There is a bookstore, Grey Matter Books, not far from where we live, and I go there weekly. I was looking for J. Since we moved last year, my books are in no order and on shelves all over the house. There is the Handke issueβthe issue that created such controversy around his Nobel Prize. Simply, the writer had given vocal support to the repressive regime of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. The ethical question pauses the hand on its way to the shelf, a question I have wrestled with since Knut Hamsun, literary hero of my youth, was revealed as a Nazi sympathizer.
What sharpened the dilemma for me was that I had been reading and admiring Handke for a good forty years before learning of this advocacy. His work is finally too deeply rooted for me to repudiate it. I bought the book, but not without some inner tension. As I abide in mine. This time, that feeling of inspiration came right away. It opens with the narrator out walking, savoring the special vividness of the colors all around. As that recognition hits Handke, so the expression of it hit me.
I felt a sudden widening and sharpening of attention, and the impulse right away to stop and to ponder its intimations. What prompted me was that Latin phrase Nunc stans. I had seen it before in various books, but never with a clear sense of what it meant, and now Handke had brought it to me.
And at just the right moment. Wherever my recent thoughts had been tending, whatever I had been writing about, this was the sensation I needed. Nunc stans. The profundity embedded in that seeming paradox: a sense of eternity caught in the stilled moment β¦. I found that I wanted to be writing. The impulse itself tells me that there is something that is waiting to be expressed. I sometimes think that writing is not so much what the writer does, as what it is that takes place.
Certain sentences step forward as I read on. This is not a sentence I can just move through on my way to the next. Comprehend, from the Latin, grasp together. Here there are two concepts: that a writer ought to see objects as if in a dream, and that only in dreams are true essences disclosed. Which I find a solacing thought. I mean the reading that feeds my inward self, that offers me the signs by which I try to make my wayβthat holds out, however obscurely, a promise of some kind of arrival.
