- ‘And Mary said: “My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour,” etc. Zacharias her father was filled with the Holy Ghost and prophesied saying: “Blessed be the Lord, God of Israel for that he has redeemed,” etc. “He took him up in his arms, blessed God and said, ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’ ” ’
- In truth there is no positive evidence enabling me to affirm that when reading like this the reciter chanted the sort of psalms which St Luke has inserted into his gospel. But it seems to me to come out sufficiently strongly from a comparison of various passages in Renan and notably in St Paul, the Apostles, Marcus Aurelius, etc.
Days of Reading (II)
You have no doubt read the Memoirs of the Countess de Boigne. There are ‘so many people ill’ at the moment, that books are finding readers, even female ones. When one is unable to go out and pay calls, one would rather receive them no doubt than read. But ‘in these days of epidemics’ even the calls one receives are not without danger. There is the lady who pauses for a moment – just for a moment – in the doorway, where she puts a frame round her threat, to call to you: ‘You’re not afraid of mumps or scarlet fever?
I must warn you that my daughter and my grandchildren have got them. Can I come in?’; and comes in without waiting for a reply. There is another lady, less candid, who pulls out her watch: ‘I must be off home; my three daughters have got measles; I go from one to the other; my English girl has been in bed since yesterday with a high fever, and I’m very much afraid it may be my turn to be caught, because I felt off colour when I got up. But I had to make the big effort to come and see you …’
So one prefers not to entertain too much and since one cannot be always telephoning, one reads. One reads only as an absolutely last resort. First, we do a lot of telephoning. And, since we are children who play with the sacred powers unawed by their mystery, we find merely with the telephone that ‘it is convenient’, or rather, since we are spoilt children, that ‘it is not convenient’ and fill Le Figaro with our complaints, finding this wonderful fairy-land still not fast enough in its transformations, when several minutes may sometimes elapse indeed before there appears beside us, invisible yet present, the friend to whom we had desired to speak and who, though still at her table, in the far-off town where she lives, beneath skies different from ours, in weather not as it is here, in the midst of circumstances and pre-occupations of which we know nothing but of which she is about to tell us, finds herself suddenly transported a hundred miles away (herself, and the whole ambience in which she remains immersed), against our ear, at a moment ordained by our own whim.
And we are like the character in the fairy-tale who, this being what he has wished for, is shown his betrothed by a wizard, with a magical clarity, in the act of looking through a book, or shedding tears, or picking flowers, right beside him, yet in the place where she then is, far away.
For this miracle to be renewed for us, we have only to put our lips to the magic planchette-board and summon – for quite some time on occasions, I will agree – the vigilant Virgins whose voices we hear every day without ever knowing their faces and who are our guardian angels in that vertiginous darkness whose gates they watch over jealously, the Omnipotent ones thanks to whom the faces of the absent loom up beside us without our being allowed to see them; we have only to summon these Danaids of the Invisible who empty, recharge and hand on to one another unceasingly the dark urns of sounds, the jealous Furies who, as we murmur a confidence to a woman friend, call out to us ironically: ‘I’m on the line,’ at a moment when we were hoping no one could hear us, the irate servants of the Mystery, the implacable Divinities, the Damsels of the telephone! And the instant their summons has sounded in the night full of apparitions to which our ears alone are opened, a faint sound, an abstract sound – of distance being suppressed – and the voice of our friend is addressing us.
If at that moment the singing of a passer-by, the horn of a bicyclist or a distant regimental band should enter by the window to importune her as she is speaking to us, they ring out just as distinctly for us (as if to prove that it is indeed she who is beside us, with everything that surrounds her at that moment, that is striking her ear and distracting her attention) – truthful details, nothing to do with the subject, useless in themselves, but all the more necessary as revealing to us the full evidence of the miracle – prosaic and charming elements of local colour, descriptive of the provincial street and roadway to be seen from her house, such as a poet chooses when he wants to bring a character alive and evokes his milieu.
It is she, it is her voice which is speaking to us, which is there. But how far away it is! How many times have I been able to listen to it without anguish, as if, faced by the impossibility of seeing, without long hours of travelling, the person whose voice was so close to my ear, I sensed more clearly how disappointing this semblance of the sweetest proximity is and how far distant we may be from the things we love at the moment when it seems we need only stretch out our hand to detain them.
A real presence – this voice so close – in an effective separation. But an anticipation also of an everlasting separation. Very often, listening to it in this fashion, unable to see the person who was speaking to me from so far away, her voice seemed to be crying out from the depths from which one does not reascend, and I experienced the anxiety that would one day seize hold of me, when a voice returned to me thus, alone no longer dependent on a body I should never set eyes on again, to murmur in my ear words I would like to have been able to embrace as they passed on lips that are forever dust.
I was saying that before making up our minds to read, we try to keep on conversing, to telephone, we ask for number after number. But sometimes the Daughters of the Night, the Messengers of the Word, the faceless Goddesses, the capricious Guardians cannot or will not open the gates of the Invisible to us, the Mystery we solicit remains deaf, the venerable inventor of printing and the young prince who was both a lover of Impressionist painting and a motorist – Gutenberg and Wag-ram! [two Parisian telephone exchanges] – upon whom they call tirelessly, leave their supplications unanswered; then, since we cannot pay calls, since we do not wish to receive them, since the damsels of the telephone cannot connect us, we resign ourselves to being silent, we read.
In only a few weeks’ time we shall be able to read the new volume of poetry by Mme de Noailles, Les Eblouissements (I do not know whether it will keep that title), superior even to those books of genius, Le Coeur innombrable and L’Ombre des jours, the equal in fact, it seems to me, of the Feuilles d’automne or the Fleurs du mal. Meanwhile, we might read the pure and exquisite Margaret Ogilvy de Barrie, wonderfully well translated by R. d’Humières, which is simply the life of a peasant woman told by a poet, her son.
But no; the moment we resign ourselves to reading, we choose for preference books like the Memoirs of Mme de Boigne, books which give us the illusion of continuing to pay calls, calls on people we had not been able to visit before because we were not yet born under Louis XVI, but who are not so very different as it happens from the people whom you know because almost all of them bear the same names as they do, their descendants and your friends who, by a touching courtesy towards your ailing memory, have kept the same first names and are still called: Odon, Ghislain, Nivelon, Victurnien, Josselin, Léonor, Artus, Tucdual, Adhéaume or Raynulphe. Fine
