The Book I'm Not Reading

                                     

The book I'm not reading has a life jacket enclosed

 The book I'm not reading is a friend of mine

 God knows we need those

                                                                                Patty Larkin

I think often enough about W.G. Sebald’s eponymous novel, Austerlitz. It is a story that is concerned with the concept of memory as a foundation of identity. As a four-year-old child, Jacob Austerlitz, the novel’s narrator, had been sent on the Kindertransport from Prague to London and then shipped to Wales where he was given a new name, Dafyyd Elias, a new set of parents and a wholly new identity that erased the one that he had previously enjoyed. However, Jacob Austerlitz did not come to learn of his history or his real name until he became a teen-ager ready to graduate high school. The experience of his exile, though, had left him traumatized. He says, “I realized . . . how little practice I have in using my memory and conversely how hard I must always have tried to recollect as little as possible, avoiding everything which related in any way to my unknown past.” In his early life he knew nothing about World War II, the Nazi persecutions, the concentration camps in which both of his parents died, or the fact of his exile; it was not until he visited the Ghetto Museum in Terezin that he heard any suggestion “of the persecution which my avoidance system had kept from me for so long, and which now in this place surrounded me on all sides.” In response to this sudden awareness and attempting to learn his history, Austerlitz searches out his old Nanny, Vera, who had cared for him before his forced exile. During the conversations with Vera she remembers for him a question that once as a four-year-old, he had asked her. “Vera,” he had wondered to her, “when the snow covers the ground how do the squirrels know where to find what they have buried.” It is a perceptive question for a four-year-old to ask, I think, but Vera doesn’t in the present relate to him how she had answered, or at least, Austerlitz doesn’t narrate the response she offered him. But the adult Austerlitz in the present wonders, “How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what it is we find in the end.” I consider that what we know about ourselves is based on the stories we tell, but Austerlitz’s repression of memory had suppressed his stories. I guess ultimately I do not know what we find finally in our memory (a narrator in Jose Saramajo’s novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis asks “What will you be when you discover it is night and you find yourself at the end of the road?”), but for now I might answer Austerlitz in this manner: we remember when we tell the story and then we are the story we tell. Austerlitz had no memory until he narrated it. And perhaps the pop in any story lies first in its recall and then in the editing that over the years has revised it, in that exercise of memory that entangles the past and present. And where does the writing physically begin?

One place where I can discover what I have buried is in my journals. It is in those volumes that many of my stories begin. In the archives at the University of Wisconsin-Stout where I had taught for twenty-eight years, I have placed almost 50 years of day books and reading/study journals. Some of the volumes go back to my early 20s when I first thought to keep a journal. "What are you doing now?” Ralph Waldo Emerson had asked Henry David Thoreau. “Do you keep a journal?” On the 22 October 1837, when he was only twenty years old, Thoreau entered this in his journal: “So I make my First entry to-day” Almost two centuries later, on my bookshelf reside two large compact volumes of Thoreau’s journals that exist in forty-seven volumes that had run to over two million words and spanned twenty-four years and twelve days in length! My original entry was not so momentous though perhaps equally inspired, and I have long forgotten what I had then entered first in a journal. It is buried somewhere under the snows. But even before I became an official scholar—by which, of course, I mean reading and writing academic tomes and publishing articles in scholarly journals (where the matter was often filled with unpopped, unscooped facts), I had begun to keep day/reading journals that accompanied me everywhere I journeyed and into which I recorded my progress through any number of days, books, relationships, events and ideas: it was in the journals that I found what became the genesis of stories; some of those journal entries still surprise and delight me, but so many are buried under the snow in the archives. The journals offered me the raw material for what I might have hoped would become popped and scooped stories. Some of those journal entries even might have had pop and scoop! Over the years, I have entered these primary narratives into a variety of journal types: into reporter-like stenographic pads, and soft-covered, bright-colored school notebooks, or sometimes into tiny, clothbound, and lined books. For several years, I chose to make my entries into large, heavy and oversized blue accounting volumes all of which I kept close to hand in a variety of suitably sized Man bags. I was younger then and I did not travel light. Over the past several decades I have taken to make my entries into black moleskin books on pages graph-style-lined, a design I observed in one of my stays in Paris. On my shelves two still unwrapped volumes awaiting stories At some point I began writing in the journals with fountain pens that I filled with a variety of color inks though today I write solely in empyrean blue and jet black. 

 I have made my partner promise that when I die—as I must—she should deliver into the archives whatever volumes that I have continued to fill over the years since that first deposit. I do intend to maintain a journal for as long as I fam alive and have the capacity to do so. But I am a careless scholar and I often forget or am too lethargic to enter some of what I might consider my more profound thoughts; sometimes they then become lost until in some context they become found and then perhaps it is a new thought and idea. In the journals there does not exist an organizing principle in which the notes have been entered. When I am reading a book—but only sometimes—I set aside time to transfer into my journal under linings and annotations that I had added to the book’s margins, and at times I might even have added into the journal entry a comment or six inspired by the text. In the journal I might next directly enter a very personal description and comment that concerned events and thoughts and dreams deriving from and addressing to my personal life and times. This might be followed by an entry from my reading of some periodical, maybe The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, or  less frequently these days The New York Times. The latter too often always leads, however, to an angry screed—mostly a complaint—and I have restricted my reading in the newspaper to the arts and leisure section and the obituaries. If I’m not there I know I’m onto dead. Thoreau had written long ago that to read the newspaper daily is like a dog returning to its vomit, and cautioned not to read the newspapers! There is, as I have said, no organizational principle to the journal entries. How I would find something that I might want in them at some later time escapes me, and so I occasionally read in whatever journals are at hand looking in the snows for some food I have left. As for the tomes in the archives, they are unavailable for such browsing, though I believe, there is much excellent voice in those little organs, yet now I cannot make them speak. Later, to someone, they will have to speak for themselves. As I have said, I am a careless scholar.

 Why do I keep them, the journals I mean? How do I even make the present ones speak given the disarray of the entries; how can I give some voice to past volumes entombed now in the archives? Tucked away in several boxes in the archives at the University and inaccessible until 2035 no one, in fact, will be able to read the volumes. I can’t even get to them now without some immoderate effort in time and space. And where would I start, what year would I explore? I do not think the archive office has delved into the volumes to categorize them by date. I don’t even know that other than randomly I have dated the books. I would have to approximate dates by reading through the entries and remembering the narrated event, and in that search I could add the pop and scoop that stories require. Ah, memory: the narrator in Sebald’s Rings of Saturn says, “But, in reality, memory fails us,” and I have annotated in the margins of that page this comment: “As always.” As it must. Hence can be born the stories with pop and scoop.

The person narrated in those past journals might appear unfamiliar to the person narrated in the present, though I am certain that a recent story told will include traces of that past character. I know that over the future years he will have been and will still be narrated in various other voices. I suppose those journals contain matters that are not lost but only submerged deep in the subconscious awaiting like the cicada broods for their moment to arise. But as long as they remain buried they are veiled and unstoried until suddenly something in the present—I read a journal— inspires a memory and a story is born.