Whenever I want something ticklish, plotless, full of words I don't know and situations I've yet to experience, I read Guy Davenport. In his stories, his multiple sunlit stories/essays/poems, you could be living in a jar with a dead bee, attending the birth of photography in Toledo, driving down the boulevard Raspail with Gertrude Stein, walking on a mountainside with Robert Walser, riding Da Vinci's bike through the twentieth century, bathing in all Guy Davenport has read. And he has read vastly. Giddily. Making connections and abruptly severing them with the intelligence and imagination of the twelve-year-old boy he'd like to be, climbing trees, nudging and nipping. He disports himself in his knowledge, apricates in his reading.

As, in their turn, do his readers. Read a few pages and then pause. Especially outdoors. Read a paragraph and stop. I like reading words I don't know, or might have known once but have forgotten, and enjoy guessing, or just reading for the sound and the rhythm. I like not knowing where I am in what I read. That makes me an odd reader but I like that too.

In my various volumes of Guy Davenport's writing, I found only one pencil mark in the margin, a circle, indicating particular pleasure, in the Walser story A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg:

… if you stare through a window into a snowfall the room will rise and snow stand still …

I think I may have used that in a story. And the title of his essay collection Every Force Evolves a Form has entered the vernacular in this house, a great encouragement when the force is with you but the form has not yet arrived.

I interviewed Guy Davenport by correspondence for a book on teaching literature. He taught as if that were the only thing he did, he said. Which in a way it was. And he wrote as if writing were the only thing he did. As if all he'd read were continually present in his head. He found my Irish address improbable and insufficient. Which it is.

First time this year sitting up at the pond, blissfully warm, listening to the play of water trickling, and a bird or two, staring at lightly rippled reflections and not quite reading Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald which I started again yesterday. Now and then glance at the cover of the book next to me, with its image of a little boy dressed in white like a creature out of time; then look at the pond with Sebald-like attention and dreaminess, the way you watch a film about Pina Bausch, and afterwards, even without moving, you're convinced that you can walk, leap and collapse like Pina Bausch and her dancers.

How does the impermanence, the melancholy of Austerlitz inhabit the home pond: water boatmen in the salle des pas perdus, towns unaccountably empty if not bereaved, memories that will not, will, will not enter the mind they vacated many years before; the ghostly-uncanny of Prague in the 1930s, the sorrow of Belgium, the chill of Wales, the sooty subterranean of Liverpool Street Station, the skulls of Bedlam, the silence of Terezín?

A small brown beetle I don't recognise swims my way. By the time it reaches the edge and disappears behind a stone, I know what it is: a Sebald beetle.

Like Awakenings, Austerlitz is far from plot, more like a state of being, a quest in danger of arrest if not paralysis. No grinding machinery here, only aftermath and disquiet. No characters. So to speak. Sebald often says that. So to speak. So is a weightier word in German than in English. Flatter yet more resonant or differently resonant, differently interrogatory:

Vera said that every time we reached the page which described the snow falling through the branches of the trees, soon to shroud the entire forest floor, I would look up at her and ask: But if it's all white, how do the squirrels know where they've buried their hoard? Ale když všechno zakryje sníh, jak veverky najdou to místo, kde si schovaly zásoby? Those were your very words, the question which constantly troubled you. How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what is it we find in the end?

Dipped about in Thomas Browne Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall on a very windy day. Oliver Sacks read Thomas Browne. So did W.G. Sebald. I dip about. Preferably outdoors but March isn't quite the season.

The darknesses of all reading are more pronounced when the spelling is unfamiliar. 'The line of our dayes is drawne by night, and the various effects therein by a pencil that is invisible.'

Isn't that what we need to read in early to mid-March when large issues stalk the planet and we mouth through them in disbelief?

Thomas Browne was a Norfolk doctor in the seventeenth century. Burial Urns were discovered at Walsingham in that county. My parents' ashes are part of that county. Or they washed through it in the River Bure, having travelled in their actual and imaginative lives the Volga the Thames and the (Essex) Blackwater.

We are onely that amphibious piece betweene a corporall and spirituall essence, that middle frame that linkes those two together, and makes good the method of God and nature.

Pity it isn't spelled Godd, at least.

Awakenings by Oliver Sacks

Next door to our room last night at the Absolute Hotel a course called Introductory Mindfulness was in progress. At Limerick Junction, on the way home, a woman up the platform was reading If I die.

I was reading Awakenings and the stationmaster was reading the paper. My neighbour praised the stonework of the building opposite, the one that is perforated in mysterious ways, either by bullets or decay. The train was late but I didn't mind; I was deep in the strangest lives it's possible to read.

Twenty case studies of Oliver Sacks' patients at a hospital in the Bronx in the late sixties and early seventies, who, some for as long as forty years, had been fixed in severe Parkinsonism after an attack of sleepy sickness, in the era of epidemics towards the end of World War One.

Then along comes a new drug at the end of the 1960s, L-DOPA, that wakes them up, often explosively. Suddenly there they after forty years in their own reality. One patient wanted to return to 1926. The lost forty years were absurd, unbearable. You don't always want a miracle. You want ordinariness. Cobbling shoes or playing the piano. Walking into the garden and sitting talking with your sister.

The language that you meet chez Oliver Sacks is as strange as his patients' lives, but if you skate over the words you don't know, if you don't anguish over the meaning of erethism or oculogyric crisis, their humanity is ours too, at railway and all other junctions. What is illimitable and insatiable, (Oliver Sacks likes italics), either too fast or frozen, what is immeasurable in their experience is ours too. Our lives as collections of moments without time and change without transit, like quantum mechanics. A lifetime burning in every moment, as Eliot says.

The state is there, and it cannot be changed. From gross still vision, patients may proceed to an astonishing sort of microscopic vision or Lilliputian hallucination in which they may see a dust-particle on the counterpane filling their entire visual field, and presented as a mosaic of sharp-faceted faces.

In her halcyon days on L-DOPA, Gertie L. was in a state of 'great inner stillness' and of 'acquiescence'.

'My mind was like a still pool reflecting itself.' She would spend hours and days and even weeks reliving peaceful scenes from her own childhood – lying in the sun, drowsing in a meadow, or floating in a creek near her home as a child; these Arcadian moments could apparently be extended, indefinitely, by the still and intent quality of her thought.

Rose R. had a repertoire of means of thinking about nothing.

One way is to think about the same thing again and again. Like 2=2=2=2; or, I am what I am what I am what I am. It's the same thing with posture. My posture continually leads to itself. Whatever I do or whatever I think leads deeper and deeper into itself.

Frances D. thought up ways to negotiate space.

It's not as simple as it looks. I don't just come to a halt, I am still going, but I have run out of space to move in… You see, my space, our space, is nothing like your space: our space gets bigger and smaller, it bounces back on itself, and it loops itself round till it runs into itself.

How to stay alive and human in a Total Institution. Rolando P. is at the end of his tether.

'Can't you fuckers leave me alone? What's the sense in all your fucking tests? Don't you have eyes and ears in my head? Can't you see I'm dying of grief? For Chrissake let me die in peace!' These were the last words which Rolando ever spoke. He died in his sleep, or his stupor, just four days later.

When to get out.

Every afternoon after lunch Leonard L. lay down on his bed and hallucinated into the frame of a picture of a shanty town from a Western movie. He ordered the painting for the sole and express purpose of hallucinating with it. Creating reality. 'They hallucinate the richness and drama and fulness of life. They hallucinate to survive'.

Imagine knowing your crisis comes every week on a Wednesday, and being able now and again to delay it till Thursday; drinking five or six gallons of water a day; planning your route to bed, Now! Deciding to die. Being utterly still yet perpetually moving, in an ontological orbit contracted to zero, like Hester Y., or, like Robert O., have thoughts suddenly vanish in the middle of a sentence, drop out and leave a space like a frame without a picture.

As much as Proust or Virginia Woolf or TS Eliot or Beckett or Rilke. Read Awakenings.

Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell

What do you read while an old sycamore tree is being reduced (by something less than a third) outside the window? What tale can keep you from staring at at the high vis young tree surgeon up among the smaller branches with two chainsaws and a Japanese knife hanging round his waist and the wind strengthening?

The tale of Little Joe Gould, that's who, bohemian, bum, down and out in thirties and forties New York, Yankee crank with a Harvard accent, the Professor, the Sea Gull, Professor Sea Gull, the Mongoose, Professor Mongoose, or the Bellevue Boy, who has been writing for many years an Oral History, already the length of eleven Bibles, in longhand, and has stowed the copy books around New York and environs, in cupboards, behind bars, under hen roosts.

Like Little Joey Block, our onetime neighbour, who felled a few trees in his day, and told a few tales. 'How I got here, now that's a fairy tale'. He wrote poetry, in quantity, and read it out at the drop of a hat.

The only sections of the Joe Gould's Oral History (of Our Times) that Joseph Mitchell gets to see are essay chapters rather than oral chapters, he is told, about Joe Gould's father, and his mother, about the eugenics of two Indian tribes, the importance of tomato ketchup, and translations of Longfellow into the language of the seagull. (Apparently 'Hiawatha' works better in seagull.)

He does not get see the oral chapters. That's because the Oral History of Our Times is enacted, not written. Little Joe Gould, in bars, flophouses and hospitals, through the agency of Joseph Mitchell, brings it into being. To each, an amanuensis. Whether or not we write our oeuvre is ours to judge.

In natural sequence you'd read Jane Eyre next, watch the Orson Welles film and wonder what Jean Rhys thought of Rochester as romantic hero and the mad wife in the tower as part of his nobility.

Instead, by who knows what osmosis: The Rector's Daughter by F. M. Mayor.

