing all books, the age which allocated a sacred place to the book—that age is irrevocably past. ‘The world was made to end up as a beautiful book,’ Mallarmé said, according to Valéry.

With our farewell to the book we have also lost our assurance of the beauty of the world. For why else was the book invented if not to publicize the beauty of the world?

So let’s just get on with it.

Michael Krüger. Translated by Mike Mitchell.

Krüger is the editor of Akzente, one of the best-known literary magazines of Germany. He is the author of the novels The End of the Novel (1992) and The Man in the Tower (1993). He has also published three volumes of verse, including Diderot’s Cat (1993) and won a number of literary awards.

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