A History of Books (7 page)

More than once during each of the forty years after the first appearance of the images mentioned, the same images appeared again in the mind of the man mentioned. Sometimes the images appeared unexpectedly, but often the man caused the images to appear.

During the first few of the forty years mentioned, the man mentioned was sometimes uneasy because the image-farmhouses mentioned resembled some or other farmhouses that he had seen in the distance in a certain district where he had sometimes travelled during his childhood, whereas the words that had first caused the images to appear were part of a work of fiction
written about forty years before the man's birth by a man who had become famous as a writer of fiction after having worked until he was about thirty years of age in the merchant marine, and whereas the work of fiction was set, so to speak, in fictional places resembling places in South America.

During the few years mentioned, the young man was sometimes uneasy also because the image-farmhouses and the image-landscape comprised many image-details whereas the only words that he could afterwards recall from the work of fiction mentioned were the words
slumbrous
and
estancia
.

During the few years mentioned, the young man was sometimes uneasy also because the work of fiction mentioned had been one of the texts that he was required to study during the second of the three years during which he had studied English at the University of Melbourne. During those three years, he had never understood how his teachers and his fellow students had been able to read the texts as they seemed able to read them or afterwards to talk and to write about the texts as they talked and wrote. His lecturers and tutors spoke as though he and his fellow students were practising literary criticism of the sort practised by the greatest of all literary critics, a man from some or another famous university in England; a man whose name the young man pretended to have forgotten as soon as he had completed his university degree although he could never forget the name or the one image that he had seen of the man: a reproduction of a photograph showing the famous critic wearing a jacket and an open-necked white sports shirt, as though his being a
famous literary critic exempted him from having to wear the collar and tie worn by most university teachers of his time. The image-scenery mentioned in the previous paragraphs had first appeared in the mind of the young man while he was sitting in a tutorial, while the tutor was talking as a literary critic might have talked about the book of fiction mentioned earlier, and while he, the young man, had first tried to understand the words of the tutor but had then fixed his attention on the image-scenery and on the question whether or not such scenery might be supposed never to come to an end in any image-direction.

After the passing of the first few of the forty years mentioned earlier, the man who had been the young man no longer felt uneasy on account of the image-scenery mentioned or of any other imagery that appeared in his mind. If the man happened during later years to recall his earlier uneasiness, he felt sympathy towards the young man who had supposed that the image-scenery appearing in his mind while he read must have appeared as a result of his having read some or other words or sentences. The man regretted the young man's having once supposed that he ought to read fiction for some purpose other than to wait during the hours or the days after his reading for the appearance in his mind of images never previously read about or written about.

 

An image of a lounge room appeared in the mind of a man who had spent nearly five hundred days in the room forty-five years
before. The image-room was large and the image-furniture in the room was comfortable.

The man mentioned remembered the room and the rooms adjoining it as the most comfortable of the many places where he had lived as a young man before he had married. After he had moved into the rooms, which had been advertised as a spacious partly furnished flat in the outer south-east of Melbourne, the young man had made only two changes. First, he had moved an armchair away from a wall in order to make way for his bookshelves. He hoped to become in the future the owner of books enough to cover the walls of the room where he would spend his evenings, but when he moved into the rooms mentioned he owned no more than a hundred books. The second change that the young man made was to take down from the walls the few pictures hanging there and to attach to one of the bare walls the first few of the many sheets of paper that he hoped to attach to every wall of the room.

All but one of the few sheets mentioned was covered with large, neat handwriting done by the young man with a black felt-tipped pen. The one sheet not so covered was a page from an essay submitted by the young man for assessment during the previous year, when he had attended evening classes as a part-time student at the University of Melbourne. No reader of the sheet mentioned could have learned what the subject of the essay had been, but many a reader might have learned that the subject had to do with a certain book of fiction by an author who had spent much of his early life in the merchant marine.
In the left-hand margin of the sheet mentioned were several sentences in handwriting different from that of the essay writer. One such sentence had been underlined with a red felt-tipped pen. The sentence read:
You seem not to understand how morality works in literature
. Beneath the sentence, another sentence had been written with a black felt-tipped pen in the handwriting of the essay writer:
Worse, I do not understand what is morality or even what is literature
.

The young man who moved into the spacious flat, so to call it, had been trying for several years to write a certain long work of fiction. He had hoped to complete during his evenings and weekends in the flat the work that he had previously failed to complete in one or another rooming house or backyard bungalow. Soon after he had moved into the flat, however, the young man had begun to spend much time during evenings or at weekends in looking through his books of fiction for passages worthy to be copied onto sheets of paper and then attached to the walls of his lounge room or in copying such passages and attaching them to one or another wall.

The man remembering the flat where he had lived forty-five years before remembered not one sentence from the many passages that had been copied onto sheets of paper and attached to walls. The man remembered, however, that a certain book on his shelves had provided more passages than had any other book. The book had been on the young man's shelves for only a few weeks before he had begun to copy passages from it. The young man had bought the book in a bookshop in the central business
district of Melbourne only a few hours after he had read a review of the book in a newspaper.

The man remembering the book that he had read forty-five years before saw in his mind several adjoining image-rooms in which the image-walls were covered with image-books on image-shelves. The image-rooms were part of an image-flat in an image-city in image-Europe.

