There are books so right they're wrong, books that belong to another era of your (reading) life, books that you read at the wrong moment, that do not fit your current sensibility, whose timbre you can register only briefly in the middle of the night, when past selves come out to play.

The Boat in the Evening, the last work of Tarjei Vesaas, is such a book. I have been reading it on and off for several weeks, unwilling to give in to it, not just because it's bare and Norwegian, austere, minimal and I bought it in what passes for summer here, this year; also because its doubts and raptures recall my adolescence. Poetic scenes with cinematic beauty, says the blurb on the back. Intense, solitary, like my adolescence. And cold.

I liked the chapter about his mother going out in a snowstorm to make music with friends. And the one on going out to watch the dance of the cranes, freezing and still, waiting and then rewarded. His absorption in the place he knows, where he's lived all his life, I like all that, I love it.

If only one could share their music and shrieking, shriek with the shrieking birds, about what one wishes to know!

The difference between this and Tess (of the d'Urbevilles) receiving the cold potato fields of Wessex into her tired brain, is the difference between misery and rapture.

They are not birds, they are ourselves when we have passed between the millstones, crossed the thorny wastes, gone through the fire, undertaken wondrous journeys and given away our heart to things unworthy of it—with the resulting humiliation unto death.
Then it happens.
Then we must dance like this. Then we clothe ourselves in the proud guise of the crane...

I came back to ee cummings by a circuitous route. His poems give a kick to a grey and turbulent afternoon. Take them like a tonic, as with Gertrude Stein. Wake up, go back to the day with a different head on you.

ee cummings was at Harvard at the same time as Joe Gould, later, in the nineteen thirties, forties and fifties, the Greenwich Village bum known as Professor Seagull (because he did seagull imitations) who was writing, he said, the oral history of his times. He was immortalized, as they say, by Joseph Mitchell, who maybe impersonated or invented or wanted to be Joseph Gould.

Last night I read an article in The New Yorker about Joe Gould and Joseph Mitchell: did Joe Gould really write the 9 million words of oral history he claimed? Did Joseph Mitchell really want to get to the bottom of it? Jill Lepore investigates, via ee cummings and Ezra Pound, among others.

I read the article inside the insomniac hour between four and five, and by the end I was woven in with the two Josephs, the facts of it and the fiction, the onlookers, the benefactors, malefactors, psychiatrists, poets, artists and reporters.

ee cummings, against the odds, became famous. Joe Gould did not. No one wants to take on the possibility that Joe Gould's 9 or 11 million words in their dusty copybooks exist somewhere, on a chicken farm (where he said many of the books were stored, though it turns out the chicken farm was a psychiatric hospital). If enough people know that an oral history of his times may have existed it will start to exist.

After reading Jill Lepore and today the poems of ee cummings, it exists a little more.

One ee cummings edition I found on my shelves, 50 poems published in 1940, had an obituary tucked inside from the Herald Tribune of September 9, 1962, written by Malcolm Cowley, another Harvard Man. The brown newspaper cutting smells of vanilla. On page 13, where the review has lodged these 75 years, there is a ghostly imprint of the folded paper insert. The brown fades into page 12 and then disappears.

(will you teach a
wretch to live
straighter than a needle)

I've rarely read a book as fast as I read Fletch by Gregory Mcdonald. The Avon paperback with red-edged pages and cover text out of register, invited speed and derision; the short sentences and perpetual dialogue propelled a version of plot-driven impatience I'd forgotten about.

I'd seen the film the night before and was curious to see if it was as funny on the page or if it was born to be plundered. I found myself looking only for differences in the plot, locations, characters. Why is the name Underwood changed to Underhill in the film? or Nevada to Utah? Adultery to bigamy?

I must have bought it in the seventies or eighties during a trip to New York. My taste was more catholic then, and I was trying to understand America. Even cowgirls get the blues, for example, illuminated a road trip across America in 1980/1. Teach Yourself Irish and the autobiography of Sean O'Casey, Volume I, illuminated my early years in Ireland.

Fletch is less funny on the page than in the character played by Chevy Chase. Such is the wraparound nature of film, and the open nature of reading.

I read Fletch that day because I felt disinclined for most else. Dan and Alessandro were up in the field trampling dock around the new trees; I didn't feel like working on poems while they were doing that. They were doing the work and I felt tired. So I read Fletch and listened to Fidelio (talk about crossed lines) and I read it fast.

