Literary Wanderlust

Kimmo Rosenthal has turned from a career in mathematics and teaching to writing. His most recent work has appeared in After the Art, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Decadent Review, The Fib Review, Hinterland, The Dillydoun Review, and BigCityLit. He also has a Pushcart Prize nomination and is a non-fiction Staff Reader for Ploughshares.

Language is like a road; it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time. Thus states Rebecca Solnit in her book Wanderlust (A History of Walking). She also observes that when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back. I immediately thought of replacing “places” with  “books”, being reminded of Proust saying every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. He likens books to optical instruments, allowing us to see ourselves in a new light. Other analogies between reading and walking can be gleaned while reading Solnit’s book. Both can be viewed as a crucial way of being in the world, and both are contemplative and aesthetic experiences. I found myself at times replacing “city” with  “book” and “walking” with  “reading,” and realized that the passages still resonated. Reading is a form of mental travel through the landscape of the imagination. Pilgrimages being described as walks in search of transcendence recalls Borges famously imagining that if paradise exists, then it should be a library. Judith Schalansky proclaims that the library (is) the true theater of world events. She also avers that writing can be more important than experiencing.  Scribere necesse est, vivere non est.

Books can indeed provide a journey to new worlds, liberating us from time and the contingencies of so-called reality. And so, I have come to think of reading (and its companion,  writing) as a form of journey, exploring the terrain of the imagination, where the landmarks consist of thoughts, images, and feelings.

Once I discovered the work of Gerald Murnane, I began to think of my reading as a kind of literary wanderlust. The very titles such as Inland, The Plains, and Landscape with Landscape evoked the idea of a journey and a search. I recently saw him referred to as a grounded visionary. Murnane, who has never really travelled, never been on a plane, and does not own a computer, has stated that he has no need to travel for he can do all the traveling he wants in his mind. He travels on private maps, where the truth exists somewhere in the “folds”. The place that matters to me most is a place in my mind…all the other images that matter to me are arranged around the image of that place like townships on a map.

Murnane inspired me to seek out philosophical and introspective works inviting self-reflection. My gaze  centered away from the prevailing winds towards literary landscapes on the far horizon of reading, while believing Murnane’s claim in Stone Quarry, that the precious resource (of a writer) is the belief that he or she is the solitary witness to an inexhaustible profusion of images from which one might read all the wisdom of the world.

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There is no book offering greater testimony to this than Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I often find myself returning to visit these cities, which constantly appear as new and fresh, replete with surprises. Traveling through them is like traversing a map of life, for they seemingly encompass everything. As Marco Polo regales the Kublai Khan with tales of his travels, Khan, feeling estranged from his own destiny, is enthralled, as Polo transcends reality through imagination, reverie, and poetry. He speaks of the lake of the mind and the zodiac of the mind’s phantasms, while reminding Khan that everything imaginable can be dreamed. Like the books in Borges’ Library of Babel, the catalogue of forms is endless. Until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. In these continuous cities, hidden cities with their secrets, thin cities, fragile and tenuous, cities of melancholic memories and desires, you can allow yourself to be dreamed while becoming lost in a labyrinth of streets and signs, forever seeking to become an emblem among emblems in your own undiscovered city.

Now, imagine a sui generis travel book of real places compiled exclusively from reading, maps, and the imagination. Judith Schalansky’s Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands (50 Islands That I Have Never Visited and Never Will) demonstrates that the library indeed provides a theater box to the world. This book is a paean to erudition and the intellect, evoking the same magic as Calvino’s cities. Growing up in East Germany when travel was prohibited, Schalansky had to make do with books and maps, where she says she discovered the stories and made them mine.

A literary landscape should be adorned by beautiful language. The concinnity of her prose enthralls, whether it limpidly captures geographic details, or  is burnished, and elegant. The islands become a mise-en-scène for human drama, the full panoply of lust, greed, madness, and despair unfolding before us. Her description of Brava evokes an earthly paradise, with the dew on the almond trees and the sounds of the minor-key morna plucked on the lute-like cavaquinho. It encapsulates the yearning for a place that is at once everywhere and nowhere.

Reading and writing both involve solitary searches. In The Plains, Murnane muses on the peculiar pleasure of knowing that one’s prized discovery is of no value to others. In fact, it is enhanced rather than diminished by being inexplicable.

And, indeed, how can we possibly  explain the labors and joys of our own, private, literary wanderlust?