Goodbye to Berlin

The light, pours in eastwards, year after year, has drained the colour from the books closest to the window. When I'm here the heaps of books might get re-arranged but somehow, by some quirk of fate, it's Light of the Ancient Worlds that has suffered the most, it's yellow cover now only a few degrees perceptibly different from the yellowing pages within the covers.

But what to do with the others, a book, for instance, that is 1,100 pages long, and packed with over half a million words?The answer, inevitably, is nothing. Nothing is to be done, Mr. Lenin. Perhaps I'll wrap it in a large piece of white cloth and keep it from the sun. Ridiculously superstitious, of course. What, after all, can tenderness protect when time's got it by the throat, so to speak?

You look around the room, just rotating your neck, your body rigid, lest any movement wake little r. She's flung most of the books to the floor with a kind of abandon that I can only envy. The cover of Muthoo's incomprehensible book on bargaining theory has been bent. Which is a good thing, I think. This is kind of delusional, you realise, talking about books all the time and not actually reading them. At Henry's, on Charing Cross, you thought you might find Jahnn. Whatever anton recommends turns out to be gold. Now and then the crazy thought comes to you: maybe you'll find Strehlow (though only 500 copies were ever printed..or maybe Chatwin just made that up). Perhaps you'll find Fukase for a fiver...

In the room are three clocks, all of them halted. Cheever and Dyer lie quietly on the fake-1920's wooden radio set, next to some very old toys: Charlie George, Bobbie Moore, Martin Cheevers/Cheeves..that can't be right, can it? and someone else, his name now faded beyond recognition. Outside, a ginger-haired woman walks a lazy black dog with a red collar. She's plumpish and not very attractive. Like Jimmy Stewart, you're half expecting a murder to take place. Maybe later.

You decide to leave the piles of books as they are. On the top is the unfinished Goodbye to Berlin. Despite its alluring cover and promise of decadence it was dull beyond imagination. Still, I can see its reflection on the slanting window and every now and then, when a large vehicle hurtles past on the road outside the image trembles.

Already the leaves on the great tree are browning. This is how it invades its prey; first a few speckles, splotches and then it becomes more general. A few days ago, though, there was a stiff breeze. The sky darkened im...

~~~

"London, your London, was really beautiful. Beautiful, not in the the sense of a measured beauty in all its dimensions, the way one sees in Paris time and time again but beautiful in the manner of a reference to areas which remain hidden and which one is able, time and again, to find when one's inner landscape opens up."

---Paul Celan (via nomadics)

Time and again,

or time and time again

in the sense of

a circle

that is broken

I find you

lost,

among the ruins

of my heart