A page or two in, the Rector's daughter wishes she hadn't been born. There she is in a purposefully featureless place called Dedmayne in a flat eastern county of England, in charge of her imbecilic (sic) sister and her learned autocratic father. The brothers have all moved away. The mother is dead. 'Life hath a load which must be carried on. And safely may.'

Does it have to be like this?

The Rector is a Canon with a Library and low tolerance for anyone who hasn't read it. Occasionally he consents to 'a happy day', with lunch, a leisurely afternoon, and tea to follow. Did his daughter read Jane Eyre, when she wasn't improving with Bacon's essays or transcribing Tertullian for her father, or was Trollope her only consolation? The sister dies and then there's just the Rector, his daughter, and Cook, and the village. Much revolves around walking, reading aloud, and tea.

Did Beckett draw on 'a happy day', with tea to follow?

'There's something beyond us in the wind and clouds, I never feel heaven can be at all like July,' says the Rector's daughter in her one burst of freedom with Mr Herbert, who goes on to marry someone else. After her father dies she moves to a suburb with an aunt, where 'perhaps she lost some of that individuality, that unlikeness to the ordinary world which had given her a kind of gauche, innocent charm'.

The Rector's daughter dies in the 'flu epidemic, like James Salter's mother. 'How long it was after her father's death depends on how one judges of time.' After a brief spell of being more like other people, she was glad she didn't have to do another forty years.

Heaven isn't like July, it's a wintry burst of light, a collection of poems the Rector's daughter wrote from which 'something emerges occasionally – an odd cry from the heart, or whatever there is beyond the heart, and one feels she's curiously complete'.

Jean Rhys and F. M. Mayor, elephants in a different dark room in Paris and Cambridge in the 1920s. Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams and Flora Macdonald Mayor. People say a great deal about connectivity and the like. Tossing your reading around, is how I'd say it. The books you've read are there to be played. The Library as Keyboard. The Music of Time and how one may judge it. A tune beyond us, yet ourselves.

After Ford Madox Ford, Jean Rhys, Quartet, which is about the ménage she shared in Paris with F. M. F. and Stella Bowen. After you read Quartet, F.M.F. is no longer the narrator in The Good Soldier, he is the gentleman philanderer, Edward Ashburnham, who maybe doesn't love women at all, and Stella Bowen is his wife, the clean-run Leonora, who sets him up.

Jean Rhys was born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams in Dominica, came to England aged nearly seventeen. England was never England as she'd imagined, it was just another set of lies. No wonder she decided to study drama, where at least lies were de quoi vivre, even a métier. As Ella or sometimes Emma, or Petronella, she was cast adrift, often ill, always poor, easily led, either beholden or in despair.

Among the characters of The Good Soldier she would fall somewhere between Maisie Maidan on the boat back from India, and Nancy the convent girl who by the end of the novel is mad, with touches of the Russian Grand Duke's concubine and an uncertain taste in hats. In Wide Sargasso Sea, her prequel to Jane Eyre, she conflated all of them in Antoinette/Bertha/the first Mrs Rochester, madwoman in the attic: her story.

Ford Madox Ford named her Jean Rhys (he changed his own name, changing hers was part of his predatory move). He opened doors for her, made her a writer. Other doors he closed. He gave her shelter but he ate her alive. There's a fine line between people doing things for you and people controlling you while their wives or procuresses listen outside doors and sneer.

Jean Rhys must have read The Good Soldier or the Saddest Story Ever Told. Did the upright Englishness of Edward Ashburnham fool her for a while? Wouldn't she have been warned? Did she suspect the affectless American narrator? Was she seduced by the conversational intimacies, the wave upon wave of language, The Good Soldier as Venus flytrap, consuming the susceptible? Or did she just feel completely inadequate?

Jean Rhys's main characters are all women alone, looking for safety in bars and hotels, uncertainly dressed, pulled this way, pushed that, drawn to the ideal of the English gentleman, the physical type anyway, of the successful pretender, like Ford Madox Ford, with his clean-run, scornful wife Leonora, or Stella.

Jean Rhys is not a pretty writer. The reader must scuttle and wilt and watch, full of pity, confusion or revulsion at the seediness of it all. This is not a gathering of uncertain hearts at a German spa, it's the transit lounge of 1920s Paris, where there are no good soldiers, only international vagrants, petty thieves and gigolos.

Jean Rhys's novels are The Saddest Story. Ford Madox Ford knew nothing of sadness.

The Good Soldier or The Saddest Story Ever Told by Ford Madox Ford was described by one of the author's friends as the finest French novel in the English language. Discuss. Or write the author a letter, as I used to say to students.

My dear F.M.F.,

Hard to know where the Good is, or the Saddest in your story. You are disingenuous, Sir. Un faux modeste. Faux croyant. Neither Good nor Saddest. Fractal, perhaps. This is not a story you heard, it's a story in which you were embroiled. You trip over yourself, recount from so many angles there is no more solid ground, let alone a minuet, while appearing to be a colourless, wealthy American telling this complicated tale to a stranger in an inn near the sea. Uncertainty is the key, constant undermining and recovery, as in much of life, which is why your book is such a seductive read. The sort of giddy subtlety you no longer find in the newspapers. You make a meal of not knowing how to tell your tale, lurid as it essentially is, dashing back and forth from one point of view to another, none of them – least of all yours – reliable; you share your frailty with your listener/reader, as if that let you off a lot of hooks, then resume the tale with an old world politesse. 'Did Florence commit suicide? I didn't know.' There's a great deal of slippage and unease. Fissures open every other line. You, our narrator disperse among the uncertainties as if you had no say in the matter. All this smacks of French difficulty or exception, a tricky relation between novel and reader, novel and writer, life and the telling. If you don't seek clarity you'll find it, weaving between events and their resolution, which is usually death and in one instance, madness. What is one to think of humanity?

Your J.K.

Buy Music for Chameleons and read Handcarved Coffins, a friend urged in Chicago in 1981, during a year of making friends and influencing nothing (that I knew of yet). That was my introduction to Truman Capote. Then I read In Cold Blood, then other semi-fictions, later The Complete Stories, and lastly saw the film with Philip Seymour Hoffman, who acted Capote perhaps as well as Capote himself.

Truman Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons. He'd been trying to get the world into a book since he was eleven. Now and then he succeeds, and it brings balm in the vast unsatisfactions of his life. The novel Answered Prayers was to be his Proust but, despite his telling everyone about the mountainous manuscript on his desk, it was barely begun when he died.

Some of his Proust he had already written, like the story about making Christmas cakes with his version of Proust's grandmother, a much older cousin everyone called Miss Sook, and her rat terrier Queenie. Or maybe, across his stories, and fiction/nonfiction, he'd already written all of it.

You may want to dislike some of his characters but they're disarming and vanish without trace. He gives them enormous attention: their eyes their legs their hair their mouths; they often have his own short body. You can feel him slough it off with a fine-turned sentence, a well-wrought tale.

He would tell Anna these stories, go home and go to sleep. His dreams were clear blue.

You can't quite feel for him; he won't let you; but you have to admire his gall. And your dreams will be clear blue too.

At this moment the telephone rang. And rang. And it was ringing so loud he was sure all the hotel could hear. An army would be pounding at his door. So he pushed his face into the pillow, covered his ears with his hands, and thought: Think of nothing things, think of wind.

So long, See you tomorrow by William Maxwell

The title hangs in the air. The ordinary is suddenly perilous, again. 'Whether they are part of home or home is part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer.'

I've read this novel about seven times, twice in the last two days, and each time I find new places to pause, new ways to read. A crime of passion in rural Illinois in the early 1920s is not a narrative whose summary would draw me in. But this is less about crime than the friendship of two boys, stopped in its fragile tracks, and the attempt of one of them, now a man in his sixties, to make amends. 'If I knew where Cletus Smith is right this minute, I would go and explain. Or try to.'

He circles the story, intricate as it becomes, more well-intended, then despairing. What the preacher should say. What the farm dog would say. What justice ever is. 'In any case, talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.' He tries one then another point of view, each choice, each change making it a lie each time.

'In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead. '

Circling till you tire and you have only the loss and the humanity left. You hope your friend is 'undestroyed by what was not his doing.' That is what you've tried to say, though now, as then, you fail to know how to understand, or weep, or make amends.

'Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.'

One of the astonishments of reading is how completely, especially on winter afternoons, you can inhabit another's mind, then move on with your day, go check the new frogspawn in the pond, and apparently forget, but not.

The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon

The Pillow Book is not by Sei Shōnagon, it's of her. The notebooks in which she wrote were surplus to requirements at the Imperial Court of tenth century Japan, where she was a lady-in-waiting. Let me make them into a pillow said Shōnagon to the Empress. She wrote her days then slept on them, dreamlessly. A report from a thousand years ago is already a dream. What delights her, what bores her, what is unsuitable or squalid or makes the heart race, today's main stories in the Imperial Court, colour schemes according to season, rendezvous manqués and bedroom etiquette, the sound of a distant flute and how it differs from a flute nearby.

To read The Pillow Book is to re-do your day.

Today's main stories here on the hill in early 2015 are the first frogspawn, the weather turning round to the west, new pruning knife ordered. Encouraging Things: talking to Pat in the farm shop, Mary bagging fondant for the bees, the broad bean bed turned and planted. Delightful Sensations: pulling several feet of pristine bindweed root out of black leaf mould, smelling a sack of newly-dug artichokes. Things that give a poignant feeling: the wind in silhouetted trees in the evening, Mozart about to turn to the minor key.

As Daily life in Ancient Rome by Jérôme Carcopino came out of the padded envelope, a Peregrine Book from 1964 with a school stamp on the flyleaf, thumbed and respected (the glue was so much better then, and the paper), the text in Monotype Bembo, I smiled. The author's photograph on the inside cover shows a genial white-haired Frenchman captured in mid-phrase, fellow-traveller of the man who taught me A level Latin, Mr Berridge, in his chalk-dusty black robe, with a polio limp and so much to enjoy in any language: he leaned back as he wooed us with Horace and Vergil. Into each school life just enough foreign land.

