I’m a big fan of the rooftop lounge at the Austin Central Library.
My lens was fogging up when I took this one, but I sort of like the effect.
the smoker
They came, as all extremists do
In time, to a sort of grandeur …
— Richard Wilbur, “The Undead”
There’s a kind of patio in front of this hotel and a man sits there, smoking a cigarette.
I arrived at this hotel three days ago and he was already there.
When I awake in the morning — I peer out of my window, look down — he is there.
When I go to my car, he is there.
When I ready myself for bed, he is there. Smoking.
He has neither phone nor book. He listens to nothing — nothing that you or I could hear — and appears to look at nothing, except, perhaps, the tiles that floor the patio.
It could be that he has neither sight nor hearing, that he is only mouth and lungs.
He sits by a table, but nothing is on the table: no pack of Marlboros, no lighter.
He wears a loose casual shirt and nylon trousers.
It is as though he has one cigarette he smokes eternally. It never burns down, but eternally renews itself.
“Purity of heart is to will one thing,” said Kierkegaard. This man has the purest of hearts.
When I check out today, he will surely still be there, and I will try to catch his eye. But I have little hope of that.
Perhaps I will return to this hotel in a year or two and find him still there, smoking.
Perhaps I alone can see him.
Why they don’t accept this word I can’t even imagine!
I’m beginning a series on Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers.
A remarkable visual reconstruction of Tenochtitlan.
Mann's Joseph: Prelude
I recently read Thomas Mann’s tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers — one of the more extraordinary reading experiences of my recent years. I had started it once, decades ago, and then again a few years later, but it’s probably been 25 years since I’ve even tried to read it.
I have a kind of instinct for reading, or at least I think I do. I always have plans for what to read; sometimes I follow those plans and sometimes I don’t. But every now and then I’ll be planning a series of books to read, or articles and essays — or maybe I’ll actually be in the middle of reading something — when I’ll suddenly think, You need to drop what you’re doing and read this other thing instead. That doesn’t happen often; two or three times a year, maybe. But it is an inner prompting (like Socrates’s δαιμόνιον) that I have learned to obey. I don’t know where it comes from, but I do know that when the impulse comes I find it irresistible. I have learned to accept the prompt and to be grateful for it.
So: a few weeks ago, I was in the middle of planning some reading, and I looked up from whatever I had on my lap, my computer or my notebook, and my eyes fell on my copy of Joseph and His Brothers, and I thought: It’s time to read that. I did, and I couldn’t possibly be happier that I did; it’s an outrageously brilliant work of art. While reading I had thought that I might write a long essay about the experience of reading this book, but on further consideration I doubt that my responses to it would fit into an essay. They’re too complicated and digressive. (In that sense, they’re much like the book itself.) So I’ll be writing about it here, on themes and topics and events that interest me, in no particular order. It’s not the sort of book that you comprehend on one reading – it’s not the sort of book that you can even confidently navigate in in one reading – so my attempt to write about it will require me to re-navigate it, to return and reread and rethink and reconsider. Stay tuned. I mean, if you’re into this kind of thing.