I succeed at doing almost nothing day after day, alone in our house – now it seems big and empty, with Chrissy gone and the living room and her room completely emptied out. I am reading War and Peace, though, and today I read a footnote which I find a little heartbreaking. In the story, an important character, Pierre, has laid out cards for a game of Patience (another name for solitaire) to decide whether he will leave Moscow or not. Though he gets the outcome that means he should leave, he stays because it's really what he wants to do. The edition I'm reading, the Norton, uses the "Maude translation" -- translated by Aylmer Maude and edited by his wife, Louise Maude. Aylmer met Tolstoy and became devoted to him – according to the preface, he died living in a "Tolstoyan colony near Chelmsford" in 1938. The Norton editor, Goerge Gibian, retains a number of what he cause "Aylmer Maude's copious and useful footnotes," including one after the episode of Pierre and the game of solitaire. Maude notes that:
This footnote, it seems to me, is like a swaying chain of smoke rings. It's deeply, even tragically personal – Tolstoy and his unfinished article, Maude and his love of Tolstoy, Mary Tolstoy and her love of her father, Pierre and his love of his country, Gibian and his love of Maude's translation – all of these deeply personal feelings are here, and important. Maude talks to Mary, who remembers her father, who created a character who remembers his country, and Gibian memorializes them all by choosing to include the original footnote. And yet, this deeply personal feeling, this touch – it feels almost physical – is at the same time so distant. It is a series of recollections, of tenuous associations. Mary and Maude's memories are only tenuously attached to the text, let alone the man; the footnote as it remains seems a misty, almost quaint leftover – what can Tolstoy's daughter's recollection of an article that never came to be tell us about how War and Peace affects our lives now?
But the thing is – I want it to affect me. No – it does affect me. I feel as if, in this moment inside of this book I've actually touched something, someone, a chain of someones – Gibian, Maude, Mary, Tolstoy, Pierre. We contact one another in this moment of reading. I am alone in the empty living room (the dead room, it almost seems now, with nothing in it), but it isn't dead, it isn't empty, because when I read, I go over ground where so many others have been – and some of them have left traces, where something – I don't know what, but something – remains.
I know. It's terribly Romantic and mystical. It maybe isn’t useful for anything. But that's the deal, isn't it? In the end, I don't do what I do because I think it's useful. I hope it is. It try to make it useful, to teach people about living and being good people and good users of language, as well as knowledgeable readers and writers. But the real reason I read – and read and read and read – the reason I have always read is that I want to fill those empty, dead, rooms. I want to make life inside the places that seem to have no life, and contacting books – and the chain of other, smoke-ring-like readers who have read them before me – is a way to do that.
And so Maude's footnote, and the retention of if, both breaks my heart and mends it again. "At Ysanay Polayna in 1906 shortly before his daughter Mary died" – it is in itself a way to understand how literature bypasses death, or emptiness. Tolstoy, his daughter, the Maudes, Gibian – they're all dead. Someday, sooner or later, I'll be dead too. But after I am dead, other readers will still read about Pierre playing solitaire, deciding whether or not to leave Moscow before Napoleon sacks the city, as Pierre believes he will certainly do. And even if they do not read it – if War and Peace ceases to be popular; if people stop reading books; if there stop being people – Pierre will still go on playing that game of solitaire. He has been created and he has lived and he has played solitaire, over and over and over. Every time someone has read about him, he has been created, he has lived, he has played solitaire. And he has never really died. Books don't die. They just end. And when you open them up, they're still there, exactly as they always were. Even if you don't open them up again, they're still there exactly as they always were. You change, the world changes, language changes, but the book itself remains. (In the end, yes, I do think it does. That there is…well…a book itself. And endlessly replicated experience that we call Language Spoken.)
And so I'm glad I read that footnote today. Thank you, Aylmer Maude, Louise Maude, George Gibian, Mary Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy – thanks for being there with me. Thank you for filling up the empty rooms.
Tolstoy himself often laid out the cards for patience to decide questions he felt doubtful about, and like Pierre in this section he disregard the decision given by the cards if it did not suit him.
At Yasnaya Polyana in 1906 shortly before his daughter Mary died, she told me that being undecided about completing an article he had begun he had laid out a patience to decide whether that article would be of use to the world. The patience did not come out, but he rose from table with the remark: 'All the same I shall write it.'
This footnote, it seems to me, is like a swaying chain of smoke rings. It's deeply, even tragically personal – Tolstoy and his unfinished article, Maude and his love of Tolstoy, Mary Tolstoy and her love of her father, Pierre and his love of his country, Gibian and his love of Maude's translation – all of these deeply personal feelings are here, and important. Maude talks to Mary, who remembers her father, who created a character who remembers his country, and Gibian memorializes them all by choosing to include the original footnote. And yet, this deeply personal feeling, this touch – it feels almost physical – is at the same time so distant. It is a series of recollections, of tenuous associations. Mary and Maude's memories are only tenuously attached to the text, let alone the man; the footnote as it remains seems a misty, almost quaint leftover – what can Tolstoy's daughter's recollection of an article that never came to be tell us about how War and Peace affects our lives now?
But the thing is – I want it to affect me. No – it does affect me. I feel as if, in this moment inside of this book I've actually touched something, someone, a chain of someones – Gibian, Maude, Mary, Tolstoy, Pierre. We contact one another in this moment of reading. I am alone in the empty living room (the dead room, it almost seems now, with nothing in it), but it isn't dead, it isn't empty, because when I read, I go over ground where so many others have been – and some of them have left traces, where something – I don't know what, but something – remains.
I know. It's terribly Romantic and mystical. It maybe isn’t useful for anything. But that's the deal, isn't it? In the end, I don't do what I do because I think it's useful. I hope it is. It try to make it useful, to teach people about living and being good people and good users of language, as well as knowledgeable readers and writers. But the real reason I read – and read and read and read – the reason I have always read is that I want to fill those empty, dead, rooms. I want to make life inside the places that seem to have no life, and contacting books – and the chain of other, smoke-ring-like readers who have read them before me – is a way to do that.
And so Maude's footnote, and the retention of if, both breaks my heart and mends it again. "At Ysanay Polayna in 1906 shortly before his daughter Mary died" – it is in itself a way to understand how literature bypasses death, or emptiness. Tolstoy, his daughter, the Maudes, Gibian – they're all dead. Someday, sooner or later, I'll be dead too. But after I am dead, other readers will still read about Pierre playing solitaire, deciding whether or not to leave Moscow before Napoleon sacks the city, as Pierre believes he will certainly do. And even if they do not read it – if War and Peace ceases to be popular; if people stop reading books; if there stop being people – Pierre will still go on playing that game of solitaire. He has been created and he has lived and he has played solitaire, over and over and over. Every time someone has read about him, he has been created, he has lived, he has played solitaire. And he has never really died. Books don't die. They just end. And when you open them up, they're still there, exactly as they always were. Even if you don't open them up again, they're still there exactly as they always were. You change, the world changes, language changes, but the book itself remains. (In the end, yes, I do think it does. That there is…well…a book itself. And endlessly replicated experience that we call Language Spoken.)
And so I'm glad I read that footnote today. Thank you, Aylmer Maude, Louise Maude, George Gibian, Mary Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy – thanks for being there with me. Thank you for filling up the empty rooms.
Um, hi. I found your blog via your OKCupid profile and, well, I think you have nifty brains.
Jack Collins
blackjack@jolly-roger.com