An 80 year phenomenon — the brief time of international Alexandria; its topography, its business, its people; the internal life of E. M. Forester; Constantin Cavafy; Lawerence Durrell. The choice quotations: “he had the appearance of a cerebral and ruffled heron”. Best $50 spent this winter.

Michael Haag, Alexandria, City of Memory

Plutarch tells us that when Octavian’s forces landed in Egypt in their pursuit of fleeing Antony, that very night the sounds of an invisible procession — music, singing, laughter — could be heard leaving the city of Alexandria and heading to the Roman camp. It was Antony’s heretofore patron, the god Dionysus, explains Plutarch, abandoning him to his destruction. The poet Cavafy says that it was not Dionysus, but the city of Alexandria, which abandoned Antony. Whoever of the two is right, the poem is really about something else: about taking a loss open eyed, as the facile phrase has it, like a man.

At midnight, when suddenly you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly:
as one long prepared, and full of courage,
say goodbye to her, to Alexandria who is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and full of courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion,
but not with the whining, the pleas of a coward:
listen—your final pleasure—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
to say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

“My life has always been more in books and dreams” said Lawrence Durrell somewhere about himself, and, it seems, this is how my own life is turning out, in the end. For over a year now, it has been a book a day for me, just about. On some days, I end one and open the next in the same sitting.

Yesterday was Michael Moran’s turn. He starts with a good epigraph:

I have always thought the situation of a Traveller singularly hard. If he tells nothing that is uncommon he must be a stupid fellow to have gone so far, and brought home so very little; and if he does, why — it is hum – aya – a tap on the Chin; — and — “He’s a Traveller”. (From the diary of William Wales, Astronomer and Meteorologist on Captain Cook’s second voyage).

Moran elucidates the point further, as it were, with a bit on Dr Johnson, about whom:

his adventurous friend James Boswell records that Johnson was skeptical of what a traveler might learn by taking long voyages, despite on one occasion when dining with the Reverend Alexander Grant at Invernes, divertingly “standing up to mimic the shape and motions of a kangaroo”, and making “three vigorous bounds across the room”.

The rest of the book serves to exemplify the claim.

Up on the plateau, the howling freezing wind drives falling snow over the white fields horizontal, but here, in the deep valley, it only sways the tops of naked trees. Fat blobs of wet snow fall before my eyes diagonal. It is 17:03 and the world is growing dark. I lie under my sable blanket, in a woolen cap, on my high Portuguese bed so that my face is level with the wide open window. Cold breezes stroke my face. I breathe the delocious cold wet air. Last, o moment, last, thou art beautiful.

Amit Chaudhiri’s Afternoon Raag is to my taste a little too much about remembering what it was like to be Amit Chaudhuri, the child of middle class Silhetis in Old Bombay two-timing two Indian girls at Oxford. I know it was remarkable to Amit, so what. But, being a classical singer, he does know and understand his other art:

When a singer performs, it is the job of the accompanists to support him dutifully and unobtrusively. A cyclical rhythm-pattern—say, of sixteen beats—is played at an unchanging tempo on the tabla, and the song and its syllables are set to this pattern, so that one privileged word in the poem will coincide ineluctably with the first of the sixteen beats in the cycle. This first beat is called the sama, and much drama, apprehension, and triumph surround it. For the singer is allowed to, even expected to, adventurously embark on rhythmic voyages of his own, only to arrive, with sudden, instinctive, and logical grace, once more at the sama, taking the audience, who are keeping time, unawares. Once this is achieved, the logic seems at first a flash of genius, and then cunningly pre-meditated. While the pretence is kept up, and the singer’s rhythm appears to have lost itself, the tabla-player, with emotionless sobriety, maintains the stern tempo and cycle, until the singer, like an irresponsible but prodigious child, decides to dance in perfect steps back into it. Similarly, when a singer is executing his difficult melodic patterns, the harmonium-player must reproduce the notes without distracting him. The tabla and harmonium players behave like palanquin-bearers carrying a precious burden, or like solemn but indulgent guardians who walk a little distance behind a precocious child as it does astonishing things, seeing, with a corner of their eye, that it does not get hurt, or like deferential ministers clearing a path for their picturesque prince, or like anonymous and selfless spouses who give of themselves for the sake of a husband. Mohan, who plays the tabla with clarity and restraint, created the ground on which my guru constructed his music, and Sohanlal, attentively playing the harmonium, filled in the background. In the care of these two custodians, my guru sang and shone with his true worth.

