Category: Access

I love talking about books I haven’t read.  In part because it’s a national tradition, ever since everybody in Russia came up with something nasty to say about Doctor Zhivago without having laid eyes on the novel. But partly, and on a more serious note, because it’s very much in the general tradition of literary dramaturgy, when utterly fictional writers, painters, or composers tread the boards with splendid aplomb even as the reader is left wondering about what their novels, paintings, or sonatas might actually be like.

Friends, acquaintances, sometimes virtual strangers who are acquaintances of friends, come to visit us in Palermo and stay with us every so often. Obviously impressions of the personages inhabiting one’s own house are vivid, far more intense than of those with whom one dines or has drinks, whence, inevitably, the urge to somehow reflect on them in this diary.

No less than Time, which the precocious T. S. Eliot pedantically capitalized already in his school essays, Memory is a slippery subject.