Bunin, "Зеркало"

A work ("Mirror") by this Russian man of letters.  You can read the original here.

As wintry day grows dim, as calm shades touch   
Descending on our souls, reflections cross 
Into a mirror darkened now and lost:  
Such perhaps is death.  Yes, perhaps, just such. 

Alone in tomb-like murk, a red flame sways
From my cigar, a wondrous jewel bright;  
My fire once doused, a trace will drift away –
A fragrant, slender fume to endless night.

Who set this fire ablaze?  Whose fingers dear, 
Whose sparkling rings cascaded along the keys? 
Both sadness fills my soul, and ecstasy, 
Because this tomb-like murk I do not fear.

Under the Rose

There are countless ways to dream oneself a writer, but only one lonely path to ever achieving that noble aim (as a character in this overhyped novel discovers). In our days of mass market publishing, where even the oddest and vilest of tomes can find print and accolades, we are no longer obliged to peruse obscure journals, college newspapers, or even minor presses to learn of novelties. Nor should we be doing so, anyway: literature of genius rarely, if ever banners the young. Juvenilia and apprentice writings often stun the assiduous researcher just as much as the older writer, who, hopeful of youth's energy, ends up quickly squinting at his first pages through trembling, forked fingers. Occasionally, however, one finds a lollygagging charm in the younger writer not evident in his more careful and ironic successor. A good introduction to a story in this collection.

Our protagonist is a porcupine (and, as we learn from the author's introduction, the antagonist is a mole), which may explain his overweening antipathy to human interaction. He also doesn't like people because he spends his days and nights watching them, lying to them, and, on harsh occasion, murdering them. Porpentine is our man in Cairo, or, as the story opens, in Alexandria, and his tasks accumulate as Britain nears this historical conflict which he deems inevitable. We meet him, "his face ... carefully arranged: nerveless, rakish-expectant, he might have been there to meet a lady," in one of those cafés which subsist on fictional intelligence officers. As it were, his watch keeps promising him his ruddy-cheeked colleague in espial, Goodfellow, and while the latter ambles through Muhammad Ali square, we are afforded a glimpse into their situation (soon, of course, to become the Situation):

Tender and sheepish, therefore, they wove their paths to cross his own at random. Mirrored, too, his private tactics: living in the most frequented hotels, sitting at the tourist cafés, traveling always by the respectable, public routes. Which surely upset him most; as if, Porpentine once having fashioned such proper innocence, any use of it by others – especially Moldweorp's agents – involved some violation of patent right. They would pirate if they could his child's gaze, his plump angel's smile. For nearly fifteen years he'd fled their sympathy; since the lobby of the Hotel Bristol, Naples, on a winter evening in '83, when everyone you knew in spying's freemasonry seemed to be waiting. For Khartoum to fall, for the crisis in Afghanistan to keep growing until it could be given the name of sure apocalypse. There he had come, as he'd known he must at some stage of the game, to face the already aged face of Moldweorp himself, the prizeman or maestro, feel the old man's hand solicitous on his arm and hear the earnest whisper: 'Things are reaching a head, we may be for it, all of us, do be careful.'

That Moldweorp would now be the German Maulwurf, with the double meaning intact, is not lost on Pynchon; nor is the fact that although "Porpentine worked nominally for England and Moldweorp for Germany, they probably would have chosen the same sides had their employments been reversed." A ruthless game will be afoot as "Egypt's sun beat down, somehow threatening," but the questions asked are the same as in every trial of the spy: whom can I trust, and what happens when I cannot even trust them?

Much more happens: Goodfellow finds a bedfellow in eighteen-year-old Victoria Wren (both cataract and Queen would not be amused); Victoria's much younger sister Mildred is pawned off, in a somewhat perverse aside, on Porpentine; the girls' father Sir Alistair continues to comb Egypt for a decent pipe-organ, finding a less than perfect one and imbuing our quilled hero, if briefly, with a sense of the otherworld; and slowly but surely a plot thickens and bubbles around a Consul who will be at a certain time and place in the gun-sight of a host of malefactors. The plot of Under the Rose is pure Buchan, with the concomitant nastiness and topicality which both makes the Scot a joy to read and assures his oblivion. And like in Buchan's war-torn landscapes there are glimmering jewels amidst this dusty, treacherous desert: "He fell asleep reading an old and mutilated edition of Antony and Cleopatra and wondering if it were still possible to fall under the spell of Egypt: its tropic unreality, its curious gods"; "As if her glow were a reminder of any Yorkshire sunset, or at least some vestige of a vision of Home which neither he nor Goodfellow could afford"; "So that at some point, prowling any mews or alley in midcentury London, the supreme rightness of 'the game for its own sake' must have occurred to him, and acted as an irresistible vector aimed toward 1900." Yet one of the finest and most curious passages relates the last year of decisions by Victoria, who seems to have come to Egypt so as to elope from it: 