I have always shied away from Primo Levi, whether for the chemistry that informed his profession (running a paint factory) or for the chemistry that informed his and my origins (jewish). I read a selection of his stories and found the language annoyingly subservient to the plot (I can get very impatient with plot, especially on a hot day), then began The Periodic Table, the Penguin edition festooned with praise from other jewish writers like Roth and Bellow, neither of whom attract me. I have enjoyed Oliver Sacks on the subject of his youth and chemistry, so why not this?

The Urstoff of Primo Levi is jewish, which I prefer with a small j, as with french, english, irish and arab. This is how far from Primo Levi I am. My father would have been closer. He liked Primo Levi. In fact he seized Primo Levi, as Saul Bellow seized the day and Philip Roth assumed a supremacy I find intolerable. If these characteristics are also mine I'd rather not know.

That is why I have always shied away from Primo Levi.

A woman on the Ryanair flight back from France was reading Chat magazine: dense cover, lots of red and yellow, dense chat pages featuring text as onslaught and pictures as dough, interspersed with puzzles. I remembered her as I was reading Simone Weil up at the pond today. I don't know if it's hilarious or normal, the encounter of Chat and an essay on the abolition of all political parties. Ryanair is on the side of Chat, that's for sure.

I brushed by Simone Weil a long time ago, when I was inherently allergic to anything that flew in the face of common sense. A crowd of siskins rising from a hayfield, yes. Any kind of god, no. It wasn't the difficulty of her writing. I'm good at reading books I don't understand. I can find a phrase here, a sentence there, an idea, a chord touched. More like how we choose to spend our thinking time.

An idea that turns the norm around is attractive. Political parties haven't taken up much of my energy. Truth, on the other hand, has. Honesty. Integrity. Always wrestling with something like that. So far as political parties, or party politics, are concerned, I have not been drawn. Even green politics, even the Monster Raving Loony Party.

I would like a woman whose life could be described as a life of deliberate foolishness, as Czeslaw Milosz said, I would like the truth she espoused, she lived and died for, Joan of Arc with language and sight, I would like her refusal to join or seek adherents. All this is music to my alien ears. I might be afraid of her, but it is a fellow-feeling.

I dreamed my diary was stolen from a blue bucket in which it lived, that I was ejected from a play directed by a friend, and lastly that, when I tried to take a shower to wash these woes away, as fast as I took off my clothes, the more they stuck to me, more and more of them, tighter and tighter. The sense of desolation lasted all day, even as we sat in the afternoon sun by the river Dordogne, with a few locals also sitting, swimming, fishing, watching willow fluff float downstream like sleeping flies. Travel all this way and there's always a moment by a river, quiet and calm, where you might be reading William Saroyan, even reading a section out loud, about wanting to be alive and not having any interruptions. I have relished William Saroyan many times, for his onward émigré voice and the way the history of humanity is there entire by the end of each story, and that's where it's been going all the time.

This is what I read out, from the story 'The little dog laughed to see such sport':

It is a private concern of mine. It is an altogether selfish concern of mine. I want to live while I am alive, that is all. I want at least to try. We have not yet been able to find out if it is possible for us really to live during all the seasons, all the changes of climate, all the stages of growth, each with its own fierce and magnificent problems, but we have the right to want to try. We don't really care if it kills us, just so we are allowed to try and are not interrupted by some irritating idiocy such as war which comes about through the same despair in duller men finding a different outlet. We want to go about it quietly, privately, without cannon booming, without oratory, without transportation, aviation, war tactics, abnormal pain, abnormal heroism, abnormal greatness. We want to go about it in some small part of the world we know, in which we have lived, and we want every part of this small landscape to be real to us, to become a part of us, and we want every God damn tree in the place, every patch of empty earth, every plant with leaves, every stream, every moment of sky, every hour of light in the world, every ounce of pressure of air, every mouthful of food and water and wine, to mean something to us, to be a part of our seeking be alive immortally. We want to have the time it takes and we don't want any interruptions.

It's great isn't it, said M to her friend R, it's so comfortable to slip back into all that with someone else, the guilt and all that awful stuff we love to hate. M looked at me. You weren't educated by the nuns were you, she said. No, I said, and I don't know what it is to slip back into all that, all anything, with someone else. I can't think who would give me that feeling, let alone a group, to say nothing of a tribe. I can't even understand the concept of that, said M, and she looked at me to see if she could find a useful concept somewhere on my face. If I slip into anything, I said, it's not with anyone, it's with books and music. That's what I need to slip into often. And it's not awful stuff I love to hate, it's wonderful stuff I love to love. We looked at each other briefly, pleased with having sorted out a warm, mutual, incomprehension.

