A History of Books (6 page)

Even if the young woman had been concerned to know what was in the young man's mind during their last outing, he would not have tried to explain to her that he saw in his mind the image-view of the topographical map mentioned earlier or that he saw, rising to view, the same image-details that had thus risen while he had read, more than five years before, the last pages of a certain book of fiction by the famous author mentioned earlier. Among those image-details were a black image-flag above a distant image-building in the image-city mentioned earlier; a young image-man and beside him a young image-woman, hardly more than an image-girl; and, barely visible on distant image-farms or in distant image-villages, or even among the image-trees of distant image-woodlands, many a young image-woman, hardly more than an image-girl, who might later be mentioned on image-page after image-page of image-fiction.

 

In the mind of a man aged nearly forty years, an image appeared of the front cover of a thick book of fiction. The man had bought more than a thousand books of fiction and had read more than half of them, but he had never learned the various terms used by publishers and booksellers to describe their wares. The man knew only two kinds of books: hardcover books and paperback books. The cover mentioned was at the front of a paperback book.

The man mentioned would have liked to own only hardcover books of fiction. Such books reassured him when he looked at them or touched their spines. He understood that hardcover books numbered many fewer than paperback books. He preferred to own books of fiction that were read by few other persons. He got much pleasure from owning some or another book of fiction that had supplied him with a rich pattern of connected images but was unknown to his friends.

The image of the front cover mentioned seemed always to the man mentioned a drab image. The image-cover was mostly white with black image-words appearing on its lower third. In some or another part of the upper third of the image-cover was an arrangement of blue and black and red image-discs. The man understood that the image-discs were intended to represent or to suggest glass beads of many colours. He had been given to understand this by a review of the book mentioned or, perhaps, by a paragraph on the rear cover of the book mentioned. He had been given to understand also that the book contained, among many other things, a report of a monastic community living in an isolated place at a date several hundred years later than the twentieth century and devoting much of their time to the playing of a game with many-coloured glass beads, each of which was intended to represent or to suggest one or another item or strand or theme in the history of civilisation. The author of the book was a German man who was considered by some persons a deep thinker and who had been born sixty-two years before the birth of the owner of the book.

For perhaps ten years after the man mentioned had bought the book mentioned, he had left it on one of his bookshelves without opening it, although he had sometimes handled the book and looked at its cover. The man often dealt thus with one or another book of fiction that he expected much from. During the years before he read such a book, he would foresee himself reading a book the contents of which he would not remember after he had begun to read the actual book although he would seem to remember them as having been richer than the actual contents. During the first few of the ten years mentioned, the man sometimes foresaw himself reading about an object that might have been a gigantic abacus with thousands of many-coloured glass beads strung on thousands of wires. During later years, the object in question might have been a gigantic billiard table on which rested or rolled thousands of beads of the sort mentioned. The beads mentioned in each of the two previous sentences were far from resembling the drab discs depicted on the cover of the book mentioned. They more resembled some of the thousands of glass image-marbles that the man had often looked at more than thirty years before in a coloured reproduction of a certain photograph in a certain issue of the
National Geographic Magazine
showing a certain part of a certain factory in a certain town in the state of West Virginia, which state the man saw in his mind during the sixty years after he had first read the issue of the magazine as a few valleys on the shaded side of a high, forested ridge of dark-blue mountains. The image-marbles mentioned were stored in a row of image-bins from which they flowed into image-bags under
the supervision of a smiling, dark-haired young image-woman.

The man mentioned finally began to read the book mentioned in his fortieth year, according to the records that he kept of the books of fiction that he had bought and read. Thirty years afterwards, the man could remember nothing of his experience as a reader of the book. He knew that he had read the first hundred pages of the book because he had recorded that fact at some time during his fortieth year. He recalled, however, not one word of the text of the book, not one image that had appeared in his mind while he read the text, and not one thought or feeling that had occurred to him while he read. According to the man's records, he had removed the book from his shelves four years after he had read the first hundred pages. He had then given the book, together with several other books by the famous German author, to a person who claimed to admire the author.

Thirty years after the man mentioned had read the first hundred pages of the book mentioned, he remembered sometimes a certain afternoon when he had been alone in his house while his wife and their children were elsewhere. On that afternoon, the man had first caught sight of a blue disc and a black disc and a red disc on the spine of a certain book on one of his bookshelves and had regretted, as he had often previously regretted, that he had read a hundred pages of the book. The man had next caught sight of an image of part of a glass marble on the spine of another of his books. This book was a hardcover work of fiction that the man had not yet read, although he had often admired the dust jacket and had sometimes read from the
dust jacket a short account of the contents, so to call them. The man had then gone to his son's room and had fetched back to the lounge room, which contained the bookshelves previously mentioned, a jar of glass marbles. The man had then poured the marbles onto the carpet in the lounge room and had stood back from the marbles and had stared at them and had felt while he went on staring at the many-coloured mass of them something of what he had formerly hoped to feel whenever he had looked forward to reading the book of fiction by the famous German author.

According to a passage on the dust jacket of the book with an image of part of a glass marble on its spine, the chief character of the book was reported in the book as supposing that each of his many glass marbles represented a racehorse and as having sometimes pushed some of those marbles around a mat so that he could see in his mind image after image of the running of a horse-race. The man mentioned in this section of the present work of fiction stared at the glass marbles on the carpet of his lounge room as though each represented a book of fiction that he had kept on his shelves and the contents of which he had tried to foresee before he had read the book.