This was her first trip abroad. She talked a great deal about her religion: had, for a time, considered the son of God as a young lady will consider any eligible bachelor. But had realized eventually that of course he was not, but maintained instead an immense harem clad in black, decked with rosaries. She would never stand for such competition, had therefore left the novitiate after a matter of weeks but not the Church: that, with its sad-faced statuary, its odor of candles and incense, formed along with an uncle Evelyn, the twin foci of her serene orbit. The uncle, a wild or renegade sundowner, would arrive from Australia once a year bringing no gifts but prepared to weave as many yarns as the sisters could cope with. As far as Victoria remembered, he had never repeated himself. 

There are college term papers to be drafted with Victoria's devotion as that of the fledgling writer (the quite proper use of "novitiate" will nevertheless surely be adduced as a hint), with his religion being literature itself. Yet it is the last line which remains the most marvelous. A raconteur, you see, is someone who, with a phony aside or two, only repeats others; a bore is someone who only repeats himself. That is why, also along with the Wrens, specifically along with Victoria, a zealous pyramid hunter, a certain Bongo-Shaftsbury, can go on and on about silly archeological artefacts and other such nonsense yet not appear to pose any romantic obstacles. That is also why there is another type of profession in which repetition and boringness are virtues. Well, they were virtues until they were replaced "by trends and tendencies and impersonal curves on a lattice of pale blue lines." Very thin and cracked pale blue lines.         

Baudelaire, "Le joueur généreux"

A prose poem ("The generous gambler") by this French poet, and source of a very famous quotation.  You can read the original here.

Yesterday amidst the boardwalk crowd I felt myself grazed by a mysterious Being whom I recognized immediately and had always desired to meet, although I had never once laid eyes on him.  He was doubtless of like desire, for in passing he gave me a suggestive wink which I hastened to obey.  I followed him closely; and soon I descended behind him into a dazzling underground abode of a luxury none of Paris's finest houses could ever hope to approach.  It was remarkable that I could have passed by this imposing lair so often without detecting its entrance.  There reigned a carefully constructed, if intoxicating atmosphere which almost instantly erased all the tedious horrors of life; one's lungs filled with a somber beatitude akin to that which must afflict the lotus eater when, disembarking upon an enchanted isle beneath the rays of eternal afternoon, he feels born within them and, amidst the soporific sounds of melodious waterfalls, is then overcome by the desire never again to see his native shores, his wife, or his children, nor anew to scale the frothy crests of the sea. 

There were unknown men's and women's faces of fatal beauty which I believed to have seen before in epochs or countries now impossible to recall with any exactness; faces which inspired within me not the fear ordinarily generated by a stranger's countenance, but rather a certain fraternal sympathy.  Were I to attempt a description of the singular look in their eyes,  I would insist on never having beheld gazes so energetically aglow with the horror, boredom, and immortal desire of feeling alive.      

By the time we sat down my host and I had already become old and perfect friends.  We ate; we drank immoderately of all sorts of extraordinary wines; and, no less extraordinarily, after several such hours I seemed no more drunk than he.  Nevertheless, our wagers, that superhuman pleasure, had at various intervals interrupted our frequent libations; and I must admit that I gambled away my soul, owing in no small part to heroic insouciance and frivolity.  Yet the soul being such an impalpable thing, so often useless and sometimes so annoying, I experienced in this loss only slightly less emotion than if I had misplaced, while out on a stroll, my business card.     

For a long while we smoked several cigars whose incomparable flavor and aroma imbued my soul with a yearning for unknown shores and joys; inebriated on all these delights, and seizing a cup filled to the brim in a moment of excessive familiarity that did not seem to displeasure my host, I dared pronounce: "To your immortal health, Old Goat!"