For all undue reverence for his own past, he is capable of a well turned phrase:

When one remembers a scene from the past in which one is with a loved one who is now dead, it is not like a memory at all, but like a dream one is having before his death, a premonition. In this dream which precedes death, the person is tranquil and happy, and yet, without reason, you know he is to die. When we recall the dead, the past becomes a dream we are dreaming foretelling death, though in our waking moments we cannot properly interpret it or give it significance. My memory of the day I bought the tanpura with my guru is like such a dream.

One wishes he had gone more in that direction; and skipped the other stuff.

Amit Chaudhuri, Afternoon Raag

Anne Somerset’s The Affair of the Poisons has two superb chapters: the first being the description of the court and its mechanisms. Here are a few nice quotes:

(-) Naturally, the King was incapable of fulfilling the expectations of more than a tiny  minority of those who came to court and he had to find ways of preventing  disillusionment from becoming too widespread. According to Saint-Simon, ‘He fully  realised that the substantial gifts he had to offer were too few to have any continuous  effect and he substituted imaginary favours that appealed to men’s jealous natures,  small distinctions which he was able with extraordinary ingenuity to grant or  withhold.’ Yet despite his skilful management, the King himself was acutely aware of  how limited were the means at his disposal. He told his son, ‘We … who see so  many hopes before us every day … can thereby easily recognise how unwarranted  they are and how much time is wasted upon them.’  To try to stave off disappointment, the King deferred decisions for as long as possible. ‘Every time I award a vacant place I  make a hundred malcontents and one ingrate.’

(-) The Italian observer Giovanni-Battista Primi Visconti realised that many  of the nobility were being ruined by their extravagance and Mme de Sévigné  professed herself mystified as to how people at court avoided total insolvency.  Concerned at her daughter’s expenditure, she wrote anxiously, ‘There must be some  kind of sorcery you practise in connection with … the high life you lead … I think  you must resort to black magic, as must these impecunious courtiers. They never  have a sou, but they go on royal tours, on every campaign. They dress in the height  of fashion, take part in all the balls … no matter how bankrupt they are … Their lands decrease in value. No matter. They go on just the same.’

(-) A Paris doctor named Gui Patin  declared in 1664, ‘The court is full of intrigue, ambition and avarice’ and he stigmatised it as a place where people would rather repudiate their closest  companions than to see them prosper.

(-) The French court instilled in its inhabitants an overwhelming sense of  superiority, for it was taken as self-evident that the world of Versailles represented civilization at its height. The Abbé de Saint-Réal noted wryly, ‘Their contempt for  anything that is not of the court is unimaginable, and goes to the point of  extravagance.’

(-) Such incidents  justify La Bruyère’s dictum that the court was composed of men who, like diamonds,  were ‘very hard but highly polished’, which led him to the conclusion that ‘all this  great refinement is nothing other than a vice called falsehood’.

The second is the chapter on the love life of the King.

Then things quickly go downhill. Not because of any failure of the author, but because what follows — the history of the investigation into witchcraft and satanism — is the same old story. If you read about the Salem witch trials or the soul stealers affair in China, you have read it already. It’s just more of the same. Sophisticated French courtiers are just as superstitious and ready to manipulate the superstitions of others to eliminate their enemies and advance their own careers as Puritan theologist and KGB agents. But amid the drudgery of one damn thing after another, every now and then Sommerset manages to smuggle a true nugget:

During that episode several cases would come to light when attempts to practise magic had ultimately led to much worse things. Few people came to the divineress with the express intention of purchasing poison. On the whole, they began by  complaining of their husband or some other individual who irked them, and the divineress would hold out the hope that their death could be brought about by  supernatural means. It was only when this failed to achieve the desired result that  they became ready to countenance murder, for the spells that had proved so  harmless to the intended victim invariably had a corrupting effect on the  perpetrators.

