Reading, Etc.

Finished with Sebald (and Sebald is finished with me) for now. The ending of Vertigo has something in common with Borges' "Matthew 25:30" (I'm rereading JLB via an Anthology I found on Kindle -- and he himself supposedly stirred the mix):

MATTHEW 25:30 And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. The first bridge on Constitución. At my feet the shunting trains trace iron labyrinths. Steam hisses up and up into the night which becomes, at a stroke, the Night of the Last Judgment. From the unseen horizon, and from the very center of my being, an infinite voice pronounced these things— things, not words. This is my feeble translation, time-bound, of what was a single limitless Word: “Stars, bread, libraries of East and West, playing cards, chessboards, galleries, skylights, cellars, a human body to walk with on the earth, fingernails, growing at nighttime and in death, shadows for forgetting, mirrors which endlessly multiply, falls in mu sic, gentlest of all time's shapes, borders of Brazil, Uruguay, horses and mornings, a bronze weight, a copy of Grettir Saga, algebra and fire, the charge at Junin in your blood, days more crowded than Balzac, scent of the honeysuckle, love, and the imminence of love, and intolerable remembering, dreams like buried treasure, generous luck, and memory itself, where a glance can make men dizzy— all this was given to you and, with it, the ancient nourishment of heroes— treachery, defeat, humiliation. In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman's eyes. You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem.

—Translated by ALASTAIR REID