Classical Bookworm

Jorge Luis Borges: Chess

I apologize for the lack of book-related posts lately. Chess has me by the neurons, and I don't really mind. Here is something that covers both bases, though. I saw this poem in a fun documentary about chess by Davide Fasolo.

Chess

1
In their solemn corner, the players
govern the lingering pieces. The chessboard
delays them until daybreak in its severe
sphere in which colors are hateful.
Inside they radiate magical severity
the forms: Homeric tower, light
horse, armed queen, last king,
oblique bishop and attacking pawns.
When the players will have gone,
when time will have consumed them,
certainly the ritual will have not ceased.
In the Orient this war was lit
which amphitheater is today all the earth.
As the other, this game is infinite.

2
Fainting king, slanting bishop, fierce
queen, straightforward tower and cunning pawn
on the black and white path
searching and fighting their armed battle.
They ignore the player’s pointing hand
governs his destiny,
they ignore that a tamed severity
holds his will and day.
The player is himself a prisoner
(the sentence is Omar’s) of another board
of dark nights and light days.
God moves the player, and he, the chess piece.
Which God behind God begins the conspiracy
of dust and time and dream and agony?

Translated by Blanca Lista. Original version below.

Archaeology: It's Not for Everyone

Nearly three thousand years old that palace was, it appeared. I wondered what sort of palaces they had in those days, and if it would be like the pictures I'd seen of Tutankahmen's tomb furniture. But would you believe it, there was nothing to see but mud! Dirty mud walls about two feet high—and that's all there was to it. Mr. Carey took me here and there telling me things—how this was the great court, and there were some chambers here and an upper storey and various other rooms that opened off the central court. And all I thought was, 'But how does he know?' though, of course, I was too polite to say so. I can tell you it was a disappointment! The whole excavation looked like nothing but mud to me—no marble or gold or anything handsome—my aunt's house in Cricklewood would have made a much more imposing ruin! And those old Assyrians, or whatever they were, called themselves kings.

—Nurse Leatheran in Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia

I thought this book would be a fun adjunct to my Mesopotamian studies, but I found it rather annoying. The narrator, Nurse Leatheran, was far too judgemental and xenophobic for my liking. She kept going on about how catty the other women were (a classic case of the the pot calling the kettle black) and she kept referring to Poirot and the Tunisian priest as "foreigners" with repulsive "foreign" manners, as if she, an Englishwoman in Iraq, were not a foreigner herself. Perhaps Christie wanted to expose the attitude of (post)Victorian colonialism. The book is interesting because Christie herself was a nurse and married an archaeologist, whom she accompanied to digs in the Middle East. The mystery itself is good, though it could have been cleared up sooner if the police had found the murder weapon. I suppose there always has to be some error to make it a mystery.

“Into The Forest” by Jean Hegland

Caution: Spoilers Ahead!

I am so glad my blogodoppelgänger recommended Into the Forest by Jean Hegland because it was a very appropriate read for me at this time. It is a story about two orphaned sisters, Nell and Eva, struggling to survive in rural Northern California after the complete collapse of modern society. The chapter-less book is presented as the journal of the more bookish of the sisters, Nell.

Much of the first half of the book consists of discontinuous flashbacks explaining who they are and the situation they are in: how they were preparing to start their careers, Nell at Harvard, Eva at the San Francisco Ballet; how they lost their mother (before the crash) and then their father (after the crash); and how their world gradually and mysteriously unravelled around them. This was the hardest part of the book to read because although the story is fictional, the general scenario is likely to become real in the next few decades and the thought of hundreds of millions of real people suffering in this way is hard to take.

“Cold Mountain” by Charles Frazier

I picked up this book at the library sale table knowing only that it had been made into a well-liked movie and, as the cover proudly proclaims with a shiny gold seal, that it had won the (American) National Book Award. I thought it might be a pleasant bedtime diversion, but it turned out to be a rather meaty evening snack. Unfortunately, with my casual approach, I didn't take any notes so my impression of the book is supported only by my unreliable and unorganized memory.

There was much scope for creative writing in this work, what with colourful Southern expressions and slang, but even landscape descriptions and the thoughts of the more erudite characters featured pleasantly unusual and evocative metaphors. As a biologist/nature freak/outdoorsy type, I was of course enamoured of the significant attention devoted to natural history and nature craft (huntin' 'n' fishin' 'n' sleepin' rough). I'll never forget Ruby deriding Ada for not being able to distinguish the sounds of the leaves of different trees moving in the breeze, and in autumn, when such sounds are most easily distinguished. (After reading that I actually started paying attention to sounds of the different trees where I live.)