We also spoke about the universe, about its creation and its future destruction; about the century's greatest idea, that is to say, about progress and perfectibility; and, in general about all the repositories of human infatuation.  On this subject His Highness did not lack for light-hearted and irrefutable humor, expressing himself with a smoothness of diction and calmness of wit which I had never observed among all the world's most celebrated speakers.  He explained to me the absurdity of various philosophies which had occupied human thought to the present day, and even deigned to entrust me with several fundamental principles whose benefits and propriety I was not to share with anyone.  He never once bemoaned the poor reputation he enjoyed in every corner of the world; he assured me that he himself was the most interested of all in seeing superstition's demise, and that he had been fearful with regard to his own power on only one occasion.  This was the day he had overheard a preacher, one more subtle than his colleagues, screaming from a pulpit: "When you hear praise, my brothers, of the progress brought by the Enlightenment, never forget that the Devil's greatest trick is convincing you that he doesn't exist!" 

The recollection of that celebrated orator naturally led us to the subject of the academies, and my strange companion affirmed that it was hardly beneath him in many instances to breath life into a pedagogue's quill or speech, or even his conscience, and that he was almost always in attendance, if invisible, at all academy sessions.  

Encouraged by such unstinting revelation, I asked him about God and whether he had recently seen Him.  With an insouciance tinged with a certain sadness, he responded: "We greet one another whenever we meet, but in the fashion of two old gentlemen in whom innate politeness could never fully extinguish the memory of ancient grudges." 

It was doubtful that His Highness had ever given such a lengthy audience to a mere mortal, and I was afraid to abuse my privileges.  Finally, just as quivering dawn was whitening the panes, this celebrated character, sung by so many poets and served by so many philosophers unknowingly laboring towards his glory, said to me: "I want you to remember me fondly; and, as someone to whom people impute so much ill, I also wish to prove to you that I am at times – if I may borrow a vernacular expression – a good devil.  In order to compensate the irreparable loss you have made of your soul, I will give you anyway what you would have won if your lot had been favorable, that is to say, the possibility of alleviating and defeating, for as long as you live, this bizarre feeling of boredom which is the source of all of humanity's maladies and miserable progress.  There will be no desire formed in your heart that I won't help you attain; you will reign over your peers; you will be covered in praise and even in adoration; money, gold, diamonds, and enchanting palaces will seek you out and implore you to accept them, without your having made the slightest effort towards their obtainment.  You will shift country and region as often as your imagination bids you to do so; you will be drunk indefatigably on sensual pleasures in charming locales where it is always warm and women smell as fragrant as flowers, and so forth and so on," he added as he rose and, with a pleasant smile, dispatched me thence.

Had I not been afraid of humiliating myself before such a large gathering, I would have willingly grovelled at the feet of this generous gambler in gratitude for his unprecedented munificence.  After having taken my leave, however, incurable defiance little by little returned to my heart; I could scarcely believe in such prodigious fortune.  And so, as I went to bed, praying out of imbecile habit, I repeated, half-asleep: "My God!  O Lord! Have the Devil keep his word to me!"   

Verlaine, "Mon rêve familier"

A work ("My familiar dream") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

I often dream this vivid dream so droll:
An unknown whom I love, and who loves me; 
And who, each time, is not the same, you see,
Nor truly other, yet who loves me whole.

She loves me whole, my heart, whose truth unfolds
To her alone, alas! no problem wields
For her alone, my pale brow's dampest fields
Alone can she refresh, with teardrops rolled.

A blonde, brunette, or redhead?  I know not.
Her name?  My memory says sonorous, soft, 
Like those beloved whom this Life's expelled.

Her gaze resembles those of statues grim,
Whereas her voice, so distant, grave, and quelled,
Recalls dear voices now in silent hymn.

Benito Cereno

Life and its cruel minions have tamed us to see what it wishes. We may walk into a crowded room and think it unfriendly because its occupants are our verbal strangers when in reality each is as lonely and isolated as we think ourselves; we may concoct anecdotal evidence of the locals in our vicinity because our domicile must be distinguished from all other towns at all other times; and we may understand a person's weaknesses by the compliments he grudgingly distributes. Yet, in essence, this is nothing that should surprise us. We are geared and programmed to be benevolent because, whatever those selfish naysayers might believe – and they believe in nothing except deepest, coldest space – faith and goodwill remain our natural disposition. I might not wander into a dark alley for fear of the worst of human predatoriness; but I will trust the young and charming salesperson genuinely persuaded by the reliability of his products, if only until I politely bid him farewell. If trust is our starting point, suspicion is our quiet ally as the smoke of human ambition clouds our judgment. And in this German town several hundred miles from sand and sun I read over two thousand pages on the ocean and its perils, some so obscure as to remain the banter of old sea-dogs. And there is not a little of the incomprehensible in the bold designs aboard the San Dominick in this majestic tale.