I preferred the baths to the battles, the Latin to the emperors. I didn't know Greek but was glad to see it there on the page; I deciphered by the letter. The Greeks are a race of people on clean warm islands and isthmuses with blue seas and skies, elegant shadows, behind them only myth. The Romans are busier, sweatier, closer to the Common Era in which we subsist. Thermae is a Greek word with an entirely Roman meaning.

The baths are one of the fairest creations of the Roman Empire. They not only benefited civilization, after their fashion, but also served art, which has been permanently enriched by monuments whose spaciousness, proportions, and technical perfection command our profound admiration even in their decay.

In the Spa Experience during the Late Common Era you pay so much you deserve to get a whole new identity. 

This was not all: this imposing group of buildings was surrounded by an esplanade, cooled by shade and paling fountains, which gave space for playing grounds and was enclosed by a continuous covered promenade (the xystus). Behind the xystus curved the exedrae of the gymnasiums and the sitting-rooms, the libraries, and the exhibition halls. This was the truly original feature of the thermae. Here the alliance between physical culture and intellectual curiosity became thoroughly Romanized.

History is what you do in the day. Kaspar Hauser in Herzog's film tells the story of getting to the city, but he doesn't know what happened after that.

After my first ever visit to a spa, I re-read James Salter stories. These choices seem implacable. You look along the shelves and James Salter, suddenly, is the one who fits the post-spa experience.

Last Night (2005) is more spare than Dusk (1988). Very male. Very officer and gentleman. Very onlooker if not wishful thinking. Regretful, lascivious, elegant. People always on the verge of generic, just glancing through, light and fateful, their names esoteric as healing herbs, their stories intermingling and then separate as if never before.

Reading as detox might be worth pursuing. Kafka said a book should sting. Sometimes the sting is unease. Disturbance in the internal weather. A complex frontal system on every other page.

He was later to tell her that words are no accident, their arrangement and choice was like another voice speaking, a voice which revealed everything. Vocabulary was like fingerprints, he said, like handwriting, like the body which revealed the invisible soul, which expressed it.

You don't always know who's speaking in his stories – and he uses the French indent rather than English inverted commas  – which plunges you further into the moment because you now and then you think that one of them must be you.

During the spa experience none of them was me, except parts of my body when they were massaged. What I don't know about the spa experience afterwards, is what, in weight, I don't know at the end of a James Salter story. Massage can be painful.

Ivy and Stevie by Kay Dick
Novel on yellow paper by Stevie Smith

Re-immersing in Stevie Smith after a day in the wood is un plaisir de choix, loamish and endless, a patois of leaf mould and rabbits: life is enemy territory, you know. Stevie in interview is like Stevie on her own pages: wilful, willing, honest, integral as a stick of Brighton rock.

Stevie Smith was too diffuse when I was 20 something, too easy yet obscure, a forward-looking girl who doesn't stay where she is.

That's on days when I am one big bounce, and have to go careful then not to be a nuisance. But later I get back to my own philosophical outlook that keeps us all kissable. 

My mother said I might enjoy German lieder when I was older, and she was right. Around the same time Stevie Smith came back into view, and I read Novel on yellow paper every few years after that, the way you revisit a bay where you swam as a child, though you didn't know it then, that you were a child, or what swimming was, or that later you'd remember swimming here, running down at low tide and then swimming, whatever swimming was, through seaweed, jellyfish, over molluscs towards firm sand.

Stevie Smith re-read Racine's Phèdre over and over. She dives into Racine's elegant lines and few words, his Phaedra and her implacable gods, her tragic simplicity; unlike Stevie's own life, which ran on its own eagerness and common sense, depreciating, negating, compensating, composting, singing, almost.

Edith Sitwell's English Eccentrics sits on my desk with a mix of Michaux, Sebald, Heraclitus, The Pillow Book, Steinberg, Buzzi and the Collins guide to Cacti & Succulents. Reading syncopation. If there ever was a beat to be off. Or a small beat running on, like Pompey in Novel on yellow paper, like Stevie in interview, leaning on the ordinary, kiddo, picking up the obvious from behind, oh.

At Felixstowe dinner is on a higher plane. Very spiritual. With pink Shape to follow, very Platonic. Like it was a This World carbon copy of A Great Idea.

A Weakness for almost Everything and Journey to the Land of the Flies by Aldo Buzzi
Reflections and Shadows by Saul Steinberg
Villa Triste by Patrick Modiano

I was thinking of writing a story based on a dream a friend told me about an Italian pop singer called Mina, and thought I'd read something Italian. I passed by Moravia, Calvino, C. Levi, P. Levi and Dante before stopping at Aldo Buzzi: here was a sensibility of place, travel and food, beginning in Italy then rapidly over the Alps to Switzerland, France, England, America and Djakarta, full of grounded glances and unusual information or advice, for example that toothpicks seem to have been invented for the Japanese, that before travel a Russian will spend time in his room with a pair of shoes, and that you shouldn't trust a writer who doesn't mention food.

With his friend Saul Steinberg, Aldo Buzzi went to architecture school in Milan in the 1930s. I like to imagine them there, and in New York, two stick figures, stock figures, wearing hats and carrying umbrellas, looking out across a short perspective down the avenue to their younger selves. Aldo Buzzi didn't start writing till he was 70, and Saul Steinberg was an artist, so their writings are refreshingly non-determinate, dry, willing: you can take it on from here yourself.

This is my paradise: a road along the sea without traffic, a wide, irregular walkway along the beach, paved with tiles, on which one can walk comfortably even with bare feet. A low wall on the beach side, where one can sit.

A winter's day soon after Christmas in Ireland, which Buzzi as far as I know, did not visit, the sea running shallow and wide with tiny ripples. No traffic. Low wall. My friend behind a table in front of his house by the sea, facing southwest, offering free rum punch to passers-by. Among whom Mina, the Italian pop singer, tax exile in Switzerland, where I would place her in Nabokov's hotel, the Montreux-Palace, with views over the lake to the Alps, like the narrator of Modiano's Villa Triste, but the other way around: she is on her balcony looking across the lake to distant insecurities.

Mina, my friend said, she was here. He pointed at the ground under the table. Over a rum punch or two, Mina meets a local farmer, and, abandoning pop and tax and exile and luxury, settles with him. So that is why, just after Christmas each year since that dream, I give free punch to anyone who is passing by. 

Aldo Buzzi, who in Journey to the Land of the Flies returns frequently to the waitress he once saw in Crescenzago, where he had lunch on the way to Gorgonzola, would understand.

Maiden Voyage by Denton Welch
A Schoolboy's Diary by Robert Walser

On a day that began with a thick mantle of snow and by midday had turned to rain and gales, I set up a tango between Denton Welch and Robert Walser, reading a chapter of one and then a story or two of the other. Denton, the 16 year-old with a taste for architecture and fine porcelain, runs away from school and then joins his father in Shanghai in the 1930s, meets Walser the perpetual child, the delighted servant of his own life, in the attic of my cabin fever one winter's afternoon. Denton tries out a frock for the first and maybe last time (he was paralysed by a bicycle accident not long after he returned to England), with full make-up and heels; Walser, suited, slightly hunched against the next mountain, but smiling, ever-obedient, apologetic, has to lead. They do not manage the full show of tango emotion, but at the end both are flushed with pleasure, exertion, and the expectation of how this will look on the page.

I recognise their discomfiture, their rawness and their pleasure at the stuff of their days, I know their relentless observation and unease, the way they skirt about experience until they find a temporary nook, a place from which to write, later. Reading is for recognition, for knowledge of your suddenly extensive kin.

When I read, I am a harmless, nice and quiet person and I don't do anything stupid. Ardent readers are a breed of people with great inner peace as it were. The reader has his noble, deep, and long-lasting pleasure without being in anyone else's way or bothering anyone. Is that not glorious?

You don't have to read a book; in China you can read the tea-leaves.

Each cup had a lid, and when I lifted mine I saw whole leaves swimming in the water like a school of fishes. They were pale green. Some had not yet uncurled. I watched them opening with pleasure, and I thought that we missed a lot in England by not leaving the tea-leaves in our cups. To watch them swirling and drifting is like watching the smoke from a cigarette. And what is smoking in the dark?

The daphne bholua in the front garden gave off a brave whiff of its scent, its inner peace, even through an inch of snow this morning. Is that not glorious?

Westward Haut by Edward Dorn
Worstward Ho by Samuel Beckett
Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley

Beckett worms worstward in 16pt Bembo, uncoupling as he goes:

What were skull to go? As good as go.
Into what then black hole? From out
what then? What why of all? Better worse
so? No. Skull better worse. What left of
skull. Of soft. Worst why of all of all.
So skull not go. What left of skull not go.
Into it still the hole. Into what left of soft.
From out what little left.

 Ed Dorn sets off west on I-80, loquacious and choppy:

Well, I Was Dead for Nearly Five Years Once …
Yess, the First Year is Sheer Torment
One doesn't Know What To Do …
Loose Ends, you know,
Difficult to Get Acclimatized,
But After That, When the Full Freedom
Of Your Non-entity Soaks in
It's the sheerest Joy Imaginable.

Charles Kingsley, in 1855, thanks his novel's dedicatees:

That type of English virtue, at once manful and godly, practical and enthusiastic, prudent and self-sacrificing, which he has tried to depict in these pages, they have exhibited in a form even purer and more heroic than that in which he has drest it, and than that in which it was exhibited by the worthies whom Elizabeth, without distinction of rank or age, gathered round her in the ever glorious wars of her great reign.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke.

