Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Geoffrey O'Brien is editor-in-chief of the Library of America and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His latest books are Early Autumn and The Fall of the House of Walworth. He is a widely published poet, critic, editor, and cultural historian and has been honored with a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Institute for the Humanities. He lives in New York City.

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The Browser's Ecstasy

Counterpoint Press

Chapter One

A Reunion of Old Acquaintances

* * *

We had already been talking about books for severalhours.

    It may have been Marjorie who began it, although Rex wasquick enough to grab hold of the theme and spin us off into one ofhis characteristic whimsical flights, in the confidence that the inevitablysober Melchior would bring the talk back to earth. Supperwas long since over, and we were sprawled ? those of us who hadnowhere particular to go and nothing we would rather do than tossabout odd anecdotes and random inventions ? on the tatty butcomfortable armchairs and the single battered sofa in what passedfor a sitting room.

    The rough weather brewing outside only made us more awareof how delightfully situated we were. It was exactly like a scene in anovel where, mysteriously, none of the characters appears to haveany obligations or responsibilities beyond helping the story unfold.Indolently we savored the circulating talk, hanging on the verypauses and momentary hesitations as intently as on the most eloquentoutbursts.

    It had gotten to that point in any such gathering where themere fact of talking extends magical possibilities. So magical thateven those who refrained almost religiously from speech ? the austerePhyllida, for instance, locked in what looked like scornful communionwith her cigarette, standing with her back to a sixteenth-centurymap of Atlantic trade routes ? seemed to vibrate to therapid counter-rhythms of the discussion. From time to time someonegot up, paced back and forth in front of the mantelpiece, stoopedto refill a glass. The air was smoky and the talk constant, accelerated,a bit too loud at moments.

    That we should end up talking about books was almost inevitable.Books were strewn about the room, in no particular order,on the mantel wedged between bookends shaped like men-at-arms,piled up promiscuously on side tables, gathering dust in corners; one(an economics textbook with a torn cover) had been jammedagainst the door to keep a draft from creeping in. No telling howmany decades some of those books had been in the room: one by onethey had washed up, books of no particular interest to anyone andhence abandoned to a common space. There was a guide (sadly outof date) to the restaurants and entertainments of Toronto andvicinity; a detective novel by an industrious but none too inspiredimitator of Agatha christie; a monograph likening certain legendsof Micronesia to the structure of certain experimental novels; astudy of the inner lift of mid-level managers that had made considerableimpact when published in the immediate aftermath of theSuez crisis; a slim but dauntingly opaque treatise called simplyThoughts as Objects; and, flung carelessly in a corner (the oneitem that appeared to have been read in full and repeatedly), a thickpaperback with a torn cover on which a buxom adventuress and abrawny adventurer posed against a collage of palm trees, schooners,and glittering ballrooms. All in all it was an average catch ofGutenbergian flotsam.

    What, in any case, could have been more natural to us than totalk about books? We were bookish people, steeped in a conversationabout books that had already lasted years. We had read so manynovels that our lives (our lives being definable as what became of usin the intervals between reading novels) had themselves inevitablybecome a sort of messy open-ended novel. The space between thenovels we read and the novel we lived was a zone of cunningly sustainedindeterminacy where we were free to meditate on the reciprocitylinking the rejected lover drowned in the pond and the anxiousvacation à trois, the fatal letter of denunciation and the missedtrain on Monday morning, the plague on the estate and the disastrousdinner party, the foreign invasion and the stymied promotion,the masked ball interrupted by madness and the badmintonmatch interrupted by an unusually brisk August breeze. Was it nota system of reflections, of imitations so subtle that the observercould hardly tell which was the model and which the copy?

    Books went from hand to hand among us. With the exchangeof a book many a love affair had begun; with a sudden change ofopinion about the merits of a particular book had been signaledmany a rupture of relations. At times one or another of us hadfound a book truly superior, capable of absorbing and replacing allthe rest of them, and this had led to many chilling disagreements, tofierce and sometimes nearly violent rejoinders. There were regretsand denunciations; beloved books that were finally found unworthy;despised books in whose pages hidden riches were at length discovered.Sometimes these things had to be worked out chapter bychapter, sentence by sentence. And how many unuttered curses andunresolved quarrels had been relegated to the margins of the kind ofbook in which it was still permissible to challenge one's enemy to aduel, or to hire assassins among the riffraff of the rue Saint-Lazare?

    But all that was years ago. What was broken off with bookshad later been joined together again with books, subsequent chaptersemended and elaborated what earlier chapters had recklesslytruncated and defaced. Through books we felt we lived multipleexistences not precisely our own, lives of monastic austerity orcourtly riot or flyblown squalor. To talk about those books, thoselives, was a further interweaving that made them even more profoundlypart of us.

    We would, surely, have been quite lost without them. Yet whenwe talked about them it felt oddly like talking about nothing at all,like talking about weather or furniture. Tonight, for instance: noreason to believe that this discussion would have any more decisiveconsequences than the thousand and one discussions that had precededit. We did not look to any impending resolution; we simplycontinued.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Browser's Ecstasyby Geoffrey O'Brien Copyright © 2003 by Geoffrey O'Brien. Excerpted by permission.
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