Oh, what a world! -

27 March 2009 @ 02:37 pm

In London, in early June of the year 1929, the rare book dealer Joseph Cartaphilus, of Smyrna, offered
the princess de Lucingethe six quarto minor volumes (1715-1720) of Pope's Iliad.

The princess purchased them; when she took possession of them, she exchanged a few words with the dealer. He was, she says, an emaciated, grimy man with gray eyes and gray beard and singularly vague features.

He expressed himself with untutored and uncorrected fluency in several languages; within scant minutes he
shifted from French to English and from English to an enigmatic cross between the Spanish of Salonika
and the Portuguese of Macao.

In October, the princess heard from a passenger on the Zeus that Cartaphilus had died at sea while returning to Smyrna, and that he had been buried on the island Oflos.

In the last volume of the Iliad she found this manuscript. It is written in an English that teems with Latinisms; this is a verbatim transcription of the document.

(...) My travails, I have said, began in a garden in Thebes. All that night I did not sleep, for there was a combat in my heart. I rose at last a little before dawn.

My slaves were sleeping; the moon was the color
of the infinite sand.

A bloody rider was approaching from the east, weak with exhaustion. A few steps
from me, he dismounted and in a faint, insatiable voice asked me, in Latin, the name of the river whose
waters laved the city’s walls. I told him it was the Egypt, fed by the rains.
"It is another river that I seek," he replied morosely, "the secret river that purifies men of death."

He added that on the far shore of that river lay the City of the Immortals, a city rich in bulwarks and amphitheaters and temples. He died before dawn, but I resolved to go in quest of that city and its river.

I cannot say how many days and nights passed over me. In pain, unable to return to the shelter of the
caverns, naked on the unknown sand, I let the moon and the sun cast lots for my bleak fate.

The Troglodytes, childlike in their barbarity, helped me neither survive nor die. In vain did I plead with them to kill me.

At first I thought that this was some sort of barbaric writing; then I realized that it was absurd to imagine that men who had never learned to speak should have invented writing.

The man would draw them, look at them, and correct them. Then suddenly, as though his game irritated him, he would rub them out with his palm and forearm. He looked up at me, though he seemed not to recognize me.

The Troglodyte walked ahead of me; that night I resolved to teach him to recognize, perhaps even to repeat, a few words.

Though but a few
paces from me, he seemed immensely distant.

The Troglodyte walked ahead of me; that night I resolved to teach him to recognize, perhaps even to repeat, a few words. Dogs and horses, I reflected, are able to do the first; many birds, like the Caesars’ nightingale, can do the second.

However scant a man’s understanding, it will always be greater than that of unreasoning beasts.

Until one morning, something very much like joy occurred—the sky rained slow, strong rain.

We accept reality so readily—perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

I asked Argoshow much of the Odyssey he knew.

He found using Greek difficult; I had to repeat the question.

Very little, he replied. Less than the meagerest rhapsode. It has been eleven hundred years since last I wrote it.

That day, all was revealed to me. The Troglodytes were the Immortals.

Out of the shattered remains of the City’s ruin they had built on the same spot the incoherent city I had wandered through—that parody or antithesis of a city which was also a temple to the irrational gods that rule the world and to those gods about whom we
know nothing save that they do not resemble man.

In their self-absorption, they scarcely perceived the physical world.

These things were explained to me by Homer as one might explain things to a child.

Like a god who created
first the Cosmos, and then Chaos.

There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are
immortal, for they know nothing of death.

What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know
oneself immortal.

I have noticed that in spite of religion, the conviction as to one’s own immortality is
extraordinarily rare.

Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration
paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe only in those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive.

Taught by centuries of living, the republic of immortal men had achieved
a perfection of tolerance, almost of disdain.

I have been Homer; soon, like
Ulysses, I shall be Nobody; soon, I shall be all men—I shall be dead.

No one is someone; a single immortal man is all men.

I know of men who have done evil in order that good may come of it in future centuries.

Nothing can occur but once, nothing is preciously in peril of being lost.

Death (or reference to death) makes men precious and pathetic; their ghostliness is touching; any act
they perform may be their last.

Viewed in that way, all our acts are just, though also unimportant. There are no spiritual or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; given infinite time, with infinite circumstances and changes, it is impossible that the Odyssey should not be composed at least once.

Fragments from The Immortal by Jorge Luis Borges.