In winter, at the hour entre chien et loup, it takes some time to find the Rilke I first met in Paris when I was a student, susceptible to doubt and transformation as never before or perhaps since. Reading does not cast an even light throughout; it is not like fibre optic, whizzing through the material world to reach the immaterial.

In childhood I considered reading a profession one would take upon oneself, later some time, when all the professions came along, one after the other. I had, to tell the truth, no clear idea when that might be. I trusted that one would notice when life somehow turned and came only from without, as hitherto from within. 

By the time Rilke wrote the Duino Elegies he had noticed. Or maybe he hadn't. His language had. As far as this reader was concerned then, these were two separate affairs.

When I lived in Paris I knew a German journalist called Malte, engaged in worlds that were beyond me.  I was a green apple and would remain so until about last week.

Bohumil Hrabal – just to say his name lands you plumb and softly in the middle of Europe – has very good titles: Closely Observed Trains, Vacant Lots, I Served the King of England, Too Loud a Solitude, Total Fears. On a flight to London in November I reread Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. I began just after take-off and managed to time the end of the sentence, which is the whole book, for touch-down in Heathrow. This was so satisfying it felt like an augury. I'd swallowed the Irish Sea in a single sentence. No ill could come of this.

In London I bought Total Fears (published by Twisted Spoon Press in Prague), written as a series of letters to April Gifford, dubbed Dubenka. He needs to be talking out loud to someone, somewhere and she is that person and these pages are the place. His recollections and associations rampage at will through long paragraphs full of ellipses.

He never sent the letters. They were as much for Dubenka as they were for Pipsi, his dead wife, for the familiarity of talking to her, for his own comfort (and safety), and for me, midwinter, on a day of horizontal rain and wind. Wetterkrank. Sick with weather. Mid-Europeans are good with weather and sickness of the soul. Good with extent. Always landed, bordered, wry and fearful, translated from the word Go and, in the mid- to late-twentieth century, about to be crushed by a Bolshevik boot.

Bohumil Hrabal aged 75, thinking and drinking in Prague, London, Glasgow and the Delighted States of America where he gave talks at many universities, living with his twelve cats in the Kersko woods, addressing his Dubenka over in Stanford, California, his dead wife Pipsi, his rush of recollection in the late eighties and early nineties, Total Fears is the hurtling missive of his latter years. Or is that, missile? He feels hurt by his own house, his own bedroom, by the view through the window; the whole world is hurting; he avoids his own image in the mirror; in neither time or space, at the heart of horror and dread, he is cold.

… how many times I've felt like jumping from the fifth floor, from my apartment where every room hurts, but always at the last moment my guardian angel saves me, he pulls me back, just like my Herr Doktor Franz Kafka, who wanted to jump from the fifth floor … just like Malte Laurids Brigge, who also wanted to jump from the fifth floor, he was hurt too by the world in Paris. Brigge was hurt by the whole world as well, just like Rainer Maria Rilke.

Bohumil Hrabal died in 1997 after falling from his hospital window while trying to feed the pigeons.

Futility by William Gerhardi (sometimes with an e, though this may be an affectation, like the brocade dressing gown in which the author liked to be photographed).

In my twenties I read him under the rubric of bad literature, and ventured to say so to Kay Dick, whom I met this once; he's a great writer, she said indignantly, as if I might be sweeping her own writing into the same bin.

And so we covered verst after verst, as our luxurious train, freshly painted, beautifully furnished, admirably kept, rushed through a stricken land of misery. On our choice engines we moved like lightning, or perchance stood long hours at lonely wayside stations, the glamour of innumerable electric lights within our carriages presenting to a community of half-starving refugees the gloating picture of the Admiral and his 'staff' at dinner.

Wry, perhaps, faintly sardonic but moist; bad. Not Debbie Harry bad. Indulgent bad. Any insider/outsider who charts this mess of creaking aristocrats with their pert daughters in pre-revolutionary Russia is going to look bad. Revolution starts to look like a relief, cleanser of the last privileged social group who read, wrote, and thought; and lost their fortunes, or mislaid them.

'Motives!' he cried. 'That is the very point, There are no motives. The motives are naught. It is the consequences. Where are we going? Why are we going? Look: we are moving. Going somewhere. Doing something. The train rushes through Siberia. The wheels are moving. The engine-drivers are adding fuel to the engines. Why? Why are we here? What are we doing in Siberia? Where are we heading for? Something. Somewhere. But what? Where? Why?

Households. Dependents. Old men. Dependents. Scenery. Goldmines. Wives. Daughters. Mistresses. Their sisters. The tedium of expedience. Politics. The expedience of tedium. Divorce, or not. Boches and Bolsheviks. Petersburg Moscow or Siberia, everything remains the same. Complete households move from one side of a continent to the other: wives daughters, mistresses, dependents (quiet, persistent, grateful, anxious), their light feet on the brink of decamping.

The pages that please me the most take place on the Trans-Siberian Express, a journey that Uncle Kostia fears is in excess of anything they are likely to achieve, though everyone behaved as though they were going to Siberia for some reason.

'Oh' groaned Uncle Kostia at my stupidity. 'Can't you understand that it is the very fact of this physical futility that inflates me with a sense of spiritual importance?
I looked at him with a blank expression.
'When I am at home – I mean anywhere at a standstill – I am wretched intolerably. I write and I think – –'. He stopped.  …
Now it is different. We are moving, apparently doing something, going somewhere. One has a sense of accomplishing something. I lie here in my coupé and I think: It is good. At last I am doing something. Living, not recording. Living! Living!

If the one word name worked for Colette it could work for Teffi, the pen name of a Russian émigrée writer who lived in Paris from the 1920s to early 1950s. Teffi sounds less coy than Colette, more androgynous, more Welsh.

I read Russian writers looking for signs. My mother said she didn't like Chekhov's plays because they reminded her of her family. She said it with a half-laugh, half-lament: what passes for home, as good as it gets, full of holes. The only sentence my mother could say in Russian was: 'I'm tired and I want to go home'. I've never been to Russia; as with my mother and Chekhov, maybe signs are as near as I want to get.

The signs are: relentless self-scrutiny; the need to be separate, the need to sit down. My mother wouldn't talk about Chekhov when she was standing up, or about family, unless beset by fury. Sticking together by mutual revulsion, as Teffi says of lesrusses (one word) in 'Que Faire'. Which is fine if everyone is doing it. Well, when I say fine… In Teffi's stories, everyone is doing it.

Should I go home? Anna said loudly. She shook her head and looked around. Next to the door stood an exotic plant. The plant looked stunted but it was in a very large tub, and tucked away behind it was a low armchair.
     "Just what I need."
She sat and drew the thick, plush curtain hanging by the window towards herself.
     "Perfect. Now I can do some thinking." 

In the low armchair behind the stunted plant, inside the plush curtain, Anna thinks.

Going home could be very frightening. The night before her elder sister had come and sat on her bed and said tenderly, "Why make things hard for yourself? You'll only wear yourself out." This sister, who had died four years ago, had never really loved her, and it was very strange suddenly to hear her speaking so affectionately. If she had been alive she would have done nothing but judge.

The work of dreams and nightmares. Good and bad. Another human drama. Any minute.

 It was a real breakthrough – to draw a boundary oneself. But hardly anyone seemed to grasp this. She had heard, not long ago, about a prisoner whose cell was six steps in length. Every time he reached the wall he wanted to smash his head against it, so tormented was he by this limit imposed on his freedom. Six steps – that was all. Then he decided he would take only four steps. He drew a boundary, of his own free will, and he felt free.

The émigrée draws a boundary at four feet and she feels free.

In Vejer de la Frontera, Andalucía, on a misty afternoon I read a story and fell asleep, read another and fell asleep again. My second read of Flannery O'Connor; and the first time I have slept in the afternoon, twice, ever. Two days later, via the Refugio de Juanar, a walk and two miradors, in warm sunshine on the beach at Marbella, I read another story and then fell asleep. I'd been to rural Georgia of about fifty years ago, and now I was tired and happy to have spent this time away from myself.

Flannery O'Connor didn't move about – from Georgia to Iowa and back to Georgia – she didn't live long, or marry, or go on holiday, she lived with her mother with peacocks, ducks and hens and wrote astounding stories of people she must have known and absorbed with the air she breathed. To be this muscular with her creatures she must have stared at them and inhabited them long after they'd gone.

An old General attends his granddaughter's graduation ceremony; he sits behind her in his wheelchair, as Dignity Honour and Courage among all these upstarts. She wanted him to be there. My kin, she wanted to scream, See him. It has taken her twenty years to graduate. As he is honoured, as his granddaughter is honoured, a hole begins in his head. The black music brings in the hole and then he's running backwards into words and stabs of pain he meets with curses and then death. 

A quick paraphrase of A Late Encounter With The Enemy

By the time we got to Málaga I couldn't read any more; I was gazing. From a hotel balcony on a hill, I absorbed another human drama behind the second, the fourteenth or the nine hundredth window from the left; I hovered with sixty-four thermal gulls as firecrackers belted out of the avenida beside the ferry to Africa. Then there was the sunset and after. The great distances of unfamiliar places.

Flannery O'Connor didn't gaze. She entered confusion and prejudice with the confidence of a long-distance swimmer.

She saw the Polish words, dirty and all-knowing and unreformed, flinging mud on the clean English words until everything was equally dirty. She saw them all piled up in a room, all the dead dirty words, theirs and hers too, piled up like the naked bodies in the newsreel. God save me, she cried silently, from the stinking power of Satan!

The Displaced Person

I'd done university, I was considering the Outer Hebrides and maybe reading to an old lady, growing veg, gazing west. Meanwhile I read these Victorian, Edwardian wives: Mrs Henry Wood, Mrs Humphrey Ward, Mrs Amanda McKittrick Ross. I bought them in junk shops, it was a reason to forage and there were easy finds that fed, in the end, not the Outer Hebrides but the Complete Works of Mallarmé in rural Sussex and a PhD.

