Damien Broderick - Strange Attractors by Original (pdf) (no david read aloud txt) 📕

At this point in my wondering I used to devise a scene from around

the year 2020. It was Sunday afternoon (or, if the working week had

shrunk as forecast, a Monday or even a Tuesday afternoon). Someone

vaguely like myself, a man who had failed at what he most wanted to

do, was standing in gloomy twilight before a wall of bookshelves. The

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man did not know it, but he happened to be the last person on the

planet who still owned a copy of a certain book that had been composed on grey Sunday afternoons forty years before. The same man had once actually read the book, many years before the afternoon

when he searched for it on his shelves. And more than this, he still

remembered vaguely a certain something about the book.

There is no word for what this man remembers — it is so faint, so

hardly perceptible among his other thoughts. But I stop (in my own

thinking, on many a Sunday afternoon) to ask myself what it is exactly

that the man still possesses of my book. I reassure myself that the

something he half-remembers must be just a little different from all

the other vague somethings in his memory. And then I think about the

man’s brain.

I know very little about the human brain. In all my three thousand

books there is probably no description of a brain. If someone counted

in my books the occurrence of nouns referring to parts of the body,

‘brain’ would probably have a very low score. And yet I have bought

all those books and read nearly half of them and defended my reading of them because I believe my books can teach me all I need to know about how people think and feel.

I think freely about the brain of the man standing in front of his

bookshelves and trying to remember: trying (although he does not

know it) to rescue the last trace of my own writing — to save my

thought from extinction. 1 know that this thinking of mine is, in a way,

false. But I trust my thinking just the same, because I am sure my own

brain is helping me to think; and I cannot believe that one brain could

be quite mistaken about another of its kind.

I think of the man’s brain as made up of many cells. Each cell is like

a monk’s cell in a Carthusian monastery, with high walls around it and

a little garden between the front wall and the front door. (The Carthusians are almost hermits; each monk belongs to the monastery, but he spends most of his day reading in his cell or tending the vegetables in

his walled garden.) And each cell is a storehouse of information; each

cell is crammed with books.

A few books are cloth-bound with paper jackets, but most are

leather-bound. And far outnumbering the books are tire manuscripts.

(I have trouble envisaging the manuscripts. One of my own books —

in my room, on the grey Sunday afternoon — has photographs of

pages from an illuminated manuscript. But I wonder what a collection of such pages would look like and how it would be bound. And I have no idea how a collection of such bound manuscripts would be

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stored — lying flat, on top of one another? sideways? upright in ranks

like cloth-bound books on my own shelves? I wonder too what sort of

furniture would store or display the manuscripts. So, although I can

see each monk in his cell reaching up to his shelf of books from more

recent times, when I want to think of him searching among the bulk

of his library I see only a greyness: the grey of the monk’s robe, of the

stone walls of his cell, of the afternoon sky at his little window, and the

greyness of blurred and incomprehensible texts.)

There are very few Carthusian monks in the world — I mean, the

world outside my window and under the grey sky on Sunday

afternoon. But when I say that, I am only repeating what a priest told

me at secondary school nearly thirty years ago, when I was dreaming

of becoming a monk and living in a library with a little garden and a

wall around me. Apart from the priest’s vague answer, the only information I have about the Carthusian O rder comes from an article in the English Geographical Magazine. But that article was published in the

1930s, at about the time when I was learning to read in my other lifetime that leads back towards the Age of Books. I cannot check the article now because all my old magazines are wrapped in grey plastic garbage bags and stored above the ceiling of my house. I stored them

there three years ago with four hundred books that I will never read

again — I needed more space on my shelves for the latest books I was

buying.

W hat I mainly remember about that article was that it was all text

with no photographs. Nowadays the Geographical Magazine is half-filled

with coloured photographs. I sometimes skip the brief, jargonised

texts of the articles and find all I need to know in the captions under

the photographs. But the 1930s magazines (in the grey plastic bag, in

the twilight above the ceiling over my head) included many an article

with not one illustration. I imagine the authors of those articles as

bookish chaps in tweeds, returning from strolls among hedgerows to

sit