We are taken back to 1799 and quite literally the end of the world – "the harbor of Santa Maria, a small desert, uninhabited island toward the southern extremity of the long coast of Chile." Here docks the ship of our protagonist, the American captain Amasa Delano, and his crew of sealers, ostensibly for water but also to experience the heartsease that the coast proffers to the brazen and far-flung. On that same horizon comes "a strange sail":

The stranger, viewed through the glass, showed no colours; though to do so upon entering a haven, however uninhabited in its shores, where but a single other ship might be lying, was the custom among peaceful seamen of all nations. Considering the lawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and the sort of stories, at that day, associated with those seas, Captain Delano's surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated excitement, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine.

Subsequent events reveal that doubts, while in most instances frivolous and self-perpetuating, do indeed have their place. However bleeding his heart might be, Delano's wits quickly notice the destitution of the ship he approaches: the nets are in disrepair, the mix of Africans and Europeans generally gaunt and sickly, and the overarching impression of the ship is of one marooned and "for days lain tranced without wind." At the helm in only the representational sense is the title character of our story, an emaciated Spaniard who in his nervous tics and sways reminds Delano of a "hypochondriac abbot." Yet there are other oddities aboard. Heat, water deprivation, and scurvy have conspired to wipe out all the Spanish officers save the captain, as well as a great number of the Europeans ("wholesale havoc" is the term used); but the Africans incur fewer fatalities. This inequity coupled with Cereno's erratic behavior begin to stab at Delano like the small daggers he thinks he espies glimmering beneath the Africans' clouts. There are also lapsed punctilios in Cereno's manners that suggest he may not be what he claims, neither a captain nor a nobleman of Spanish stock – but Delano wavers from this impression on more than one occasion. He keeps his men on board their vessel, The Bachelor's Delight; he then pursues his interest, including a desire to practice his excellent Spanish, in Cereno and the latter's rather motley crew, until some small happening helps him conclude that what he has hitherto observed may merit greater scrutiny.

The secret of the story of course will not be mentioned here, and it is for the most part a poorly kept one. What Delano ensures we see is the allegory of misrepresentation so artistically outlined as to hint at a massive intrigue. Time and again he returns to Cereno, who acts as the compass on a misty surface:

He recalled the Spaniard's manner while telling his story. There was a gloomy hesitancy and subterfuge about it. It was just the manner of one making up his tale for evil purposes, as he goes. But if that story was not true, what was the truth? That the ship had unlawfully come into the Spaniard's possession? But in many of its details, especially in reference to the more calamitous parts, such as the fatalities among the seamen, the consequent prolonged beating about, the past sufferings from obstinate calms, and still continued suffering from thirst; in all these points, as well as others, Don Benito's story had been corroborated not only by the wailing ejaculations of the indiscriminate multitude, white and black, but likewise – what seemed impossible to be counterfeit – by the very expression and play of every human feature, which Captain Delano saw. If Don Benito's story was throughout an invention, then every soul on board ... was his carefully drilled recruit in the plot: an incredible inference. And yet, if there was ground for mistrusting the Spanish captain's veracity, that inference was a legitimate one.

There is also a plenitude of lush detail: the shield-piece upon the stern recounting a flagitious scene; the clatter at tense moments of a sextet of oakum-pickers; the captain's valet Bobo, who is as much a valet as Delano is a seagull; the shaving methods peculiar to Spaniards; and four unusual, otherwise minor acts of violence that bespeak some terrible truth. Understanding the ethnic categorizations of both Europeans and Africans as the narrow opinions of Delano, an unworldly if eloquent man, may enhance your enjoyment, but it should not spoil the tale's momentum. And what is suspense if not the prolongation of a nightmare that afflicts us like any other plague? Although, from all indications, we would not want to be privy to the nightmares of Benito Cereno.