Fiction, from 1998: “A man’s memory is not a summation; it is a chaos of vague possibilities.”
There are devotees of Goethe, of the Edda, of the late song of the Nibelungen; my fate has been Shakespeare. As it still is, though in a way that no one could have foreseen—no one save one man, Daniel Thorpe, who just recently died in Pretoria. There is another man, too, whose face I have never seen.
After a long session, night found us in a pub—an undistinguished place that might have been any pub in London. To make ourselves feel that we were in England , we drained many a ritual pewter mug of dark warm beer. It was at that point that Daniel Thorpe spoke up. He spoke, somehow, impersonally, without looking at us. His English had a peculiar accent, which I attributed to a long stay in the East.
The name of the soldier and the pathetic scene of the bestowal struck me as “literary,” in the worst sense of the word. It all made me somewhat leery.“What I possess,” Thorpe answered, “are still two memories—my own personal memory and the memory of the Shakespeare that I partially am. Or, rather, two memories possess. There is a place where they merge, somehow. There is a woman’s face. . . . I am not sure what century it belongs to.”There was a silence.
In spite of that long night without sleep, I hardly slept at all the following night. I found, as I had so many times before, that I was a coward. Out of fear of disappointment, I could not deliver myself up to openhanded hope. I preferred to think that Thorpe’s gift was illusory. But hope did, irresistibly, come to prevail. I would possess Shakespeare, and possess him as no one had ever possessed anyone before—not in love, or friendship, or even hatred. I, in some way, wouldShakespeare.
The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires theof becoming familiar with one and another of those things. If that is the case with a concrete, and relatively simple, entity , then what must happen with a thing that is abstract and variable—No one may capture in a single instant the fullness of his entire past.
Goethe, as we all know, is Germany’s official religion; the worship of Shakespeare, which we profess not without nostalgia, is more private.
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