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

of the monastery while the last of my readers runs a finger along the

spines of his books and tries to remember something of my book. And

although I think of the lay-brothers as walking mostly through a particular quarter or district of the monastery, I know there are districts and more districts beyond them. In one of those districts, I decide on

the grey Sunday afternoon when I have to decide whether to begin my

writing or to go on sipping — in one of those districts, in a cell with

grey walls no different from all the grey walls in all the streets in all the

districts around it, in a collection of manuscripts that has lain undisturbed during many quiet afternoons is a page where a monk once read or wrote what the man in the year 2020 would like to recall. The

monk himself has forgotten most of what he once read or wrote. He

could, perhaps, find the passage again — if he were asked to search for

Precious Bane

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it among all the other pages he has read and written in all the years he

has been reading and writing in his cell. But no lay-brother comes to

ask the monk to look for any such page. Outside the monk’s grey walls,

no footstep sounds on many a grey afternoon.

The man cannot remember what he once read in my book. He cannot remember where among his shelves he once put away my thin volume. The man fills his glass again and goes on sipping some costly

poison of the twenty-first century. He does not understand the importance of his forgetfulness, but I understand it. I know that no one now remembers anything of my writing.

So, on many a Sunday afternoon I leave my writing in its folder. I

cannot bring myself to write what will become at last a greyness in a

heap of manuscripts I can hardly imagine.

In the bookshop, I paid for my books and pocketed my change. The

books were still on the table where the man had stacked them while he

checked their prices. The m an waited for me to take away the books

so he could go on with his gazing, but I wanted to say something to the

man. I wanted to reassure him that the books would be safe in their

new home. I wanted to tell him that some of them were books I had

wanted for a long time — unjustly neglected books that would now be

read and remembered.

The topmost book was Precious Bane by M ary Webb. I touched the

faded yellow cloth cover and I told the man that I had been searching

for a long time for Precious Bane; that I intended to read it very soon.

The man looked not at the book or at me but out at the rain. With

his face towards the greyness at his window, he said that he knew Precious Bane well. Or rather, he corrected himself, he had once known the book well. It had been a well-known book in its time. He had read it,

but he hardly remembered it, he said, especially since his health was

not what it had been. But it didn’t matter, he said. It didn’t m atter if

you couldn’t remember anything about a book. The important thing

was to read a book; to store it up inside you. It was all there inside

somewhere, he said. It was all safely preserved. He lifted a hand, as

though he might have pointed to some precise point on his skull, but

then he let the hand fall again into the position where it normally

rested while he gazed.

I took my books home. I entered the titles and the authors’ names

in my catalogue, and then I put each book in its correct place in my

library, which is arranged in alphabetical order according to authors’

surnames.

On the following Sunday, when it was time to stop sipping and to

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Gerald M urnane

begin writing, I thought as usual of the man in the year 2020. He still

tried and failed to remember a certain book, the book that I had written forty years before. But after he had walked away from his shelves and had sat down again to sip, I thought of him as knowing that my

book was still safely preserved after all.

Then I thought of the monastery, and I saw that the sky above it

had been changed. A golden glow was in the air; it was not so much

the yellow of sunlight; more the dark-gold of the cover of Mary Webb’s

unjustly neglected book or the amber of beer or the autumn colour of

whisky. The light in the sky made the avenues of the monastery seem

even more tranquil. The lay-brothers on their way from cell to cell

sauntered rather than walked. Each monk in his cell, when he reached

for a certain book or manuscript, was utterly calm and deliberate.

And when he held up a page to inspect it, the light from his window

lay faintly gold on the intricate pen-strokes or the tinted initials, and

he found with ease what he had been asked to find.

On that afternoon, and on many Sundays afterwards, I wrote while

I sipped. When I next called at the bookshop I had been writing for

six months of Sundays.

After I had paid the man for my books, I told him I was a writer. I

told him I had been writing on every Sunday since I had last seen him.

By the following winter I would have finished what I was writing. And

by the winter after that, my writing would have been preserved in a

book. I wanted the cover of my book to be a