Now and then I buy a book on the strength of a review, often in The New Yorker. I enjoyed reading about Nell Zink, I liked the sound of her publisher called Dorothy. A review is a mild and orderly affair. Turning the pages of a book is bumpier, more savage.

You have to read The Wallcreeper fast, the way it was written, in about three weeks, we're not surprised to learn. The language is emotionless, a bit chilly and clipped, maybe defensive, often sardonic, funny in a diggy way, as if the world deserves all the stink it gets. Going from Henry James to this is asking for trouble. One all suggestion and the other nekked as the day we die.

One phrase from the review that stayed with me involved Nell Zink's life-raft being hailed by the container ship Franzen. I've read Franzen on birds but not Franzen. I liked Nell Zink better on the life-raft. There are so many writers on their life-rafts, writing diaries, studying birds, breaking riverbanks, scooting after fresh sex between one shore and another.

The eponymous wallcreeper has been lacerated by a hawk by page 55. What are we to think? Nonchalance is a great leveller. Or is it fever? When you write this fast you have plenty of hours in the day to count birds, learn birdcalls, flood old riparian woodland and covet your neighbouring eco activist. The eco actions themselves are about as much fun as a routine burglary, hardly a heist; little excitement builds around the next round of infidelity. At the end she surmises about the movie version.

I understand her attitude; maybe I don't like understanding her. I'm disconcerted by being able to understand her. Not everyone is asking for empathy. Not everyone has received it.

The fireside opening, travellers gathered, an intimate narrator with a tale of an English country house, a mysterious, absent owner, a new governess, an old housekeeper, two ghosts, two angelic children, several unexplained deaths by 10pm as I like to say of italian tv: you can revel in the tropes as in creamy summer seas. At least for a while.

The Turn of the Screw by was Henry James' most popular book and his shortest, which is why, snob that I was, I thought when I first read it that it must be an aberration, an exercise in 'general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain'. The children's beauty, the English country house, the English country garden, all are flawed like the golden bowl, not a hairline crack, more of a gash, or many spectral gashes half-revealed. There is more atmosphere than plot, more anguish than causes.

No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it the more I see in it, and the more I see in it the more I fear. I don't know what I don't see—what I don't fear!

Thus the governess. And one of her charges, the boy eventually admits that he was thrown out of school because he said things to a few people, the ones he liked.

Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent what then on earth was I?

The horror and the infamy that play about these two sunlit children and the two ghosts (of the previous governess and a valet) in whose power they seem to be held, anticipates the murky darkness of Freud, (The Turn of the Screw was first published in 1898), to say nothing of the lurid and graphic accounts of abuse and false memory to which we are now inured. We can't read it as a ghost story any more.

Not that Henry James knew what he was suggesting. Not exactly knew. (See Cynthia Ozick, What Henry James Knew). He is temperamentally and artistically inclined to leave things open, every motive uncertain, every outcome a maze of suggestion and unresolve. I used to love all that, and still do, when I want to be kind to a former self who grappled endlessly, obtusely with what could and couldn't be said.

My diary from May 1968 in Paris is a tremulous and speedy read, as if I don't recognize this person or recognize her too well and want to pass over as fast as possible, seizing a word here, an image there, a faintness of spirit, a sudden delirium. May 1968 is such a set piece. Revolution within and without. Can I bear it? The monkish handwriting in black ink with medium oblique nib, the curlicues and grace notes, the evasiveness, the embarrassment, the incomprehension. Do I still speak the language?

I read in The New Yorker about Nell Zink translating a friend's novel from Hebrew, a language she barely understood, and in the process writing a book that in no way resembled the original. The friend liked it so much he translated it back into Hebrew.

A reading, and another, and another, of a diary over many years is already a translation. A culinary reduction. Old words are altered by a new gaze; the original starts to break up; a phrase here and there has cracked clean in two.

Some of the things I felt unable to say in 1968 I was in fact saying; the sheer relief of writing obscured nearly everything, especially what I did with my days and what was going on around me. Words, as I wrote at 3 a.m. on Saturday the 23rd of March 1968, took away my voice.

I had to go teaching french literature in Ireland to get my voice back.