I read a sentence from East Lynne by Mrs Henry Wood – the book fell open in a hardback thread sewn way, at the beginning of Chapter XV – and began my odyssey through what I called bad literature, pre-Kindle, pre-strange attractor, a warm bath of plot, character, reversal, the improbable crushed by the impossible in sentences pitched high.

There went, sailing down the avenue to East Lynne, a lady one windy afternoon. 

Mallarmé dances with Mrs Henry Wood. Coevals, more or less. Mallarmé good (PhD), Mrs Henry Wood, bad (warm bath). Not as bad as some later sensationalists like Elinor Glyn (Would you like to sin on a tiger skin with Elinor Glyn?), but outrée in her day.

Oh reader, believe me! Lady–wife–mother! Should you ever be tempted to abandon your home, so will you awake. Whatever trials may be the lot of your married life, though they may magnify themselves to your crushed spirit as beyond the endurance of woman to bear, resolve to bear them…

These writers were the furthest back I could go, seduced by the loud-hailer prose and the exotic plot. This was the era of my grandparents. Not that they could read. Not that they sailed down avenues. Hurried back to the ghetto, more like. I started with the wives, and later moved on to the husbands: Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Bulwer Lytton, Harrison Ainsworth, happy ugly ducklings, purple prosers if not posers.

What would I have read to an old lady in the Outer Hebrides?

The last time Ian Breakwell came to visit, he moved straight to the wall of books in the living room and cast about their titles. He preferred perusing the shelves to conversation. Though he did say later as we stood in the greenhouse that he blamed Proust for making it impossible to live in the present.

It was only after he'd gone that I saw he'd left two comments on the bookshelves, two volumes pulled out: Daughter of Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer, and The Vicissitudes of Evangeline by Elinor Glyn. I left them for a long time after his death, Ian's raised eyebrows in the living room.

With Borges by Alberto Manguel.

And he was, the young Manguel, between 1964 and 1968, with Borges in Borges' apartment in Buenos Aires, taking books off the shelves, reading out loud from Stevenson, Kipling, Henry James or Chesterton, to blind Borges, wizard of the infinite. These were the books towards which Borges felt his way and in which, sometimes, he left folded money where it might or might not be found again.

How is it to read about Borges going to the cinema to see, to hear, West Side Story for the nth time, to meditate on Maria as Beatrice, as Juliet, as Lesbia, as Laura? To hear his views on the tango (entered a decline in 1910 and has not emerged, despite or because of the efforts of Astor Piazzolla); to know how his mother spoke of him and his (also blind) father ?

She meant to say: J'ai été la main de mon mari; maintenant, je suis la main de mon fils. ('I used to be the hand of my husband, now I'm the hand of my son') but, opening the diphthong in 'main' as Spanish-speaking people tend to so, she said instead: J'ai été l'amant de mon mari; maintenant, je suis l'amant de mon fils' ( 'I used to be my husband's lover, now I'm the lover of my son'). Those who knew her possessiveness were not surprised.

Do I want to imagine the wizard of the infinite wrestling into a long white nightshirt, then closing his eyes and reciting out loud the 'Our Father' in English? Yes and no. Easier to see him run his fingers over the spines of books as if they were a relief map. To know he loved yellow (of tigers, of roses). The colour of sunlight. The last thing he imagined he saw after he went blind.

Fictions came into my hands when I was about twenty-two, in a portentous Calder paperback. I read the first story and paused. He wrote to be translated, in a high, clear tone, with dizzy twists and cheerful abysses. I kept the next story the way as a child I kept halva in the cupboard, happy to know whenever I was ready I could whirl into the next fiction and genially lose my bearings, take another bite of halva, or not. That was the era of the next (door), the next, the very next, when I began to understand it was better, in general, not to understand, to have tried and pensively failed then given up altogether and become more cheerful.

Borges, Manguel tells us, was haunted by two nightmares: the labyrinth, the house with no doors and a monster in the middle, and the mirror, which one day would reflect back a face that was not his own or worse, no face at all. Near the end of his life, in Geneva, he asked Marguerite Yourcenar to find the apartment his family had once occupied when he was an adolescent and describe it to him, which she did. The only thing she omitted to tell him was that as soon as you entered the apartment a gigantic gilded mirror reflected the visitor from head to foot.

If you are blind the mirror does not reflect your face.

That you know of.

Ill in bed; time for LP Hartley. Four novels should see me through a bad cold, as they often have before, those robust paperbacks with the densely lettered covers, early modernity chez Faber and Faber, their spines now permanently slanted in the direction of my reading.

The Eustace and Hilda trilogy and The Go-Between, written in the 1940s/1950s, relate to an earlier era when people travel by landau and barouche, by train and bicycle, when men return from the Boer War with scarred faces, large houses have many servants and people spend three months at a time in Venice in order to be with others doing the same thing.

Since I've known Joseph Losey's film of The Go-Between I read the novel with images behind it; I open doors onto known rural vistas, walk back from church, watch the cricket match, slide down straw stacks, see Julie Christie lolling with parasol in a hammock, Alan Bates in his kitchen tending the cut knee of their overheated young postman, our narrator; I hear the voice of Edward Fox, draw the scar on his face, skirt with caution the poisonous atropa belladonna.

The engine of The Go-Between is embarrassment: a boy visiting an Edwardian country house,  not knowing what to say, what to wear, getting it right, getting it wrong. Wanting to please. To learn, but not too much at a time. Things were either rather wrong or very wrong, according to his mother, a widow in humbler circumstances. Then, according to Julie Christie's mother, you just had to charge in on the unthinkable scene and cause everyone to scatter, even die.

Do not make love in an outhouse guarded by a large specimen of atropa belladonna.

LP Hartley is a nostalgist; to read these books you'd think nostalgia construed the entire task of the writer. Sick people tend towards nostalgia, and there's plenty of sickness in his novels, plenty of cripples and bath chairs as well as cures and midnight spells. The eponymous Eustace is often faint, if not worse, and even his robust sister Hilda is literally paralysed by a disappointment in love.

Reading about Eustace in Venice makes me start paragraphs in my head that I have not the energy to set down, the drift so seductive, like Eustace not arriving at the church he intended to visit, or not from the direction he'd imagined.

When I first read the trilogy I related intensely to the narrator's state of being, his dreamy bloodlessness while all around him drives on, his passionate distance from all that befalls.

Back at Anchorstone, Eustace's thoughts began to busy themselves with the coming birthday party. He would have been going there, of course, only Lady Nelly had made a special point of his coming out to Venice in time for the Feast of the Redeemer. He couldn't do both; the dates, it seemed, clashed. Perhaps it was just as well; events never moved while you were watching them, and his own particular scrutiny, he sometimes felt, had a peculiarly arresting effect. He becalmed things. 

I relate both to the novel and to the person I was when I first read it: the faint one who is ill after a week in the shifting sands of London, and the other one I may or may not be ready to revert to.

Robert Walser's Schoolboy Diary at Gatwick Airport and then at 30,000 feet.
Or
How to restore yourself to yourself while travelling.
Or
Keep yourself safe from loud children and ryanair

When I raise my head and look out over the many schoolboy heads around me, I cannot help but laugh. It is so mysterious, so strange, so bizarre. It is like a sweetly humming fairy tale. To think that every one of those heads is full of diligent, frolicking, racing thoughts is mysterious enough. Writing class may be the most lovely, attractive time for just this reason.

Walser's gentle persistence does not transfer to my surroundings. It saves me from the muffins and the phone calls, the melting chocolate and the safety drill. It doesn't give me curiosity, only peace.

It's convenient that the schoolboy dies. Then the adult (Walser) can begin.

By the time we were over the Irish Sea the adult (JK) was in abeyance. A very gentle regression followed by a near nap.

Went to a film prompted by Melmoth the Wanderer, though if it hadn't said that on the tin I wouldn't have known. The film rang fewer bells than my memory of the book I last read 40 years ago and more, in its overwrought setting of the Mallarmé Baudelaire years of my life. The film was theirs, not mine. They were perplexed and saddened, it seemed to me, by the difficulties of wandering in our day and age, what with the overrun nature of the world and people, the film people included, needing to know, to document, to interpret, to deconstruct and comment fourteen times before they go to sleep. No wonder it's difficult to wander.

My copy of Melmoth the Wanderer has no markings at all. Evidently I read it and then left it to rest with Orlando and Poe and the Romantic Agony of Mario Praz, to rise to the surface with a diffuse, uncertain aura, just like a smell or a piece of music.

With a change in the weather and most of the leaves down from the big sycamore outside my window, in the aftermath of Central Asia and the soul tribe: Fragments by Heraclitus, translated by Brooks Haxton.

The soul is undiscovered,
though explored forever
to a depth beyond report.

I used to say to students: read René Daumal's Le Mont Analogue in the light of Heraclitus.

The waking have one world
in common. Sleepers
meanwhile turn aside, each
into a darkness of his own.

Read Proust in the light, in the darkness, of Heraclitus.

Whoever cannot seek
the unforeseen sees nothing,
for the known way
is an impasse.

Set Heraclitus as a gauge of whatever you read and see what that gives.

These translations of Heraclitus have lived for the last twelve years among the elite, heterogeneous books on my desk, beside Henri Michaux's Tent Posts and Journey to the Land of the Flies by Aldo Buzzi, to say nothing of the handbook on Cacti and Succulents I bought when I was about twelve, and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.

Of Heraclitus' writing we have only fragments, an attraction to anyone who wakes up each day feeling that something is missing. You can read them at speed and then go straight back and read again. Lectio divina. Vertical attention. Islands of words. I'm glad I don't know Greek. Though I do, or did, know Latin. Formative reading of Virgil, Catullus, then later Lucretius in English.

