A Reader on Reading

And yet, even in the Universal Library, the Wandering Jew, like the Ideal Reader, can never be satisfied, can never be limited by the circumference of one Ithaca, of one quest, of one book. For him the horizon of every page must always — thankfully, we say—exceed his wit and his grasp, so that every last page becomes the first. Because, as we have said, every book once ended leads to another lying patiently in wait, and every rereading grants the book a Protean new life. Ahasuerus’s library (which, like all the best readers, he carries mainly in his head) echoes through mirrored galleries that gloss and comment on every text. Every library is a library of memory: first, because it holds the experience of the past, and second, because it lives on in the mind of each of its readers.

The Jews know this practice well. Long after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, Jews in scattered lands continued to carry out the appointed rituals, moving about in a space that no longer existed in stone and mortar, but only in the words set down for their guidance. That is the nature of all exile: it affirms the perseverance of memory. Expelled from their native al-Andalus, the Arabs of Córdoba, Toledo, and Granada continued to recite the verses that their Spanish landscape had inspired; as refugees in South America and Canada, the Armenians who survived the Turkish massacre rewrote the libraries destroyed in their Anatolian homeland; the survivors of the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina created publishing companies in their new countries for the literature that continued to be written in spite of the blood-imposed silence; in Paris, the Cubans who fled Castro’s regime borrowed the French language and tailored it to suit the retelling of their stories; in London, Mahmoud Darwich blended the Palestinian cadence of his verses with his readings of Borges, Paul Eluard, and Emily Dickinson; Vladimir Nabokov carried with him into his American exile the Russian dictionary which held, he said, the building blocks of all his childhood reading. The examples are, unfortunately, countless. The condemned crowds outside the city walls, Ahasuerus’s traveling companions in the detention camps of Calais, Lampedusa, Málaga, and scores of other places carrying with them the tattered libraries of their past, are so vast and varied that our protected inner citadels seem desolate and despoiled by comparison. In our anxiety to punish our enemies and protect ourselves, we have forgotten what it is that we are meant to be securing. In our exacerbated fear, we have allowed our own rights and freedoms to be distorted or curtailed. Instead of locking the other out we have locked ourselves in. We have forgotten that our libraries should open onto the world, not pretend to isolate us from it. We have become our own prisoners.

That is the deeper meaning of the Wandering Jew’s punishment, and its inevitable consequence, because no curse is ever one-sided. The legend of the man condemned to wander because of an uncharitable act became an uncharitable act in which many men were condemned to wander. Pogroms, expulsions, ethnic cleansings, genocides regardless of nationality or creed are the abominable extensions of this reading of the legend. But I suggest there might be others, like the one I intuited as a child when I first heard the story.

Eternal wandering as a punishment or as an enlightening exploration of the world; a fine and private place as a reward or as the dreaded and silent grave; the “other” as an anonymous enemy or as a reflection of ourselves; ourselves as single, solitary creatures or as part of a multitudinous, timeless, world-conscious being. Perhaps Christ’s words to the Jewish cobbler were meant not to punish but to teach that charity is of the essence, because, as we are told by Saint Paul, charity “rejoiceth in truth.” Perhaps what Christ meant was that in order to learn why the underdog must not be mocked and why the needy must not be pushed away from our door we must go out into the world and live among our neighbors and be the underdog, the needy, and understand that, whoever and wherever we are, we always wander outside a city wall.