Anne Somerset, The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV

Cossack assaults [tended to] reinforce Qing subject identity – a fact that a particular group of Cossacks, sent on a mission to obtain the Qing throne’s submission to the Romanovs, would fatally discover in 1653. While stopped at a “Ducher” (Hurha) village in search of horses and guides, the Russians casually announced their ruler’s intent to divide Heilongjiang roughly in half. This declaration – to make “you east of the Amur our tributary and leave those Solon west of the Non River (Ch., Nenjiang) as tributary to the [Qing] emperor” – effectively ended the Russian mission.
As the local villagers related later during an imperial audience in Beijing, they had realized that, in comparison to the value of (Qing) dynastic gifts bestowed for their usual pelt tribute, the heavier and uncompensated Russian exactions would impoverish them. So they killed the Cossacks and appropriated their pelts to add to the village’s own annual tribute.

Always high minded, after admonishing them to spare further Cossack emissaries, the (Qing) imperial throne sent off the delegation with their usual gifts of clothing.

David A. Bello, Rival Empires on the Hunt for Sable and People in Seventeenth-Century Manchuria, in Empire and Environment in the Making of Manchuria by Norman Smith (ed.)

Sanaë Lemoine writes spartan, supple prose, conjuring and pacing well a sense of silent, undefined tension. In this, her style reminds me of Patrick Modiano. Writing her first novel, she yet proves herself a mistress: hers is the highly polished style of a old experienced hand. And I learned something: her description of a teenager’s sexual attraction to an older man illuminated for me some incidents from my own past; and the book’s only sex-scene touched me as somehow very moving despite its matter of factness. I am looking forward to more from Lemoine.

The story itself is to me what the French would, I believe, call meh: its main points have to do with social insecurity (did he really love her? why did he not call me? what will does she think of me? am I too fat?); and troubled relations with one’s parents. The heroine (and perhaps Lemoine) feels that her irregular status (as a secret love child of a powerful politician) is somehow especially troubling, but the truth is that many of us have troubled relations with our parents, even those regularized through customary arrangements.

Sanaë Lemoine, The Margot Affair

Must be the strangely mature inner life of the 18-year-old depicted in Sanae Lemoine’s The Margot Affair which has led me, in my dream, to fall in love with a blond, slim, thoughtful Hungarian high school student. (No person under 30 has ever seemed to me adult enough to take an interest in. And now suddenly, at my age, this). So, I traveled to Budapest to find her school, and wondered its corridors during breaks, peeking into classrooms in-between, until I found her, surrounded by friends in the cafeteria. I sat next to her and laid it out: I explained my challenging circumstances and my love for her — as far as I can make it out now I was a political dissident (Vietnamese?), fleeing from secret police (French?), yet undertaking the risk of looking for her because I felt strongly her love could somehow save me. She heard me out thoughtfully, reflected on my words in silence, then spoke slowly: “I am afraid that what I am going to tell you may disappoint you”.

Denys Johnson-Davies’ Memories in Translation: A Life Between the Lines of Arabic Literature is both a delightful memoir of an interesting life lived off the beaten path and a good hook to other books, some shocking (Season of Migration to the North) and some moving (The City of Love and Ashes). Here is Idris Ysuf. The heroine, Fawziya, puts her hand on the hero’s shoulder (Hamza) in an unexpected declaration of tender feelings.

She was there with her hand on his shoulder. The coffee was in his hand. Fawziya was in his heart. Hamza was in her eyes. Her smile still trembled and her trembling was in his breathing. His breathing raced. Her thoughts hung on his breathing. His thoughts were absent. Their absence was in her features. Her absence was long, then she returned. Her return was happiness. The happiness was in his breast. In his breast was contentment. Her contentment was clear. In its clarity was passion. His fear belonged to yesterday. Yesterday he was roaring, and now his roar was heard. Her roar flared up. The coffee began to hiss and flare up.

I’ll read more Idris Yusuf.