Читать книгу The Old Book Peddler and other tales for bibliophiles - Stefan Zweig - Страница 4

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All progress on earth depends mainly on two inventions due to human ingenuity. The invention of the wheel, which rolls onward with dizzying revolutions around its axle, enables us to move about physically. The invention of the art of writing excites our imagination and gives expression to our thoughts. That nameless man who first, somewhere and at some time, bent the hard wood around the spokes, taught mankind to overcome the distances that separate lands and peoples. With the first wagon intercourse became at once possible; freight could be transported and men could travel and learn. It brought an end to the limitations set by nature, which assigned certain fruits, metals, stones and products, each to its own narrow home. Countries no longer lived by themselves but in relation to the whole world. The Orient and the Occident, the South and the North, were brought together by the invention of vehicles. Just as the wheel in all its various uses, as a part of locomotives, of automobiles and of propellers, overcomes the physical law of gravitation, so the art of writing, which likewise has developed far beyond the written roll, from the single leaf to the book, has overcome the tragic limitations of life and experience that hemmed in the individual human being. Because of books no one need any longer be shut up by himself, within his own narrow confines, but can share in everything that has happened or is happening, in all the thoughts and feelings of the whole of humanity. Everything or practically everything that takes place in the world of thought depends today on books, and that form of life, imbued with intelligence and raised above material considerations, which we call civilization, cannot be imagined without books. This power of the book to enlarge the soul and to build new worlds, which is active in our personal and private lives, very rarely obtrudes itself on our consciousness and then only in moments of special significance. Books have been a part of our daily lives so long that we cannot be gratefully conscious of their marvelous character every time we use them. With every breath we inhale oxygen and by this invisible nutriment we give a mysterious chemical refreshment to our blood; but just as we pay no attention to this fact so we are scarcely aware that we are continually taking in food for the mind through the eye when we read, and are thus giving refreshment or weariness to our spirit. For us, who are the heirs of thousands of years of writing, reading has become almost a bodily function, something automatic; and inasmuch as we have held books in our hands since we began to attend school, we have become so accustomed to have them with us that we take one up almost as indifferently as we do a coat, a glove, a cigarette, or anything else that is produced in countless numbers for our use. Familiarity breeds contempt, and it is only in the truly productive, thoughtful and contemplative moments of life that we see as really wonderful that to which we are accustomed. Only in these pensive moments are we reverentially aware of that magical power to move the soul which comes to us from books and makes them so important in our lives that now in the twentieth century we cannot even imagine what our inner life would be without the miracle of their presence.

Such a moment comes rarely, but for that very reason it is long remembered, often for years. I still remember the day, the place and even the hour, when it became definitely clear to me in what a profound and creative manner our inner, private world is interwoven with that other visible as well as invisible world of books. I think that I might, without immodesty, give an account of this moment of spiritual clarification, for though it is merely a personal experience, it reaches far beyond my own insignificant self. I was about twenty-six years old at the time and had already written books, so that I knew something about that mysterious transformation which a dim idea, a dream, a bit of imagination undergoes and the various phases it must pass through before it is ultimately changed by means of strange concretions and sublimations, into the bound, rectangular object which we call a book—a thing for sale, with a price stamped upon it, lying apparently without will, like a piece of merchandise under the glass of a show case. Yet each copy is awake and has a soul; though for sale, it is its own master, while at the same time belonging to the man who inquiringly turns its leaves. Even more truly does the book belong to the man who reads it, but most of all, in a complete and final sense, to the man who not only reads it but enjoys it. Thus I had had some experience with this indescribable process of transfusion by which the events of one’s own life are fused with the events of another’s, feelings with feelings, spirit with spirit; but the full magic, the breadth and vehemence of the influence of print on another’s being, had nevertheless not become fully apparent to me. I had pondered the matter vaguely but had not thought it through completely. Then this experience happened to me, on the day and at the hour which I shall describe briefly.

I was traveling on board ship—it was an Italian vessel—in the Mediterranean, from Genoa to Naples, from Naples to Tunis, and thence to Algiers. The trip took some days and there were very few passengers. So it came about that I often had talks with a young Italian belonging to the crew, a sort of assistant to the steward, who swept the cabins, scrubbed the deck and did various other chores of the same nature, which in the ordinary scale of things are looked upon as rather menial. A fine young fellow he was, good to look at, this swarthy, black-eyed lad, whose teeth flashed when he laughed—and he laughed often. He loved his rapid, melodious Italian and he never forgot to accompany his musical speech with vivid gestures. He had a genius for mimicry and caricatured everybody—the toothless captain when he spoke; the old Englishman walking stiffly across the deck, with his left shoulder pushed forward; the cook, who after dinner paced majestically in sight of the passengers and turned the eye of a connoisseur on their waistcoats, which he had just filled. It was a joy to chat with this dark young savage with his clear brow and his tattooed arms. For years, he told me, he had tended sheep on the Lipari Islands, where he lived, and he showed the kindly trust of a young animal. He soon discovered that I liked him and would rather talk with him than with any one else on board. He therefore told me all about himself, frankly and freely, as he saw it, so that after two days we were almost friends or at least comrades.

