“There is no such thing as chance,
everything is linked together”, Sarah would have[1]
said. Why had I just today received by post this article, an old-fashioned
reprint on paper, with staples, rather than a PDF file accompanied by a
covering email (which might[2]
have included some of her news, and which might have let me know where she was
and what this Sarawak place was where she was writing from) ? According to
my atlas, it is a state of Malaysia situated in the North West of the island of
Borneo, just next to Brunei, land of the wealthy sultan, and not far at all
from Debussy’s and Britten’s gamelans, I believe. Yet the content of the
article was quite[3] different : there was no
music in it, apart from, perhaps, a long funeral dirge ; there were twenty
closely printed pages which had been published in the September edition of Representations, a fine journal[4]
from the University of Californa to which she had frequently contributed.
A brief dedication appeared on the cover page
of the article, without any further comment « For you, my dear
Franz, with all my love, Sarah ». It had been posted on November 17th,
that is to say two weeks previously – it still took two weeks for a letter to
travel from Malaysia to Austria ; perhaps she had been a little mean with
the stamps - she could[5]
have put a postcard in too. What was the meaning of all this ? I went
through all I had left of her in my apartment, her articles, two books, a few
photographs and even a copy of her doctoral thesis, printed in a red Skivertex
binding, two heavy volumes weighing more than six pounds each :
« In
life, there are wounds which, like leprosy, eat away at the soul when one is
alone »,[6] writes the Iranian author
Sadegh Hedayat at the beginning of his novel The Blind Owl : the
short man with round spectacles knew this better than anyone else. It was one these
wounds that led him to turn the gas full on in his apartment on the Rue
Championnet in Paris, one night he was feeling particularly lonely, a night in
April, far away from Iran, very far away indeed ; his only company was[7]
a couple of poems written by Omar Khayyam and perhaps an old bottle of Cognac,
or a tablet of opium, or perhaps nothing, nothing at all, apart from the pages
he kept by him and which were taken with him in the vast emptiness of the gas.
Skivertex
[1] By using « would have
said » you avoid the potential ambiguity of « would say ».
[2] We are speaking here of an
imaginary email. « Might » is the best option. The difficulty with
« could » is it suggests physical capacity, which imaginary emails do
not have.
[3] Notice that, here, the word
« quite » means « completely ».
[4] Academics generally write in
journals, not magazines.
[5] Here it i sbest to use
« could » because « might » would be ambiguous.
[6] Be careful with the
distinction between solitude and loneliness.
[7] Note that this cannot be
plural.
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