Today I Wrote Nothing, The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, was where I was going before I got ill. I like the fixed stare he has, the dangerous childish eyes, tight white collar, faintly prognathous thrust to the jaw. Something harrowing about his look, especially next to the red on the cover of this edition. No surprise that he died of starvation in a Russian prison in 1942.

It is a relief that writing like his is out there. Thunderbolts in the shape of pancakes. Tiny stories that defy you to find a meaning, and then punish you by lethargy if you do.

Enough.

'Tumbling Old Women' is one story I keep going back to.

Because of her excessive curiosity, one old woman tumbled out of her window, fell and shattered to pieces. 

Is how it begins.

When the sixth old woman tumbled out of her window, I got sick of watching them and walked over the Maltsev Market where, they say, a blind man had been given a knit shawl.

Is how it ends.

Enough.

By then, numbed and pleased, you're beyond the tumbling old women and with the blind man, then without him either. The non sequitur, the strangeness, the lack of resolution, leave you where a long strand of avant-garde art leaves you: a little emptier and freshly composed. Meaninglessness has a kind of peace.

Enough.

Hard not to read into Daniil Kharms' intense and vehement gaze the physical vastitudes of Russia, the several climates, the uneasy look west and east, revolution, destitution, fairy tales gone wrong. Beyond the lands of Thrice Nine in the empire of Thrice Ten there lies not eternal life but the sane madness, or mad sanity, of Daniil Kharms.

I read Kharms to make my reality more visible, especially the parts that make me angry, like the destruction of landscape (I nearly wrote language), of habitat, creatures scurrying every which way, predators hovering. Writers who do this should have their own shelf.

Inside the parenthesis of a streaming cold, I read Loving by Henry Green, all of it in one day, between naps. It's a downstairs tale in a big house in Ireland during World War Two, though you could say it's a tale only in its first and last lines: 'Once upon a day an old butler called Eldon lay dying in his room', and, 'Over in England they were married and lived happily ever after'. What goes on in between is far more odd and poetic. Although narratives thread together – a lost sapphire ring, a dead peacock, a bit of fiddling of the books – downstairs life proceeds in the way of a confined society: formless when you're inside it, jumpy on the page. Aristocratic, or at least mandarin, economy of diction meets backstairs vernacular in a looping, wonky dance, everything truncated, as if abandoned in a rush: quick sparkles in the chandeliers, a waste of giggling behind housemaids' eyes, stolen peacock eggs preserved in waterglass. Henry Green (originally Yorke) was an aristocrat (his wife, the Hon. Adelaide Biddulph, was known as Dig, which proves that she had to prove nothing to anyone) and a businessman (a factory inherited from his father) for whom people he met on the factory floor and as a soldier in the war offered the bottomless fascination of the Other as well as the key to the ordinary impulses of the Self.

I am an eclectic reader but science fiction is a step too far sideways, even though I have in the attic my brother's collection of science fiction books and magazines and for a period in my twenties I did read them, alongside Gödel Escher Bach and a lot of maths and philosophy I couldn't understand but which got me going in ways I didn't understand either. Who was I, poking around in other worlds achieved by knowledge not language? I was in danger of lift-off myself, with a head full of Mallarmé, Berlioz and the like.

I did like Blade Runner though, Harrison Ford in love with a replicant and endless rain in Chinatown, Darryl Hannah on the roof, Rutger Hauer biting heads off whippets. And in the nineteen eighties Philip K Dick was re-issued in paperback, including the non-science fiction novels. I bought Confessions of a Crap Artist.

It's a brother story, the eponymous crap artist is a brother who has a collection of rocks and electronics and a head full of unnatural ideas, such as regarding lamp posts as authority figures and believing his geometry teacher to be a rooster in a suit. He lost his job as a tyre re-groover because he stole a can of chocolate-covered ants from a supermarket.

When in exasperation – and fear– I had realised that his brain simply had a warp to it, that in distinguishing fact from fiction he chose fiction, and between good sense and foolishness he preferred foolishness. He could tell the difference – but he preferred the rubbish. 

This is the sister speaking.
This is the brother, the author.

I used to believe the universe was basically hostile. And that I was misplaced in it, I was different from it… I had a lot of fears that the universe would discover just how different I was from it… and its reaction would be normal: it would get me.  I didn't feel that it was malevolent, just perceptive. And there's nothing worse than a perceptive universe if there's something weird about you.