Then suddenly, overnight, an invisible wall arose between us. We had landed in Naples, the ship had taken in coal, passengers, food and mail, the usual provisions at a harbor, and was again on its way. Proud Posilipo looked like a small hill and the drifting clouds over Vesuvius had the appearance of pale cigarette smoke, when he came suddenly up to me, smiled broadly and with pride showed a crumpled letter which he had just received and now asked me to read to him.

At first I did not understand. I thought that he, Giovanni, had received a letter in a foreign language, French or German, evidently from a girl—I knew that girls must admire a young fellow like him—and now he wanted me to translate her message into Italian. But no, the letter was in Italian. What did he want me to do, then? Read the letter? No, he repeated, almost impatiently, I was to read the letter to him, read it aloud to him. And then the truth flashed upon me. This young fellow, handsome as a picture, intelligent, endowed with native tact and real grace, belonged to those seven or eight per cent of his fellow countrymen who, according to statistics, cannot read. He was illiterate. And for the moment I could not recall that I had ever in Europe spoken with one of this vanishing race. This Giovanni was the first European I had ever met who did not know how to read, and I probably gazed at him in surprise, no longer as a friend, no longer as a comrade, but as a curiosity. Of course, I read the letter to him, a letter written by some seamstress or other, a Maria or Carolina, and containing what young girls write to young men in all countries and in all languages. He watched my lips closely while I read, and I noticed the effort he made to remember every word. He frowned heavily and his face contracted as if in torment, while he exerted himself to listen carefully and to forget nothing. I read the letter twice, slowly, clearly; he attended to every word, and became more and more content, his eyes beamed, his lips opened like a red rose in summer. Then one of the ship’s officers who had been standing at the rail came towards us, and Giovanni slipped away.

That was all, the whole reason for my subsequent thoughts. But my real experience was only beginning. I lay back in a steamer chair and looked out into the soft night. The strange discovery troubled me. This was the first time that I had met an illiterate person, and a European at that, whom I knew to be intelligent and whom I had talked to as to a friend. I was bothered, even tormented, wondering how the world would appear to a brain like his, shut off from everything written. I tried to imagine what it would be like not to be able to read. I tried to put myself in the place of people like him. He picks up a newspaper, and cannot understand it. He picks up a book, and there it lies in his hand, an object lighter than wood or iron, with four sides and square corners, a colored, purposeless thing; and he puts it aside, does not know what to do with it. He stands in front of a book store, and these handsome, yellow, green, red, white rectangular objects, with backs ornamented in gold, are to him only painted fruit, or sealed perfume bottles whose fragrance cannot be caught through the glass. He hears the sacred names of Goethe, Dante, Shelley, Beethoven, and they mean nothing to him; they are lifeless syllables, an empty, senseless noise. He has no suspicion, poor fellow, of the rapture that suddenly comes from a single line in a book, breaking forth from the rest like the silvery moon from lifeless clouds; he knows nothing of the deep emotion you feel when something you read about suddenly seems to become a part of your own experience. He is walled in by himself, because he knows nothing of books; his life is dull, troglodytic. How, I asked myself, can a man endure such an existence, cut off from relations with the whole world, without smothering, without feeling utterly impoverished? How can a man endure to know nothing but what accidentally meets his eye or ear? How can he breathe without that larger air of the world which is poured forth from books? I redoubled my efforts to imagine the situation of a man who cannot read, who is shut off from the world of thought. In my eager endeavor to picture to myself his way of living I proceeded with as much ingenuity as a scientist might use in reconstructing the life of a Patagonian, or of a stone age man, from the remains of a pile-dwelling. But I was unable to get inside the brain, inside the way of thinking, of a European who had never read a book; I could no more do it than a deaf person can form a conception of music from mere descriptions of it.

