what is the real in this case?—a number of marks in black printer’s ink on a few white sheets of paper

 Books and Readers

An essential monument of any city of dreams is that dedicated by the unknown reader to the nameless author in gratitude for the inspiration that has helped him attain a second, brighter existence. For myself, in any case, it appears that for long stretches I lived more intensely in books than in the intervals between them. I was not moving from Leipzig to Halle but from one chapter to the next. Between them lay the synchronized cadence of rails and ties, punctuated by the passing telegraph poles—the emptiness of the technical world. This had been the case even at school and then as a soldier—a life “to be continued.”

The palace of readers is the most enduring of all. It survives peoples, cultures, religions, and even the languages themselves. Earthquakes and wars do not shake it, nor even the burning of libraries, like the one in Alexandria. Markets, fellah towns, colosseums, skyscrapers, islands, and countries grow up in it and disappear, as though washed away by rain. Reality is charmed; the dream becomes real. A door is opened to a magical world.

I think that I have somewhere already mentioned the mandarin waiting for his execution in a line of wrongdoers, engrossed in a book as the beheadings proceed ahead of him. A reader is generally distracted, not because he could not cope with the world but because he simply takes it less seriously. This happens even more when a world is cheapened and its offerings devalued.

The Trials and Tribulations of Fontane has a firm place in my memory. I can relate details from it more precisely than what happened on the day I came to know the book. It was the day the Otago Rifles, fresh arrivals from New Zealand, were sent in at us, and we shot and blew each other up. During the breaks in the battle, I returned to the Brandenburg lake district of the Wilhelminian times.

In June 1904, as a nine-year-old, I first began reading One Thousand and One Nights, that immortal gift of the magical world to the West. I had found the book that month among the gifts on my mother’s birthday table. It was Gustave Weil’s four-volume translation, to which I repeatedly fled as to an oasis in the desert—that is, until I moved on to Littmann’s twelve-volume edition. The fables engraved themselves profoundly in my memory, as did the pictures in the richly illustrated edition. I sensed them again now in Taroudant, a Moroccan city with a strong oriental character despite its proximity to the coast.

One Thousand and One Nights: the ideal model of an at once collective and anonymous authorship. The work could have been created by a demon—fashioned overnight like one of its phantom castles. We could also think of the mother-of-pearl in a seashell—of cerebral traces that hardened into iridescence.

From: Approaches : drugs and altered states / Ernst Jünger

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(I know, for my own part, that I am far more strongly moved by episodes in books than by those in real life, which usually leave me cold. This, of course, is what the author of the book is aiming at when he uses what Kierkegaard calls ‘the foreshortened perspective of the aesthetic’, which leaves out unromantic details—the hero’s interview with his bank manager about his overdraft; the heroine’s visit to the dentist to have two decayed teeth stopped—in order to heighten the reader’s emotional tension. My emotional reaction is entirely in the sphere of the imaginary; for what is the real in this case?—a number of marks in black printer’s ink on a few white sheets of paper.)

Nanavira Thera