“It is then some secret document, some unpublished correspondence, some memoirs that may cast an unexpected light upon certain characters.”
Marcel Proust, On Reading, 1905
Republished under the title “Days of Reading” in Pastiches and Miscellanies.
Where Félix travels. Mentally, so he claims. Mixing together letters, notebooks and drawings, he carefully reads Lucian’s account. A difficult reading, assembled from fragments that can hardly be trusted without further evidence. A thoroughly uncertain journey. A journey in which, as in the Archipelago, obscure reasons appear and disappear. Félix, no more and no less than anyone else, struggles to make sense of them. Around the ocean liner aboard which Lucian continues his quest, nothing would correspond to the figures marked on the plans… No one, and nothing, knew, when this ocean liner was designed, how many compartments could be flooded before the word “number” changed its name and became “catastrophe”… And that catastrophe, however inevitable it might seem, remains difficult to discern. At first, Félix pays it no attention. Then, as he follows a narrative which, like the ocean liner itself, offers no appearance of certainty, he begins to sway and to doubt… Yet this doubt contributes to the very attentiveness which, increasingly, threatens to become, without his knowing it, an involvement. One that sets his own imagination in motion… An illegitimate temptation, given his position…
Lucian’s Journal
Nothing distinguishes the days and hours of this crossing… Questions come flooding in along with the waves. Who says that the lifeboats must remain beneath their covers until someone decides that the moment has come to lower them into the water? And nothing in the external world knows anything of the categories through which another system attempts to understand it. The wave does not know that it is recognised as a wave. Darkness does not know that its name is night. Does movement know that an organ buried within the skull is calculating it as an acceleration? Things have no need of the names or boundaries through which they become inhabitable for those who perceive them.
These divisions are necessary to thought, but they bind only the one who makes them. Was this the point at which the two architectures came together for the last time: both possessed an extraordinary power because they knew how to transform the formless into pathways, to distribute what came their way, to construct passages through a complexity that would otherwise have overwhelmed whoever had to traverse it… Both can repair, compensate, anticipate, carry on despite damage, and both ran, precisely for that reason, the risk of mistaking the remarkable effectiveness of their arrangements for a property of the world itself.
The world, however, had made no such commitment… No more than the sea had agreed to the compartments… and time, no more than I, knew anything of the timetable.
I wonder what Félix will think when he reads this journal… If, indeed, this journal ever reaches him… Sometimes I also wonder what I might think if, by some chance, I were in his place. I imagine Félix standing on the unstable deck of this ship. I truly wonder what he is doing there. I imagine him writing what I am writing… here, at this very moment… Would he have the same thoughts… the same words? Certainly not… What would they be, then?
Very freely inspired by…
Morgan Robertson, The Wreck of the Titan
Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, 1898.