When I failed to understand his inner life, that of an illiterate, I tried to clear my thoughts by imagining what my own life would be like without books. First I tried for the moment to dismiss from my consciousness everything that I had learned from written words, from all the books that I had read. But immediately I failed. My very nature, that which I conceived of as my own very self, at once dissolved completely and disappeared when I tried to take away what books and culture had given me in knowledge, in experience, in power to go beyond my own horizon, and so to feel more deeply conscious both of the world outside and of my own self. Wherever I turned my thoughts, every object and every circumstance was bound up with recollections and experiences which I owed to books, and every single word suggested countless associations with things I had read or learned. When, for instance, I reflected that I was now on my way to Algiers and Tunis, at once a hundred associations flashed through my mind, involuntary, clear as crystal, in connection with the word “Algiers”—Carthage, the Baal worship, Salammbo, the passages in Livy which describe how the Carthaginians and the Romans, Scipio and Hannibal, encountered each other at Zama, and at the same time the same scenes from Grillparzer’s dramatic fragment; and color was shed over these by a picture of Delacroix and a description of nature by Flaubert. The wounding of Cervantes during the attack on Algiers, in the reign of Charles V, and a thousand other events became strangely alive to me as I uttered or merely thought of the short words Algiers and Tunis. Two thousand years of battles and medieval history, and countless other matters rose from the depths of my memory. Everything that I had read and learned since boyhood gave value to these two names as they passed through my mind. And I understood that this gift or grace of being able to roam far in thought and follow up numerous connections, this magnificent and only right way of viewing the world from many different levels at the same time—that this was granted only to the man who, reaching out beyond his own experience, had become the possessor of the contents of books, which were drawn from many lands and people and times; and I was shocked to think how narrow the world must seem to the man who has no books. And further, the very fact that I could have a thought like this, could feel so deeply because poor Giovanni lacked the inspiration that comes from a knowledge of the great world—this ability of mine to be deeply moved by the accidental fate of a stranger, did I not owe this to those works of imagination with which I had busied myself? For when we read, what else are we doing but living the lives of other people, seeing with their eyes, thinking with their brains? From this vivid and grateful moment I recalled, with increasing vividness and gratitude, countless blessings that I had received from books. One instance after another came into view like the stars in the heavens. I remembered definite moments which had taken me out of the narrow limits of my ignorance, had revealed new values to me, and had given me, though still only a boy, emotions and experiences that transcended my own narrow and undeveloped existence. This was the reason—and now I understood it—why my youthful imagination had soared aloft when I read Plutarch’s “Lives,” or “Mr. Midshipman Easy,” or the “Leather Stocking Tales,” for a wider, more vivid world then broke through the walls and forced itself into my calm home and at the same time drew me out with it. Books gave me my first vision of the wide, measureless world, and a desire to lose myself in it. Most of our emotions, our wishes for things beyond ourselves, this best part of our being, all this sacred thirst, is due to the salt, as it were, which is contained in books, and which compels us again and again to drink in new experiences. I remembered important decisions of mine caused by books, during which, as in other such nights, one gladly neglected sleep for the sake of happiness. The more I thought of these things the better I realized that a man’s mental world consists of millions of monads of single impressions, only a very few of which are the result of his own observation or experience; everything else—the essential, complex mass—comes from books, from what he has read, experienced indirectly, learned.

It was wonderful to think of all this. Long-forgotten happy experiences, which had come to me through books, now occurred to me. One reminded me of another; and just as when you look up at the velvety sky at night and try to count the stars, new stars, hitherto unnoticed, constantly come into view and confuse the count, so I now became aware, as I looked deep into my inner world, that this other firmament is also lighted by a countless number of individual flames, and that our mental capacity for enjoyment gives us a second universe, which revolves about us with its twinkling stars, filled like the other with unheard music. I had never been so close to books as in this moment, when I did not hold one in my hand but was merely thinking of them, though I did this with all the feeling of one who has awakened to a full realization. This had been accomplished through my contact with this poor illiterate, who, though fashioned like me, was prevented by his one deficiency from penetrating with love and creative energy into the higher world. Through him I came to realize the full magic of books, which daily open the universe to those who can read.

When a man has in this way come to a full realization of the limitless influence of writing and print, of this medium for conveying thought, whether he be thinking of a single book or of books in general, then he smiles with pity at the despondency which today has seized upon so many, even those who are intelligent. They complain that the time for books has come to an end; that technical developments are now to the fore. They say that the phonograph, the cinema and the radio are more precise and more convenient means of conveying language and thought, and have already begun to replace books; that the rôle of books in the history of civilization will soon be a thing of the past. This is a narrow view, a stunted way of thinking! What miracle has technical skill ever accomplished that surpasses or even equals the marvelous effect of books through thousands of years! Chemistry has not produced an explosive with such far-reaching power, sufficient to shake the world; it has not made steel plates or reinforced concrete that can outlast this small bundle of printed sheets. No electric lamp gives out such light as proceeds from many a thin pamphlet, and no power current created by technical skill equals that which fills the soul when it comes in contact with a book. Ageless and indestructible, changeless through the centuries, storage batteries of the highest potency in the smallest and most usable form, books have nothing to fear from technical developments, for is not technical skill learned and improved by means of books, and by nothing else? Everywhere, not merely in our own times, books are the alpha and omega of all knowledge, the beginning of every science. The more intimately a man associates with books the more profoundly he experiences the unity of life, for his personality is multiplied; he sees not only with his own eyes but with the countless eyes of the soul, and by their sublime help he travels with loving sympathy through the whole world.