If ever the remembering man had set out to report in writing the further images that he connected with the book mentioned, then he might have written that the man who lived among the several rooms filled with books had no wife or child and was so devoted to the books that he later lost his reason and afterwards left the rooms filled with books and lived among criminals and outcasts. The remembering man might have written further that the owner of the rooms filled with books had a brother in a distant city. The brother was a medical doctor with a special interest in persons who had lost their reason. The brother kept under observation in a locked wing of his house a man who had not only lost his reason but followed a way of life opposed to reason. The man under observation used a language of his own devising, one principle of which seemed to be that an object could be denoted by any of a number of words depending on the mood of the person perceiving the object. The remembering man remembered that the young man had attached to many a prominent place on the walls of his lounge room one or another sheet of paper on which was transcribed one or another passage reporting the way of life of the man under observation.

The remembering man remembered that the young man had had no visitors to his spacious flat. The young man had a few friends in distant suburbs, and they sometimes offered to visit him, but he persuaded them against it. He wanted no one to step into his spacious flat before he had covered every wall with sheets of handwriting. The young man wanted to demonstrate to any visitor that he, the young man, preferred to the visible world a space enclosed by words denoting a world more real by far.

The remembering man remembered that the young man had written a long letter to one of his friends when he, the young man, foresaw that he might soon finish his task of covering the walls of his lounge room with handwritten sheets. In the letter, the young man claimed to have begun writing a work of fiction in which the chief character was suspected by his friends of having lost his reason because he believed that fiction was superior to what was commonly called reality and because he lived in accordance with this belief. The man slept on a bed of pages removed from books of fiction. His bedsheets and blankets were inscribed with passages of fiction. He attached pages of fiction to his skin beneath his underclothes. When he masturbated, he caught his seed on an outspread double-page of fiction.

The remembering man had never been able to remember more than a few of the events that had followed the young man's sending the long letter mentioned. Nor had the remembering man been able to remember from the work of fiction from which the young man had transcribed so many passages any more than a few of the fictional events that had taken place after the chief
character of the work had sent to his brother in a distant city a telegram with the message:
AM COMPLETELY CRACKERS
.

 

In the mind of a man aged more than sixty years, an image appeared of a young woman seated on a swing and rising high into the air against a background of dense foliage. Before the image had appeared, the man had been hoping to recall one or more of the images that had appeared in his mind more than twenty years before, while he was reading a book that he seemed afterwards to have almost forgotten. He seemed almost to have forgotten the book, and yet he was hoping to recall and then to report in writing some or another image connected with his having read the book.

The book mentioned was described by its publisher as a frank and revealing autobiography. The author was an Englishman and a contemporary of the man who had read at least part of the book but had later seemed to forget it. Before the book had been published, its author had become famous as the author of many books of the sort known as science fiction. The title of the autobiography was a play on words, one of its two possible meanings being that the author as a boy and as a young man had been an habitual masturbator.

The man seeing the mental image of the young woman on the swing could hardly believe that such an image-person or such an image-swing had been mentioned in the autobiography. The young image-woman had the image-clothes and the image-hair-style
of an upper-class young woman of the eighteenth century, and even the dense image-foliage behind her was such as the man had seen only in illustrations of paintings from long before his own time.

From his reading of the autobiography the man retained only two memories. He remembered that he had left off reading towards the end of the book and had never afterwards resumed. He remembered also an image that had surely appeared to him during his reading: an image of a girl or a young woman seated in a shabby armchair in a small house in a working-class suburb of a provincial city in England: near the girl or the young woman were two boys or boy-men.

The man supposed that the image of the young woman on the swing was derived from some or another illustration that he had seen at the time when he was reading part of the autobiography mentioned. The man himself knew little about the so-called visual arts, but he remembered that his wife had bought each week for their children, more than twenty years before, one after another illustrated segment of a series with the title
GREAT ARTISTS
. Having remembered this, the man visited the home of the son of his who was presently the custodian of the series mentioned.

In his son's house, the man saw, on the cover of a certain segment of the series mentioned, an illustration of a painting of a young woman seated on a swing and rising high into the air. The man learned from an inspection of the illustration that the painting included two other image-persons apart from the young image-woman. These two were an image-man who was pushing
the young image-woman from behind and an image-man who was lying beneath the image-swing and was gazing upwards at the exposed image-thighs of the young image-woman. The man later learned from the passages of text accompanying the illustration that the young image-woman was the wife of the image-man who was pushing her from behind and was the mistress of the image-man who was gazing at her image-thighs. The man understood from what he read that the painting of the young woman and of the two men was considered a masterpiece.

The man who is the subject of this passage of fiction often found himself living in his mind the image-life of some or another image-person who had taken his interest in some or another work of fiction that he was reading. The man sometimes found himself living in his mind, if only for a few moments, the image-life of some or another image-person who had taken his interest in some or another illustration that he was looking at. While the man stared at the illustration of the painting that was reported to be a masterpiece, he was not at all interested in living in his mind, even for a few moments, the image-life of the image-man standing behind the young image-woman or of the image-man lying among the image-foliage beneath her. He felt no wish to be, even for a few moments, the husband or the lover of the young image-woman in the purported masterpiece. Even though he remembered having left off reading the autobiography mentioned earlier, the man would have preferred to live the image-life of one of the image-boys or image-boy-men in the shabby image-house in the provincial image-city mentioned
earlier: to have stood, whenever the need arose, with his imagebrother in front of their image-sister; to have masturbated promptly; and afterwards to have gone back to his task of trying to write fiction.