His clean, disconcerted paranoia slices through crass Californian human life like a kid on a bike in a mud patch. Information is the only escape, half an explanation of the weirdness and the effort, as well as an obscure warning: if all this is the case, then what?

Sunlight has weight. Every year the earth weighs tens thousand pounds more, because of the sunlight that reaches it from the sun. That fact has never left my mind, and the day I calculated that since I first learned the fact, in 1940, almost one million nine hundred thousand pounds of sunlight have fallen on the earth.

My preferred forms of weirdness are more claustrophobic (Kafka, Kharms, and other writers whose names begin with K), more abrupt and organic. But there are moments in Philip K Dick when I feel at one with his weirdness.

Every time there's a quake I ask myself: is this going to open up the crack in the ground that finally reveals the world inside? Will this be the one?

I went round several bookshops in Cork this morning, took their temperature, toyed with more Edith Pearlman or Lorrie Moore or Jane Gardam, Ovid or Catullus ( I love you and I hate you such a good title), or Mozart's letters to his father; and bought nothing.

At home I considered the longterm book selection at the back of my desk: Cacti and Succulents, the The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, The Perfect Egg by Aldo Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows by Saul Steinberg, Heraclitus' Fragments, The Street of Crocodiles played by Théâtre de Complicité, Tent Pegs by Henri Michaux, Traité du funambulisme by Philippe Petit, What a life! by E.V.L & G.M., and The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Bioy was a friend of Borges in Buenos Aires. Robbe-Grillet found the seeds of Last Year at Marienbad in The Invention of Morel. Which in its turn leaned on The Island of Dr Moreau by HG Wells which I haven't read or do not remember. Bioy and Borges venerated HG Wells and GK Chesterton and RL Stevenson. From their libraries and drawing rooms in Buenos Aires, they invented elegant tales whose wistfulness strikes you later, after you've put down the book then picked it up next day to re-read as a local rather than as a tourist.

The Invention of Morel derives from the genres of mystery, romance and adventure, but the after-effect is of emotional tectonic plates shifting: a hunted and haunted man on an island off India, a museum which is more like a hotel or a sanatorium, people who are there and not there, plants inimical to life, mosquitos that bite, sour marshes, two suns in the sky, two moons, two books, not copies but the same book twice, a confusion of tides, figments, projections, time-planes, appearances and disappearances, words shouted and not heard or maybe ignored.

I have been thinking about all this for a long time, so now I was quite tired, and I continued less logically: I was not dead until the intruders arrived; when one is alone it is impossible to be dead.

Bioy and Borges have the gentlemanly tone of the earlier English writers they admire: unseated but correct, they get to dream through reason, and don't get out again. Who is dead and who is present and to what extent, if any, when, if ever, is the puzzle you need as you read.

There are illustrations by Borges' sister Norah of stylised crosshatched young women and men outside a house, by the sea, with two suns and at the end with one. The drawings alone stand still in the book. The narrative is vertiginous.

Morel's invention is a kind of camera that even Apple has not produced – yet – that plays pieces of reality over and over again. This is how dead and disturbing eternity can be.

"To make living reproductions, I need living transmitters. I do not create life.
"The thing that is latent in a phonograph record, the thing that is revealed when I press a button and turn on the machine – shouldn't we call that 'life'? Shall I insist, like the mandarins of China, that every life depends on a button which an unknown being can press?

The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford, in two very old Penguin editions (1949 and 1954), feel brittle up at the pond in this nearly harsh sunlight. Handle with care. Do not leave out in the sun. Cover with socks when unattended.

Nancy Mitford is a soufflé after the sorbet (lemon) of Fay Weldon; her creatures think of themselves as the lost generation, islanded in wealth and wilfulness between the wars. Fay Weldon's middle class women after the war have au pairs instead of nannies and accept being put upon as a second career. Plus ça change.

Nancy Mitford's narrator Fanny confesses that she never thought about whether she enjoyed coming out, it was just what you had to do.

Girls had to come out, I knew. It is a stage in their existence just as the public school is for boys, which must be passed before life, real life, could begin.

It was like going to a play in a foreign language, she said, going to dances. She hoped one day she'd see the point but she never did.

She could see the point of meeting in the airing cupboard at the top of the house (the only warm place) where the young Hons confide and explicate the day's main stories, shrieking and exclaiming in the half-light. Imagine. No one is solitary, unless seriously grumpy or so Counter-Hon as to be without substance.