In our tired post-post society we're refreshed by ancient forms of language and thought: this much was said and no more.

Of all the words yet spoken,
none comes quite as far as wisdom,
which is the action of the mind
beyond all things that may be said.

Soul by Andrey Platonov
The Lost Heart of Asia by Colin Thubron

Conjure these, a novella and a travel book, on a damp and windy day in verdant Inniscarra and you know you've pleasantly, violently, achingly, lost your footing.

Andrey Platonov's creatures in Soviet Uzbekistan are beyond Beckett's; voiceless.

They sat on the ground and fell into thought, even though, given their advanced years, they had already had more than enough time to think everything through and arrive at truth.

The people Colin Thubron meets in the same place, sixty years later, post-Soviet, have something to say. When he asks a young girl about her future she replies that soon she'll be a young woman and then she'll be married and then she'll be an old woman. Then a corpse, she adds.

Unlike the soul nation in Andrey Platonov, they have not forgotten who they are, though some would prefer to. It was better when you were a Muslim and a member of your family, not Uzbek or Tajik or Kyrgyz or Kazakh, says one man. It was better when you didn't know anywhere other than where you were.

Many Uzbeks think England is next to America; and they're right. In Central Asia, nationality is a bend in the river, a mountain range, a horde on the steppes, a burrow in the sand. If you can trace your ancestry back to the Middle Horde across thousands of miles of arid steppe, what need of placehood, only inwardness and a mouthful of damp sand.

I once met a woman who wanted to be in the middle of the world. When she said it I thought of Central Asia, obscurely but definitely, as if learned during childhood, from folk tales or music: In the steppes of central Asia by Borodin, for example. The size of Asia gives its centre a ring of truth: the desert is like the sea and the mountains the sky, how could you not think you were in the middle of the world, the middle of your world, the one you've crossed and recrossed and thus own?

Alexander of Macedon, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, did. Then, when trade east/west transferred to the sea, sparse hordes criss-crossed the steppes and the mountains, picking fights and sucking sand, and new nations formed, like the Soul nation, out of wayfarers caught like tumbleweed in the scrub, Stalin thought it ripe for gigantesque conversion. He scooped up Central Asia, all of it, and set about collectivising (read: starving) the nomads and depleting the inland seas.

Wastelands go away East and South from the Aral Sea, whose former ports are now sixty miles from the nearest water. What's left condenses into clouds that fall as salt rain all around. Cotton crops no longer grow, nor any other. They're trading oil out of the lost heart of Asia these days, which makes 5% rich and leaves 95% poor. The country code for Uzbekistan is 998. Add one and it's a major emergency.

Colin Thubron's penultimate chapter begins: I was entering the fringes of a formidable solitude. Here's Beckett again. Here's Platonov. Puzzling echoes of Roger Deakin (Wildwood), whose Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are apple and walnut paradise. Colin Thubron sees a slightly warmer Siberia where discarded people, Trotsky among them, could be parked, and nuclear fission tested.

Andrey Platonov, who was born in Uzbekistan, finds the sublime when he returns. As we're inclined, all of us who return, towards the sublime. To get published at all, Platonov has to satisfy the Supreme Soviet; Chagataev, his main character, is sent back to his birthplace to bring socialism to his nation. The ridiculous aids the sublime.

I know this nation, said Chagataev. I was born in Sary-Kamysh. 

That's why you're being sent there, the secretary explained. What was the name of your nation – do you remember?

It wasn't called anything, said Chagataev, though it did give itself a little name.

What was this name?

Dzhan. It means soul, or dear life. The nation possessed nothing except the soul and dear life given to it by mothers, because it's mothers who give birth to the nation.

Reading Soul by Andrey Platonov at Limerick Junction waiting for the down train opposite a large stone building with unaccountable small holes at regular intervals up and down the front. The broken glass in the windows is triumphant, even, beside the dwellings of the Soul nation I am reading about – if they have dwellings, if they haven't left to wander. It is a light, sad feeling, sitting on the platform at a railway junction, in the middle of several choices, with the wind blowing from west to east, reading about people on the steppes of Central Asia in the 1930s, who chew on tumbleweed and have forgotten how to think.

The station men at Limerick Junction are plump and smoking, flicking dog-ends onto the tracks. There are older travellers, their wheeled luggage trilling along behind them, younger ones with rucksack and boots, undefeated; a Chinese father and son with their guides, phones and notebooks. Nowhere any of the merriment of despair that the Soul nation can raise as they invite death from the great and powerful who can bestow it. None of the lightness of being.

At Limerick Junction on a Monday morning in the middle of Ireland there's a fullness, a satisfaction even in the lateness of the up train, the cosy station men out of a 1960s Czech film, the important door of the station master, all announcements in triplicate in two languages. The train to Dublin is running thirty minutes late. Next train at platform one is the Cork train, the Cork train, the Cork train.

Reading Soul is like being at sea. Whatever you look at on land afterwards is excessive. Too many features, too many clothes, too many bags. People on the move in Modern Europe are even more substantial than when they're at home, packed into their train seats with their paper coffee cups and their apple Danish wrappers, their soccer fanatic newspaper pullouts. The calorie count of every item, including nought for tea, coffee and diet coke, is given on the train menu.

The Soul tribe, the Dzhan, move around the steppes Central Asia in euphoric desolation: desert, mountains, marsh and oasis. They are called soul because that's all they have. They are called nation not because they are many but because they are persistent, so far beyond sense that they are back inside it.

Scanning the shelves I stopped at Grace Paley. Enormous Changes At The Last Minute. Why? Yesterday I met a woman who said she was a housewife, a sink wife, she added, I'm married to that sink. She said it without bitterness, but verging on a little black humour or domestic abyss wryness. She had eight children, all grown, and three freezers. Her husband grew a great array of fruit and she processed it all as she had processed the children.

I could wish that woman a read of Grace Paley. If she's not locked in the fruit cage or on her way to mass.

Although in my adult life I have neither children nor obvious politics other than what rises from my garden, I prepared for Grace Paley in my mother's kitchen once or twice a week when I came home from school, attending the chat between women over a cup of tea. It could be acid but it was always lyrical; they flowed with their opinions. They only had till five o'clock or so.

Grace Paley's stories are in this zone. As a writer she travels light: like my mother and her friends, this is all she's got time for.

As for you, fellow independent thinker of the Western Bloc, if you have anything sensible to say, don't wait. Shout it out loud right this minute. In twenty years, give or take a spring, your grandchildren will be lying in sandboxes all over the world, their ears to the ground, listening for signals from long ago.

I'm alert to this sense of having your say. As fundamental to a writer as to Beethoven. Marguerite Duras had her say, but she's harsher, she's french, she travels along lacunae. Grace Paley is warmer, more optimistic. She has common sense and energy I recognize. She stops short but the warmth still flows.

A woman inside the steamy energy of middle age runs and runs. She finds the houses and streets where her childhood happened. She lives in them. She learns as though she was still a child what in the world is coming next.

There's a volume to be written on the reading you do out of nervousness, displacement, anxiety or inability to sleep; minor and major attempts to secure an anchor at times when reading is for some reason impossible, as when the weather has turned autumnal and your principal reading place in the attic is shaken by hammer blows from the lads re-roofing the house, singing their way through heavy showers, bless them.

Reading is not the word. Devouring the medium in which you immerse yourself. Searching through old New Yorkers for stories you haven't read, or have read but forgotten, racing to the finish as if this completion would transfer to the day, or the night, or the storm, or the roof. Reading on the sofa downstairs with the cat, hoping for a nap; in the middle of the night in the distracted, tricksy search for sleep; in the bath, a steamy, enclosed story of, as it often is in the New Yorker, marital distress or juvenile delirium; on the train, forswearing the company of strangers and the view out of the window for a tale, written up in Hortus, of tulip hunters in the 'Stans, anticipating their species, eating their mutton stew, for their cries of delight when tulipa whateveriensis heaves and flutters into view on a chilly Spring hillside in Turkmenistan.

This must be the last of the pond moments (I've thought this for a month), last of the sun at the start of the (school) year;  not the last of the roofers, who start appearing from 8 a.m., all eyes on the 60 feet by 18 times 2 of the roof (of my life) which they are re-slating. I go past with a box of eggs, a bucket of apples or an outsize package of paper (Munken Lynx rough, 150gsm).  One of them asked what the straw in the shed was for, so I explained about the horses down the road and how the straw came back as manure. He also asked about bees, elderberries and the sedum roof on the shed. As they are roofing I am watching a small bumble bee on a blue scabious flower and working my way towards writing about Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star.

From her name to her spiky vigour on the page, I am completely seduced every time I open the book. As I was at first by Marguerite Duras in her later more talky books. Duras came into literature from foreign lands (Indo-China); Lispector (may I call you Clarice?) from Ukraine to Brazil, via international diplomacy and jewishness. Savage women wresting words out of difficult lives.

The Hour of the Star is a short book, the endgame of a writing life, with enough narrative to float compassion for this creature/character called Macabéa from the northeast of Brazil, displaced & inadequate, outlandish & naive in Rio de Janeiro, her naiveté her only strength, her life and her death.

I have misgivings about narrative as I have misgivings about poetry, yet feast off both.

Read this: 'I am a typist and a virgin and I like coca-cola'. And sigh. (Small bang). The first time I read  The Hour of the Star, the bang/small bang moments, both ironic and childlike, made me catch my breath. As well as the hesitancy, the diffidence, the assertions: 'What troubles my existence is writing.' Existence is already what must be wrenched into being. Not just Macabéa. Me. You. The small bumble bee. The roof (of my life).

What is the truth about my Maca? It is enough to discover the truth that she no longer exists: the moment has passed. I ask myself: what is she? Reply: she is not.

