Book of sand

I turned yesterday to one of my greatest favourites, for small delicate pieces to read while feeling sorry for myself with a lergy and no voice (and for Lindsay not to have a voice, believe me, that's serious - talking is what I do!).  Small and delicate, but far from trivial, because I picked up Borges' The Book of Sand.  I'll just touch on two of these netsuke.

First, Ulrike:  four pages of exquisite love agony; "My story will be true to reality or, in any case, to my personal memory of reality, which amounts to the same thing."  An elderly academic is offered a single day of love by the Norwegian Ulrike, and this touching story is written with prose as quiet and as perfect as the snow that falls in the story.  There is a joke from Schopenhauer, a reference to York's turbulent history and a half dozen other enriching ideas.  There is joy, tragedy, inevitability and serendipity, all mixed, but all seeming to be part of an inevitable whole.  "To a bachelor well along in years, the offer of love is a gift no longer expected.  The miracle has a right to impose conditions."  And later, in the bedroom, with reference to the Nibelungenlied which they have been discussing: "Ulrike had already undressed...There was no sword between us.  Time flowed like the sands."

The title story, The Book of Sand, is quite different.  A man buys from a traveller a book which turns out to have no first page, no last page, and an infinite number of pages - he never sees the same page twice.  Borges calls this an inconceivable concept, though he seems to have conceived and described it with ease.  He hopes that the stories create "dreams which go on branching out in the hospitable imaginations" of the readers.  All Borges does is describe the buying of this book and his despair at at finding it so imcomprehensible.  It bears obvious formal comparison with The Library of Babel, about a library with all possible books in it (not in this collection), and creates a similar alienation: "the book was a nightmarish object, an obscene thing that affronted and tainted reality itself."

There are other fine stories in this collection, each a little jewel.  If you do not know Borges, imagine discovering bitter chocolate for the first time, rich and sad.

The pictures, by the way, are from my recent trip to Namibia - the dunes at Sossusvlei.

Comments

[Glo]

Nice quotation about reality and the pictures of the dunes fit perfectly to exemplify it as well: what is the reality of a dune?
Awesome pictures anyway.

[Peter the flautist]

Lovely sand dunes; are you aware of the recent research on the underlying physical mechanisms for "singing dunes"? I could probably dig out some interesting papers if you wish. Some nice examples to listen to can be found here http://www.lps.ens.fr/~douady/SongofDunesIndex.html

Dark Puss