The boys are barely visible (sent to the wrong House at Eton), and the men without speech, only assets, abilities and quiet charm. Or noisy effete charm, in the case of Cedric the confounding relative from Nova Scotia who saves the day in Love in a cold climate.

Defiant yet compliant women chatter on in their own language without let or hindrance, as did Madame de Sévigné in letters to her daughter. (Nancy Mitford must have read Madame de Sévigné; her education was restricted to french and riding and reading). In the lives they tell there's plenty of let and not a little hindrance. Their triumphs are in their intimacies with their female friends, or, failing that, with dogs, horses, bats, voles and chubb, which, chez Nancy Mitford, in deep winter are fuddled by a Chubb Fuddler.

Love is mostly longed-for and unsuitable, then later transmutes soundlessly into something even less likely; babies die conveniently, or are brought up by someone else; wives die conveniently too; men are more often ill than women but they live long enough to change their will and even their opinion of sewers and foreigners. In a closed society, the structure is always there, an aunt or a nanny will do instead of a mother, and a dog or a horse instead of a lover. If you can't say it in English you can say it in eggy-peggy.

Something strange happens when you read about the time before you were born and when you were young. Nella Last's diary for Mass Observation during and after World War 2 made me feel almost present at my own birth. The upper class Nancy Mitford, and the middle class Fay Weldon define my own experience by having nothing to do with it.

Fay Weldon is a dose. I read her novels when I was thirty-something and ready for someone else's template: none of your literature, more of a nosedive into worlds I had somehow avoided, yet not. Praxis (bold as love). Puffball. Female Friends. I have eight novels by Fay Weldon, along with exemplars by Erica Jong, Fran Lebowitz, Lisa Alther, Marilyn French, plus The Female Eunuch and Our Bodies Ourselves, part of the motley on the bedroom bookshelves that includes William books, PG Wodehouse, Dornford Yates and a small irish section representing my attempt to get to know the country I moved to: Teach yourself irish, The Tailor and Ansty, Frank O'Connor.

From among these women, those antiquities and these irish, my dream channel is nourished. Every time I translate any of it into everyday life I have a feeling of perfidy. On the bedroom bookshelves books are more insistently historical than anywhere else, more insistently books.

In Ireland in the early nineteen-seventies women had to leave civil service jobs when they married. Feminist writers looked more obvious a choice than ever before, easier in a new country, and a boost I might need as well as a test of nascent teaching skills. I could try out some female eunuch thinking on a farmer's wife, or the carpenter, a former priest, who came to put in an attic window. I only like to talk politics if it's a private performance.

Otherwise I'd rather work in the garden. Silent politics. Apart from the birds. Check the trees, the tadpoles. Plant a Himalayan lily in as much leaf mould as I can find. Re-read Fear of flying in the afternoon. The book seemed very eager this time, very earnest and rather bedraggled. Pond warblers and water boatmen whizzed straight through.

The neighbours are painting their house (again), in search of complete cleanliness and renewal, not to say purge, for the time being.

I'm reading The Wall by Marlen Haushofer. 'Today, the fifth of November, I shall begin my report,' she says on line one. This is what you do when you're the last person in the world, just in case you're not the last, or not for ever.

The neighbours have chosen a colour very similar to the one they chose two years ago, close to the colour of a buff envelope; they tried several untidy swatches on the front to make it look as if it needed doing.

In addition to writing the report, the woman keeps a diary, tightening and containing the days, with inexplicable lacunae. For example, she never writes about killing deer, she tells us. The report covers two years in a forest with a dog, a cat and a cow, then kittens and a calf, milking the cow, mucking her out, catching trout, making hay, feeding deer in winter and eating them as necessary.

The neighbours are doing what they're doing. I'm saying what a woman in a book is doing and how she chooses what to say, on her own in the forest, with the rest of the world stopped in its tracks beyond a transparent wall. An ordinary woman, nameless, middle-aged, not very good at carpentry, didn't know she had hands until she was forty. She doesn't dwell on her situation; too much to do. The report covers two years in the forest and takes her four months to write; she stops when she runs out of paper.

After ten pages I forgot the premise of the book, and the neighbours needlessly painting their house. A woman in a hunting lodge in a forest, spared the frozen, stone-like death of the rest of the world, is more pressing and more vulnerable than most of us. This is an end-story of the 1960s, which I'm somehow bound to understand.

