Without death there is no art. […] What I want is to leave behind a shelf of books.
Martin Amis (1949-2023)
Readers are welcome to join the story here; my goal in this quintet, beyond the obligatory ‘Europe-building’ outlined in Volume One, is to document the contacts of my spirit between my 40th and 45th birthdays, so this second volume might well end up representing a peak in the central range of my vidinha, that most beautiful Portuguese word for a life. In the year of ChatGPT and utter panic at the purpose of individual human creativity, let these ten chapters stand as a cosmically infinitesimal monument to what will always be possible: the patient engagement of one human brain with the works of others. Something in this act, however privately delicious and small, is public; the whole business means nothing if the brain conjoining these experiences will die unreported into the eons of our species’ future. The solitude of such confinement, if guaranteed, is dreadful; no amount of chemical pleasure could compensate for a flat zero probability of influence on the brains of others. A slim but greater-than-nothing hope of contact is what ‘Europe’ above all promises - ‘a common heritage, a perceived future,’ in translator Will Stone’s enthusiastic phrasing, ‘where borders define neighbouring cultures eager to converse and reciprocate.’[1] The point is not that you take what I tell you, but that you inhale what you need from all this, from what I once needed.
My subtitle here, ‘Universes of Pain’, should not frighten anyone away: if pain is among other things the lack of something loved, then it is merely a synonym for the meaningful existence that I have variously recovered, first in these sources themselves, and then by resoldering them into an alphabetical story of my own capricious making. As an occasional sleep paralysis sufferer, I have endured, for minutes at a time, the unparalleled terror that Emmanuel Carrère, famous for his notion that ‘writing about other people is tantamount to torturing them’, describes in his account of a four-year-old boy rendered permanently
‘deaf, dumb, blind, and paralysed – not comatose, but walled-up inside his own consciousness.’ [… Carrère] imagines the boy worrying at first, but reassuring himself that his parents will come and turn on the lights soon; realizing that he can’t feel his limbs or hear himself speak, and that he has no way of communicating with his parents; concluding that he is completely alone, and, finally, ‘silently screaming.’ Carrère allows himself the license to try and imagine what was going on in the boy’s mind by identifying with him and attempting to achieve an impossible connection.
[…] Though Carrère maintains that he doesn’t think ‘you can put yourself in other people’s positions’—ventriloquize—and nor should you, he offers, once again reaching for an impersonal pronoun, that as an alternative ‘you can … occupy your own [position] as fully as possible, and say that you are trying to imagine what it’s like to be someone else,’ without pretending to be that person. The difference may be subtle, but for Carrère it presents the only remaining option which doesn’t altogether abandon the possibility of human connection.[2]
I have chosen to take individual bites from ten well-flanked beasts here instead of trying to devour a single animal – a hunting strategy with clear advantages and disadvantages, but the one to which I am by now best accustomed. Janet Malcolm’s warning that good writers betray an ‘intention of collaborating’ with their subjects – turning the lives of others into genuine literature instead of just using them as advertising for themselves – rings constantly in my ears: I inevitably chew up these monsters in my mouthful accounts of their hulking bodies, offering a saliva-addled parody of a whole not patiently studied and tasted. But Europe allows such bona fide dilettantism; nay, it urgently requires it. To the authors I contort via misrepresentation and sins of omission here, know that I found something in you, albeit one tiny part of you, that you could not possibly have predicted; I am the conduit through which a certain knowledge transcending all of us may, in these pages, freely pass and survive transmuted in future readers, but I have no more way of knowing what that knowledge is than you do.
Tübingen, February 2024
Postscript
Chapters 11 and 19 are devoted to Palestinian authors Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani. Chapter 11 (on Darwish) was drafted in May 2023 (i.e. before the historic and brutally graphic events of October 7), while the Kanafani chapter was drafted afterwards (in December). It is worth pausing to stress the stifling intellectual climate in which the latter chapter in particular was written; the German government’s stance since October 7 has made free speech (and indeed free thought) on the subject of Palestine – the attempt to uncover what one thinks through open conversation, the most basic of human liberties - a fraught business. Reviewing the contents of both chapters in early 2024, I realise that accusations of anti-Semitism and unconstitutional language could be levelled against me in Germany. Allow me to address these possible (alas, probable) accusations briefly here. It is sad that I have to say these things explicitly, but allow me both to protect myself and to allay the fears of any who would misunderstand me, wilfully or otherwise, by selectively quoting other sections of this book.
I believe that the UN partition of Palestine in 1947 was an injustice, and I believe in the Palestinian people’s right of resistance to this injustice (and the compound injustices which followed, most notably in 1948, 1967 and 1993) within the terms set by international law. I do not believe, however, that any single Jew should be removed from historical Palestine by force or denied citizenship in a post-apartheid state in Israel-Palestine. Just as white South Africans were invited by Mandela to remain in South Africa at the end of apartheid, so too should Jewish citizens of Israel be free to remain after a proper solution is found. What I do not believe, however – and here I agree with the two Palestinian authors I discuss – is that the status quo, fundamentally unchanged since 1948, is tenable; Israel can be, and must learn to be, a state for Jews without being exclusively or discriminatorily Jewish. Precisely in view of its special responsibility vis-à-vis the global Jewish community, Germany should raise its voice at least as loud as others on the side of humanist justice. In this book, I seek nothing other than to apply German law, the spirit and letter of which I wholly endorse as it emphasises ‘Germany’s special historical responsibility for the crimes and consequences of National Socialism, and in particular for the protection of Jewish life’. This is not some cheap and reluctant disclaimer, though I would hope that any serious reader would know this of me without having to be told.
[1] See Benjamin Shull, ‘Nietzsche in Italy Review: A Wanderer and His Shadow’, https://www.wsj.com/articles/nietzsche-in-italy-book-review-a-wanderer-and-his-shadow-cfba5247?st=57rmb8iafjpnnl9&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink, 28/4/2023 (accessed 23/5/2023).
[2] Marcus Hijkoop, ‘The Autofiction Writer and the Torturer’, https://compactmag.com/article/the-autofiction-writer-and-the-torturer, 19/5/2023 (accessed 23/5/2023).