The man mentioned began on the certain afternoon mentioned to hear in his mind the name of one after another glass marble or of one or another book of fiction as though it was the name of one after another racehorse about to take part in a famous race. Of all the names that the man thus heard, the name that most affected him, as though the glass marble of that name was the
most richly coloured, or as though the book of that name was the most memorable, was the name
Das Glasperlenspiel
.

 

An image-sky unlike any actual sky that he had seen occupied the upper two-thirds of a reproduction of a photograph of a painting that occupied two adjoining pages of a large illustrated book lying open in front of a man aged about fifty years. Seated beside the man was another man of the same age who had been his friend since the two had been boys at primary school. The man with the book in front of him was the owner of the book and of several hundred other large illustrated books displayed in several glass-fronted cabinets in the room where the men sat. The room, which the owner of the books called his study, was at one side of a substantial house of brick in a certain eastern suburb of Melbourne, which house the owner of the books had inherited from his father, who had been a wealthy bookmaker. The side of the room opposite the cabinets mentioned consisted mostly of tall windows overlooking fish ponds set among beds of ferns. The strangeness of the image-sky, so the owner of the book mentioned was explaining to the man beside him, consisted in its seeming to be lit not by a single source of image-light but by several such sources or by its being uniformly suffused with an image-light from no discoverable image-source. How else, so the owner of the book argued – how else to explain the appearance beneath one after another opening in the image-clouds of one after another zone of equally bright image-light on the imagelandscape
occupying the lower third of the reproduction, which imagelandscape was an almost level grassland reaching back to a distant and dark-blue image-blur that might have been a line of image-trees or the nearest margin of an image-forest or, perhaps, an image-haze above still further image-grasslands.

The explanation for the strangeness of the image-sky and of the whole image-landscape, according to the owner of the book mentioned, was that sky and landscape were images not of any sight seen by persons in the place called the real world but of visions, so to speak, appearing, so to speak, to the inhabitants, whoever they might be, of the place sometimes called the next world. How else, so the owner of the book argued – how else to explain the appearance in each of the zones of bright image-light in the image-landscape of an image-racehorse with an imagejockey up, so to speak, each racehorse and each jockey having flourished, so to speak, at some or another different period during the past two hundred and more years?

The title of the painting that had been reproduced in the book mentioned was
Immortals of the Turf
, so the owner of the book told the man beside him while the two men sat and stared at one after another image-racehorse in one after another zone of image-light on the image-grassland mentioned. The name of the painter, according to the owner of the book, meant nothing to him, although he assumed that she was a living Englishwoman, given that the painting had been done only ten years before, that each image-horse had the name of an actual horse that had been bred and had raced in England, and that
the foreground of the image-landscape might have seemed to some persons to resemble part of the actual landscape known as Newmarket Heath.

The two men mentioned met often at one or another race meeting in one or another suburb of Melbourne, although they rarely visited each other. During his rare visits to the substantial home with the glass-fronted cabinets, the visiting man spent much time looking into the collection of large illustrated books kept in the cabinets, all of which books were about horse-racing. The visiting man owned perhaps five hundred mostly paperback books of fiction, which books stood on shelves that he had fitted to a wall in the lounge room of the house where he lived with his wife and their children in a certain outer suburb of Melbourne. He and his wife had agreed soon after their marriage that he would buy one paperback book of fiction each fortnight. It was understood between them that he needed to read much fiction so that he himself could write the work of fiction that he hoped to write and to have published. Twenty years later, the man still bought and read books of fiction although he had not yet written the work that he had hoped to write.

The owner of the books about horse-racing had never married, although he had spent much time for many years in the company of a divorced woman who lived in a house even more substantial than his own in a suburb adjoining his own suburb. Seven months before the day when the two men looked at the painting mentioned earlier, the divorced woman had learned that she would soon die from cancer. One week before the day
mentioned, the woman had died. On the Saturday following the death of the woman, the man who had spent much time in her company reported to the other man, when they met at a certain race-meeting, that he, the owner of the substantial house and of the glass-fronted cabinets full of books, had been since his childhood a convinced atheist but that he had never considered himself a materialist and that he and the woman who had recently died had agreed some months previously that if some or another part of her remained alive after the event that other persons would call her death, then she would arrange for one of the racehorses that he backed on the Saturday following that event to win at odds of about twenty to one. Several hours after the convinced atheist, as he called himself, had reported these matters, one of the horses that he had backed won a race at odds of a little more than twenty to one, and soon after he had collected his winnings he invited the other man to visit him for a few hours after the race-meeting.

The other man had never been able to decide what he believed or did not believe in any field of human enquiry. While he was enjoying the snack and the expensive whisky that his host served him during his visit to the substantial house, he did no more than watch and listen while his host opened one after another large illustrated book from the glass-fronted cabinets, declaring repeatedly that he, the host, could never be a materialist while ever racehorses such as those illustrated with jockeys such as those illustrated contested races such as those illustrated on racecourses such as those illustrated, thereby convincing persons
such as himself of the existence of as yet invisible racecourses on as yet invisible grasslands under as yet invisible skies where competed the immortals of the turf.

 

In the mind of a young man aged about thirty years, an image appeared of a large farmhouse surrounded on three sides by groves of image-trees and groups of image-outbuildings. In front of the image-farmhouse was a wide view of far-reaching image-grasslands beneath a far-reaching image-sky filled with banks of image-clouds between which, at distant intervals, one or another shaft of image-sunlight fell onto one or another zone of image-grassland. In each of these zones stood an image-farmhouse surrounded on three sides as the earlier-mentioned image-farmhouse had been surrounded and having at its front the same wide view.