Moving, pt. 3

This organizing of my library is rather fraught. I’ve run out of shelves; worse, I must constantly say goodbye, for the time being, to this or that cherished volume. One of the books going into storage is called Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy. They will continue to be neglected – which seems doubly cruel since, perhaps, they were on the verge of being attended to. … Also, the mere deciding is strenuous. Were I to pack away one book by Joyce Carey, I might as well pack them all. But what of, say, P.D. James? Should I keep available her omnibuses? If so, what of her mass-market paperbacks? And is my need for P.D. James lesser or greater than my need for, say, Colette or Ronald Firbank? Is this the year in which I begin to read through Dostoevsky? In philosophy, at least, things are more cut-and-dried. City of God and On the Plurality of Worlds must stay out no matter whether I manage to peek in them during the next couple of years.

On the familial front, little Samuel was just given a set of immunizations. He cried bitterly at this betrayal.

May’s poem

This month’s poem, “In Praise of Darkness,” is by Jorge Luis Borges.

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Old age (or so it is called by others) / can be the season of our happiness. / The animal has died, or nearly died. / The man remains, with his soul. / I live among vague and luminous shapes / that are not yet darkness. / Buenos Aires, / which earlier was spreading into suburbs / toward the endless plains, / is once again La Recoleta, El Retiro, / the smeared streets of El Once / and the ramshackle old houses / we still call the Southside. / There was always too much going on in my life; / Democritus of Abdera plucked out his eyes so he could think; / time has been my Democritus. / This half-light moves slowly and causes no pain; / it flows down a mild slope, / it is like eternity. / My friends do not have faces, / women are what they were so many years ago, / the streetcorners may have changed, / there are no letters in the pages of books. / All this ought to terrify me, / but it is a sweetness, a coming back home. / Of the many generations of books on earth / I shall have read only a very few, / which I go on reading in my memory, / reading and alchemizing. / From the south, from the east, from the west, from the north, / the roads converge, / the roads that have brought me to my secret center. / Those roads were echoes and footsteps, / women and men, death throes, resurrections, / days and nights, / dreams and between the dreams, / every moment of yesterday, even the meanest, / and all of the yesterdays of the world, / the unflinching sword of the Dane, the Persian’s moon, / the deeds of the dead, / the shared love, the words, / Emerson and snow and so many other things. / Now I can let them go. I have come back to my center, / to my algebra, to my key, / to my mirror. / Soon I will know who I am.

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(Translated by Robert Mezey)

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In his article “Against Narrativity,” the philosopher Galen Strawson denies that humans typically organize their lives according to narrative patterns (in any sense of “typically” that is more than just statistical). He also denies that it’s typically good for a person to organize his or her life in this way. Some people, Strawson contends, naturally orient themselves “episodically” rather than “diachronically.” In so doing, they incur no moral cost; but it would be costly for them to try to reorient themselves.

Giving an example of an episodically oriented person, Strawson mentions Borges.

I thought of Borges as an example before Strawson mentioned him. But I’m not quite sure what he exemplifies.

Is the Borges of this poem episodic or diachronic? Is he concerned with narrative, and, if so, how?

These orientations occupy a spectrum, according to Strawson. Borges’s Funes is at the strongly episodic end. Augustine is strongly diachronic. People can be anywhere in between.

But I’m tempted to place the Borges of this poem onto more than one position on the spectrum.