Echoes of D. H. Lawrence’s Pansies: ‘Darkness submerges the stones’ in the twilight thick underdusk in apprehension of being submerged under a weight of books. Peter Kien also appears, cocooned from others by his library. That novel resists completion: equally beguiling and repulsive. During the first lockdown, books were packed up: some to go to friends, others to a local secondhand bookshop, a private library halved in volume over two and a half years. Not yet old but ageing, and wishing to carry less weight; the mind more likely to weave itself warmly into a cocoon of its own thoughts than require another’s associations.
Reading A Horse at Night, in which Amina Cain writes, “What is it that happens when a narrative allows us to look at an image longer than we are ‘supposed’ to?” Echoes from the evocation of how and why she reads. The network of lines that link two places on the map interests less than the landscape around the plotline: voice, images, sense of place, atmosphere. These are the echoes that remain long after the memory of the chain is dissolved. The vigorously evoked image of the young lady pricking her finger with a needle is almost all that persists of Byron’s comic cantos. Mariana appears, perhaps that shade of blue on the cover of A Horse at Night, or simply because the book chimes with a sense of autumn, or with Keats’: “They could not sit at meals but feel how well / It soothed each other to be the other by.” Amina Cain: “It means a different kind of peace when he is here with me. It is not pure solitude, but I am not, it turns out, a purist.”
When Paul Theroux visited Borges in his dark Maipú flat, he noted “prints by Piranesi and books, a collection of Everyman classics and shelves of poetry in no particular order, all battered and sprouting paper page markers, with ‘the look of having been read’.” Borges’ library though was small, his memory carrying what seemed an infinite memory of books.