I like writers who make me feel that what I am reading has brought them, and me, into existence, golem-like, relentless, scattering powers to the four winds.

And now – now it only remains for me to light a cigarette and go home. Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me? 

Don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.

Sartre said that if readers wanted to learn anything about his life they should read his novels and plays, not his autobiography. Stefan Zweig is elusive in all these genres. Or he's a species of selfless writer I haven't encountered before, whose work is a duty to humanity. Even a novel like Confusion, which appears to flow straight from a writer's best-kept secret to the page, may have little to do with his own experience, or even his wishful thinking. His autobiography The world of yesterday announces on page one, line one of the Foreword that he does not feel important enough to be the main character in a book (or he is a faux-modeste); we only learn he is married when he uses the first person plural pronoun. Instead he writes about the world he has lost, for which, with his second wife in their final exile in South America, he was prepared to kill himself.

In order to lose a world you have to have one in the first place. Zweig grew up in a privileged Jewish enclave in Vienna. His history is already a novel, he doesn't have to confess anything; he only has to turn a trick. He knew everyone, met everyone, emerged from a swaddle of literary-minded young men as the one most likely to succeed. I'm thrown by this kind of belonging; I can barely conceive of it; is this what allows Zweig, what compels him, to write outside himself?

I may never have begun reading Zweig at all if it hadn't been for the copy of Beware of pity at the end of my parents' bookshelves, which I didn't read then, in its probably charmless 1930s translation, and would perhaps never have read without the Pushkin Press translations of the last 15 years. I've re-read Confusion, Casanova, The Governess and other stories, read Beware of pity and The world of yesterday. And Zweig has become fictional. He has joined his characters. In his portraits he looks like Schubert then Proust, more canny than either of these. Now that I know him, or rather, hardly know him, I'm not sure I like him, not even his worthy stance on war. I would prefer him to have been a historian or a politician.

Tove Jansson's Summer Book in an Indian summer is a treat indeed. Her island in the Gulf of Finland comes through in tiny luxuriance on this third reading; every stone, every path and plant, the warm and prickly relationship between the grandmother and the granddaughter, the questions they ask each other, the many ways they avoid replying. I first read it when I was clearing out my father's house after his death, staying up the road so as not to have to try to sleep at the scene of such exhaustive anguish. The second time, at home, I read it for itself, for the grandmother and granddaughter and their playfulness, their questions, not to avoid my father or to quell him. This third time I read free and clear for all of us, daughters and grandmothers, aunts and mothers, islanders, who occupy a scrupulous territory and spend time figuring how to say so.

After a Cork Italian dinner (ravioli quite good; salad vinegar best used for cleaning windows), I dreamed we were going home from the beach carrying a leather-bound book. Sections of the book detached in the wind and clusters of pages bundled out across flatlands behind the dunes. I gave chase, ending up in a café with huts nearby, one of which was occupied by a young woman. I needed to pee; there was a queue; when I finally got in, after the pleasure/pain of a long deferred pee, I saw through the slightly open window my father smoking a joint. As I left, shielding my face, I heard my father say, That looks like Judy. I went into my new friend's hut, locked the door and crouched down on the floor. It's my father I said, I just saw my father, that's why I locked the door. Wait till I tell you about mine, she said. After her tale I stood up and there outside the window my father stared in at me with a face neither his when younger nor his at all, so blank you couldn't say was this fury, contempt or terminal incomprehension.

I needed to read the apple and walnut chapters of Roger Deakin's Wildwood after that, sitting in the evening sun, leaning up against a pine tree. I needed to be in the fruitful, honeyed centre of the world, that is, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, bringing in the harvest, standing under ancient trees, or reading about Roger Deakin doing so, then going to find an apple in Garravaghstan, where I live.

Glenmore, a few miles outside Cobh

This is where I began my Irish sojourn forty years ago today-ish in the large recessive house just behind the beach, which, as a look through the front door told me when no one answered the bell, entirely resembles my memory of it. My instincts in choosing it, or rather a wing of it, were infallible. On the brink of starting my own, I needed to know a house, someone else's house, that had settled into itself and would stay there: a muted runner down the hall, brass signs on the doors announcing Drawing Room, Dining Room, a table lamp lit by the phone.

Was the oil refinery there in 1974, perhaps smaller, is that what I saw when I went down to the beach – a generous word for a short stretch of rock, grit and seaweed – overwrought with the move I'd made? For the first few weeks, lying on the beach, sitting on the grass that led down there, I was sure I'd left something behind, something crucial. Brave quiet days, Quaker, like the family who lived there, Bill, Daisy and their children, plus Aunt May who collected carragheen moss on the beach, and Aunt Lilian who regularly forgot her dinner on the stove. There was a foghorn, now silenced, I think.

I packed a sandwich, a bottle of redcurrant cordial, and I'd need a book, perhaps. Not the French Romantic poets whom forty years ago I was unwillingly rereading in order to teach them (not my choice). What else did I read? Four Quartets? Too portentous. 'Garlic and sapphires in the mud.' 'We are here to pray where prayer has been valid.' Passionate but too discordant for a harbour beach in September in 2014, even during an Indian summer. Between the acts, my copy dated forty years ago.  That will be atmospheric reading candy. I must have bought it before I came here, in a rush of defensive purchasing including a dark green sou'wester and Tommy, A rock opera.Virginia Woolf could have stayed here. No oil refineries then. No uncertain smells. No discarded beer cans or poisoned small fry among the seaweed. She would have retreated to the beach and amassed yellow shells and blue glass, as I did. She might not have picked watercress from the stream that flows into the beach, into the sea, a little way east of here.

I've left Antal Szerb and his mid-European yearning and, in uncanny concert with Smilla's sense of snow, I've moved on to The ice palace by Tarjei Vesaas. Reading the wrong book for the place you're in is one of the great feats of the human mind. I sit and toast on the beach and read about the sound of ice groaning as it thickens as it deepens down into the water in late autumn, Norway. Here in Italy large stones shift under good-sized waves. A sort of stormy chuckling. A rhythm at any rate, more regular than the chambers of the ice palace, a Mediterranean clarity, ancient ordinariness. People have been sitting on this beach since –

I had forgotten how sad The Ice Palace is; almost unbearable. So much left unsaid: the brief intimacy of two 11 year-old girls, the winter in which one girl comes to terms with the disappearance of the other. So unlikely for a writer in his sixties to have this insight, to be able to let it through the economy of his language, through the cold of a Norwegian winter in an isolated community that seems to have nothing to do with the world most of us live in; a plain style in a bare rhythm for our crowded times.

On our Italian beach, in the lull after lunch, among one of the quieter crowds of the western world, a woman sings softly to her small daughter.

Reading on the beach, Bonassola

Morning
The father of the very noisy little boy is reading comic strips. The young man in the soft, hairy mode of Jesus that has been current for the past half-century, is reading, if that's the right word, puzzles on his tablet. The woman who arrived just after us to this tiny bay at the morning end of the beach, and seemed peeved that we were there at all and even taking her chosen spot, is reading The Book Thief (in Italian). I'm on the last few chapters of Journey by Moonlight, reading slower and slower, not wanting to get to the end.

Afternoon
Walk round the headland to the small private beach of La Francesca. Sea too rough for swimming. Water breaking noisily around large rocks, leaving a small quiet area in which to paddle. We settle in this new place. A blonde woman of forty something stands in the water petting a much younger black woman with a red handkerchief tied round her leg. Later she, the blonde one, is reading one of those Khaled Hosseini novels (in Italian). P walks out beyond the small breakwater that protects the bay, and reports a naked man standing on a promontory holding a book out in front of him, he can't see what. Kierkegaard I expect, if not Nietzsche. When I go to look I see only an upturned copy of a Dan Brown novel (in Italian) left on a rock. Meanwhile, in the shallow water, a young woman stands for some time reading a book whose title I struggle to see, lying down lower so as to be beneath the level of the front cover. She moves occasionally, facing the rock, the beach, into the sun, away from the sun. I have not seen this kind of reading since the man on the bike in my childhood who always had a book perched on top of his bike basket. The roads were quiet then. The reader in the water turns my way and finally I see the cover of her book: Smilla's sense of snow (in Italian). Sense of snow, sense of tideless sea crashing against a large volcanic rock (calme bloc d'ici-bas chu d'un désastre obscur). Before we leave I'll tell her, if I can, how much I liked watching her read.

Evening
No one is reading. Except menus.
The reader in the water was a dancer called Gaia, studying dance theatre. She was working for the summer at La Francesca and Smilla's sense of snow was a set book. The other book I brought with me is The Ice Palace. I was doubtful as I chose it, but now, after Journey by moonlight and Smilla's sense of the tideless sea, it seems entirely appropriate.

Bonassola, Liguria.

We first came here 23 years ago. We rented a piccolo appartamento in the main square for a week in  early October. The beach was warm and quiet. I read Borges' Seven Nights and Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. This time, our fourth or fifth visit, on a very busy but eminently watchable beach, it's my third or fourth reading of Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb.

This morning, sitting on a bench in the square eating a peach – was it just before or just after or during the first bite? – I had a rush, almost tearful, of nostalgia. Does nostalgia always arrive before its content or cause, in this case, perhaps, the adventure of the first time we were here, near the start of our three-month journey down Italy and back?

Nostalgia and yearning are meat and drink in Journey by Moonlight, as well as the wry weakness that allows them in the first place. As I read I also yearn for the nostalgia of the narrator's exalted youth with Éva and Tamás (whose nearly parentless existence is reminiscent of Les Enfants Terribles) up in the Buda hills, with its sense of permanent removal from the currency of everyday life. Borrowed nostalgia is a complicated, and, some might say, indulgent emotion.