Not Thoreau, not Robinson Crusoe, not JG Ballard, not Beckett. Not any of these. The woman is a thin skin covering a mountain of memories, she says. Her dog Lynx looks after her as much as she looks after him. Even after his death, which colours the report long before it's happened, he's there with her, like her, hungry and yearning, following invisible trails.

In a line here, an image there, the reporter falters and the page slips into the minor key. Not for long.  This is not a reflective book. It moves through tasks and events, neither exasperated nor happy. All the reflection is yours; afterwards you look anew at a wheelbarrow, a woodpile, a greenhouse, a loaf of bread you've made, your own cats and hens, the gentleness, sometimes, when the rest of the world is there, repainting the house, maybe, or washing the car.

The end of the book startled me; I would have been happy without an ending, without the rest of the world in any shape or form. I would have been happy with just the prospect of further and maybe reduced life in the forest, which is there too, in the final pages.

William books by Richmal Crompton, who is a woman, won out over Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, who is not a woman, in an unfamiliar room in Bristol with a bookshelf filled by a departed daughter.

A William book is a good bet for sleep in unfamiliar rooms. All the language is used up, there's nothing left over, this is all there is, once you've read it you've consumed it, each chapter leaves you épuisée, that is, ready for sleep. The drawings by Thomas Henry show a scowling boy – even his socks look defiant – who is waiting for the freedom that is surely his and already yours. The childhood you can read now, on this fluent chalky paper, rather than the one you had, should take care of your dreams.

I first read William as an adult, ill in bed. As a child I was too much of a snob for William's chopped-off English, his grubby adventures; I was already moving towards the middle of the library where the foreign section was. Swallows and Amazons I also came to as an adult. Less snobbery than discomfort, here, what with homemade tents and a girl called Titty. What to do with these? It was the foreign section all over again: English life and camaraderie in the mudflats of East Anglia, where, as it happened, I grew up. Swallows and Amazons forever.

I didn't experience camaraderie in the mudflats, I experienced solitude.

Swallows and Amazons are 1930s. William is a boy of the 1920s. I was a girl of the 1950s. There we all are in our towns, our woods, our boats, our mudflats, our languages. William's joys and woes are in Richmal Crompton's language. By the end of each chapter William has escaped, from her language as from his family, he has nothing more to say, he's gone down the road with Jumble his dog and a new whistle he finally learned how to make.

I dreamed, those nights in the unfamiliar room, as it turned out, of a black mongrel dog swimming underwater comme si de rien n'était, and then, the night before I left, of an airport that turned into a hospital where, having missed the plane I was tested, I was mad, thick noise came out of my mouth. The hens will need feeding, I was trying to say.

In the sun, late in the day, up at the pond, idling about in Tender Buttons. I'd forgotten how persistent Gertrude Stein is, how elegant and recalcitrant. Her buttons are inscrutable, their tenderness elusive. You've no idea why they fasten together like this, but with the sun on her Objects Food and Rooms, you wish her bonne route. If she sees things this way, if this puts a shine on her breakfast, bless her.

I can stay with tender buttons only about ten minutes at a time, then I need to close my eyes and open them to water boatmen pursuing their own ends in the pond.

A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family by Peter Dimock

I wanted to read this again because I'm looking for a form of speech, a persuasive tone for a letter I have to write but have no idea how to begin. If you set up the conditions for something to be said, if you assemble your examples and your images, establish your tone and explain why you are writing, by the end of the book it is said: a father's pernicious involvement in the Vietnam war as security advisor, his elder son who did the right thing, and more, the younger son's resistance and now his bequest to two boys, one his nephew, who may, when they are old enough to comprehend what sort of family they belong to, want to leave it.

By the end of the book you have a sense of the material in hand; through the structures of rhetoric and the injunctions to practise it, you feel the writer's unequivocal horror. If you then watch The Deer Hunter, the horror increases.

I want to write a letter to persuade a man to sell me a field in order that I might rescue it from agriculture and plant trees in it.  There is no comparison.  I left the family a long time ago. No horror, or none that is visible to the naked eye. Or maybe there is. Rhetoric does not discriminate. Agriculture does. And war. And justice.

In some careful, pleasured tone, practice the art of direct address, taking full advantage of the vocative. Above all, do not be embarrassed or reluctant to use it for your own enjoyment.

Rhetoric involves flying kites in clear blue air and the idea of it afterwards. You're going to love it.

Embers by Sándor Márai
A single breath tale for a day like today, with a poor night's sleep behind me, and strong gusts from the northwest pushing rain sideways across windows the way it is pushed upwards on the windows of a plane. Embers is the right thing to read and yet comfortless: the old General in his castle who has waited forty-one years to ask the friend of his youth two questions that, in the event, his friend chooses not to answer, and, in truth, does not need to answer.

I wish the main voice were not that of a General, and yet, for the balance of the tale and the era in which it takes place – the first half of the twentieth century – it has to be the voice of a General, or some such privileged person smack in the middle of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I also wish he didn't have to be in a castle in the middle of a forest with a couple of faithful retainers, though usually the middle of a forest would seem a fine place to be.

Sometimes the raw sad things a novel strives to say look absurdly simple, or maybe this is my insomnia speaking. We seek our twin who turns out to be our opposite, to be Other, that is, in this book, musical rather than military, and then we wait for death. There is no satisfactory conclusion, only the onward flow of language, the understanding now and then that for some creatures the only way emotion can emerge is over very many years and between the rules of engagement.

The faces you see as you read Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger are yours to choose. As is the cat called Bloomberg. I would like Michelle Williams as Franny and someone between Billy Crudup and Jake Gyllenhall as Zooey. Neither of our cats would do as Bloomberg.

As I read I see another Michele, who likes J.D. Salinger and looks like an Audrey Hepburn for whom life was and is a great deal more perilous than anyone would want. She talks like Franny, smokes like Franny, sleeps and doesn't eat like Franny; and she has a Mercy tattoo on her wrist. I can imagine her in the Underground – she lives in London – looking at her boyfriend and momentarily seeing him, as Franny sees her boyfriend, as an ad she's staring at on the other side of the carriage.

Franny gets about forty pages, Zooey more like a hundred and forty, though many of these involve the existential crisis of Franny, who, like Phoebe for Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, guarantees Zooey even as he tries to sort her out. Smoking guarantees everyone in the Glass family, even the two who are dead. It helps to read The Cloud of Unknowing in a cloud of smoke.

Franny's boyfriend cuts into frogs legs while Franny ponders Mercy and how it doesn't have to mean Mercy, and exhales. Saw the Anton Corbijn film yesterday about Ian Curtis of Joy Division. In an early scene in his teenage bedroom he tells a visitor who has refused a cigarette that everyone who comes into this room has to smoke.

Enter Zooey, smoking. Enter Buddy. Enter Bessie, the mother. Several Glass family members who mutter on in grouchy clever family ways. This is the sound of a family. This is the Salinger Fascination. This muttering on and the small advances, the latest difficult rescue of the imminently dead by the catcher in the rye.

Much of the Zooey volume takes place in the bath where he is reading a letter from his older brother Buddy, pages of it, as well as fielding questions from his mother Bessie, and smoking. Mrs Glass is also smoking, sometimes several at once. Franny is on the sofa refusing chicken soup and crying for Seymour who killed himself, if she isn't asleep. The last part of Zooey's tale takes place on the phone, talking into a void that Franny fully occupies.

All these articulate, troubled, sometimes dead Glass children, seven of them, these everyday rituals, like bathing or shaving or talking or finally accepting chicken soup, into which you can pile so much and so much. You will always disagree, you hope for mercy, you field anxiety, re-lather where you must shave again.

Mercy is about right. Though, now that I think about it, before I knew Michele I didn't know Mercy either. If I do now. Without the tattoo.

The need to read.

Age 14 I was going to the library every day. It was in an old church in the middle of a small town, with a venerable holm oak outside. You went in through the church porch, soft stone unreconstructed.

The girl by the window in DLR Lexicon, the new library in Dun Laoghaire, architectural event between the Marine Hotel and the sea, needs to read: Jane Austen. A woman on the train was reading Murder at Pemberley. Here's a man who has just finished a PhD on Duchamp. He leans up and down the book stall we are tending. What would you recommend? he asks. How to write round things. Another who works in the legal business and esteems Séan ó Riordáin. What would I recommend for his bedtime reading? Local. I live on the hill where Séan ó Riordáin lived; many times I saw him outside his house gazing westward. Should have guessed he was a poet.

My bedtime reading at the moment is Edith Pearlman. She has knocked open the dream channel. In the morning I can remember neither my several wild dreams nor the story I read.

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.