Early on in the novel, on his honeymoon in Venice, Mihály tells his new wife about his friendship with Éva and Tamás and  two other friends, all of whom, including Tamás who killed himself, haunt the novel's peregrinations in Italy and Paris. Marriage, after this, is little more than a taunt from the facts of bourgeois life and the future he avoids. Telling your past does not relieve nostalgia; if anything it intensifies with the exposure to alien air.

As they journey through Tuscany Mihály asks: 'Tell me, why do I feel as if I spent part of my youth among these hilltop towns?' 'You're daft', says his new wife. 'She had long known that she did not understand him, because Mihály had secrets even from himself, and he did not understand her since it never occurred to him that people other than himself had an inner life in which he might take an interest.'

Journey by Moonlight – none of this could be told in the light of day – echoes the great upheaval of Europe, and particularly Jewish Europe, in the 1930s; the sense that life is elsewhere or never to be experienced again; a hungry dependence on language: 'just to say the name Siena gives me the feeling that I might stumble across something there that would make everything all right'; expectation of release: 'he was filled with the happy feeling that he did not have to be where the important things happened'. Though he did, both he the narrator and he the writer. 'The facts were stronger than he was', he says on the last page of the novel, heading back to Budapest and work in his father's firm.

Antal Szerb died in a labour camp in 1944 at the age of 43.

At eight a.m. in a small carpark by a busy road, people are going to work, carrying takeout coffee, adjusting headphones and other transitional objects. In their warrior boots and haircuts, they have no honour to strip, no petticoats to rustle; they aren’t intent on becoming employee of the month; there’s a gruffness about their gait; work is penury, if that, especially in the summer. I’m waiting in the car, reading Chapter 6 of Stefan Zweig’s Casanova, my last thing at night book of the moment. So early in the morning, this is practically joined-up reading.

Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity was at the end of the bookshelves in my parents’ house; as a child I dusted the shelves for modest payment, annually, checking each book as I went. The black cloth binding, the slow foreign surname at the end of the alphabet, the complicated title, made Zweig a severe choice I wasn’t yet ready for.

 In 1998, Pushkin Press published a new translation of Casanova, the first volume of a Zweig series. Translation is the aerodynamics of literature, propelling the reader not only from German to English, in this case, also from the 21st to the 18th century, via the 1920s and 30s, the Austria of Zweig’s origin, the Italy of his subject, and the French of his subject’s memoirs; accommodating Heath Ledger as Casanova in his beguiling, effortless youth, Peter O’Toole as the ageing Casanova, who, out of habit though with little outcome other than pathos, engages the attention of the maid as he writes his memoirs; as well as, for this reader, Moonlight Cruise, spoils of a CND jumble sale of my youth, about the man who hated women and the woman who hated men, en passant par the man who loved women.

 Chapter six of Casanova is Homo Eroticus, a comparison of Casanova and Don Juan, the bene and the malefactor, the lover and the hater of women whose lifeworks strangely resemble each other. Casanova’s memoirs are a catalogue of conquest; he stands better over the myth he generated than his amorous exploits, which, like anything else relentlessly pursued, becomes tedious and curiously unemotional. These are operas of the flesh, no more, without moral undertow or spiritual aspiration. 

Don Juan on the other hand is all tortured aspiration and warped morality. His catalogue of conquest represents the growing stock of honour he has stolen and tragedies wreaked upon women who will hate him forever.

  Don Giovanni is all I know of Don Juan. In Mozart’s music can you hear the honour and the savagery? In the evening I listen again. I don’t hear Don Juan I hear Mozart acting and Mozart from within, the savagery converted into beauty: the menace of a fugue, as we move into the end of Act 1, the grievance of Donna Elvira halfway through Act 2: he stripped me of my honour, he betrayed me, woe and vengeance.

 For many years I wanted literature to be contentless (which is easier if it’s in a language not native to you), not looking through the glass of art but at it. I have also been chastised for listening to music in the same way. Passion and how it translates into music, into beauty; that’s what I hear. A convolute way of coming to the humanity of music perhaps, but, once established, indissoluble.

Since I was twenty there have been books I read in short bursts, keeping them by me for months, dipping into a few lines to check the internal weather, unable to read more: plotless, intimate writing that plumbs depths rather than covers ground. Less like reading and more like diving into language then stopping short, having your moment and eating it in the stillness of complicity.

The heart of reading is atavistic and possessive: out of a pan of undifferentiated yearning come these words you could have written yourself. Could have but shouldn’t have needed to. Shouldn’t but did.

We read with all the reading we’ve ever done. We write through all the reading we’ve ever done. Idra Novey writes through Clarice Lispector (Sylph Editions Cahier 23). Elfriede Jelinek (Sylph Editions Cahier 18) writes through Robert Walser. Anne Carson (Sylph Editions Cahier 21) writes through Joan of Arc, Francis Bacon, Hölderlin, Paul Celan.

Clarice Lispector’s Cronicas appeared in a Brazilian newspaper in the early seventies. Where’s a newspaper now that would publish these? Actually, as I learned at the airport waiting for a delayed flight, journalists rant through jocular teeth, making the shift for their readers to the World Cup on TV, seamless.

Cronicas are short pieces arising out of the thoughts or observations of a small daily life, the sudden revelations you might have experienced before but which strike with the force of upheaval when you experience them again. Just as The Hour of the Star, her last novel, leaves narrative gasping in the gutter, the Cronicas are fully estranged from journalism.

Clarice: The Visitor by Idra Novey
The writer as visitor to the reader’s life, with all the wiles and the wherewithal to dismay and invigorate. What more can a book do? Sting and move on. Leave a residue of sisterhood, call it that, and suspense. Such a relief that you can know and not know at the same time, the condition of the other.

Her Not All Her by Elfriede Jelinek
Robert Walser via the sensibility of Elfriede Jelinek – and the reader makes three – featherweight upheavals one after another. Crushing modesty and persistence. Constant unseating for the reader. Who is shaping whom and can we be further reduced on the page?

Nay Rather by Anne Carson
The voices of Joan of Arc had no stories and she did not know what language they spoke. What do your voices sound like? asked her inquisitors. Ask me next Saturday, she replied. Are they one or many? they asked. The light comes in the name of the voice, she said.

While staying up at night the Cycladic people invented the frying pan, says Anne Carson through the Greek poet Ibykos.

‘That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.‘ The Waves p. 74

When I first read The Waves in 1968 I marked sentences that leapt at me, and on every subsequent reading I meet the younger self who chose this sentence over that, who was moved by this coincidence of VW’s reach for reality, and her own.

There are sentences that arrest, perplex and then release you a happier camper than you were before, fulfilled and relieved.

Robert Musil: ‘Two weeks later Bonadea had already been his mistress for a fortnight’. Beckett: ‘You have to be there better than that, Clov, if you want them to let you go, in the end’.

The first sentence I read, aged three or so, was ‘Busy Timmy puts on his outdoor shoes’. Busy Timmy was there and not there, in the words as in the blue romper suit in the picture. When I moved to Ireland I had to say how many books I was importing, how many records. 'If you had a television you wouldn’t need any of that', said the man who came to fix the cooker. I was discomfited and joyful at the same time.

There are few greater intimacies than reading someone else’s diary in the middle of the night: a few pages of Virginia Woolf’s journey around Ireland in 1934, her sense of The Waves as it came into being, her thoughts on her thoughts, who came to tea that day; I sleep well after that.

Ireland in 1934. As she writes from The Lismore Hotel, the Eccles in Glengariff, the Glenbeigh Hotel, the Dunraven Arms in Adare, VW struggles with Ireland, the friendliness and the calculation. She doesn’t really know what she thinks until she’s back in Sussex, when she says this is one of the most interesting trips they, she and Leonard, have made.

I’ve been reading Orlando in the bath. Where you read is as important as what. If the reading gets too fragmented you can always transfer to wet afternoons up in your room. Land with Orlando in the twentieth century. Hard to detach him/her from Tilda Swinton in Sally Potter’s film once you’ve seen it.

Also taking gobs at Lydia Davis, Can’t and Won’t. Her brevity and narkiness make me read in like fashion. I put it down saying that’s enough of that, wanting something more accepting, or transporting.

Start The Waves again. To submerge, to lean on those names: Bernard, Jinny, and the rest. Be there on a summer’s afternoon, near blackcurrant bushes and beyond. Absorb the quality of exchange. Separate and together. The tussle of words. Onwardness of experience.

Lydia Davis has no such gentleness. She’s wry, and dry, and undercuts, rather than props up her reality. She is maybe the person Neville in The Waves needed, ‘someone whose mind falls like a chopper on a block; the whom the pitch of absurdity is sublime, and a shoestring adorable’. The Waves p.43

I reread Virginia Woolf every few years to reassure myself that life is this diffuse yet precise, a series of lulls and shocks underscored by pain, healed by beauty; for someone other than me. At least half my reading is rereading; I like the density of it, the thickness of the fabric.

This time I began with ‘Sketch of the Past’ (in Moments of Being, Panther Books, 1978). Some pages I read again and again, especially the ones about her obsession with her dead mother. After she wrote To the Lighthouse the obsession disappeared. ‘She obsessed me… until I was forty-four. I could hear her voice, see her, imagine what she would do or say as I went about my day’s doings.’ Then she ceased to see her mother, ceased to hear her voice. ‘It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole’, she wrote.

I reread To the Lighthouse with a new sense of preparedness, with VW’s childhood and youth in my mind. When the mother is there on the front step with her son, knitting stockings for the son of the lighthouse keeper, I too am anchored and relieved.

‘Certainly there she was, in the very centre of that great Cathedral space which was childhood; there she was from the very first.’ In the ghostly third section Mrs Ramsay dies again and again. Thus does VW disburden herself of the feeling of her mother; as two years later she disburdened herself, in the River Ouse, with stones in her pockets, of the feeling of herself.