One of the good things about being sleepless in a snow-covered house full of books is that I can always find something to read and cheer up. When it gets really nasty, I wander around in the dark with a flashlight like the ghost of Hamlet's father, pulling books off the shelves, opening them at random, and flipping through until I find something interesting. After that I calmly go back to bed or grab a new book.
I only read a paragraph or two, a page at the most, because if I read more than that I risk completely falling apart and waking up to wait for the dawn. I just need, I'll use the culinary term, amuse-bouche, one selected morsel that leaves a pleasant taste in the mouth. Well, verses are the ideal meze, my friend, some reader will tell me, the best sleeping pill. Through poetry, millions of people have been falling asleep like babies for centuries. But alas, I am a poet, a favorite of the muses and immune to the soporific charms of poetry.
Instead, I find the diary of Hugo Ball, the avant-garde theater director who, with Tristan Cara and Marcel Janko, founded the Dada movement and on February 5, 1916 (99 years ago) opened the later famous Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The cabaret was in a notorious part of the city, full of bars, variety shows and cheap hotels, in an otherwise impeccably clean and exemplary Zurich, where many refugee artists, writers, journalists, actors and intellectuals lived at that time, fleeing conscription in their countries. , as well as numerous war profiteers and spies. Lenin lived in a rented room in a narrow alley, near Joyce who was writing his Ulysses. Cabaret Volter had about fifty seats and a small stage. Characters in colorful cardboard costumes painted with poster colors, with masks on their faces, beat drums, lids and pans, performing skits and speaking verses in a language they invented themselves, which sounded like this:
Gadji beri bimba
Glandridi lauli lonni cadori
I would vote for the bastards
Glandridi glassala tuffm Izimbrabim
Blassa galassasa tuffm Izimbrabim.
The audience would leave the hall or roll on the floor laughing. The scenography was images of the slaughterhouses of World War I, and the pieces mocked the European civilization that led to it. "We combined buffoonery and requiem," writes Bol in his diary. The theme of history as a tragic farce would do well on Broadway for a change, I thought as I went back to bed and fell asleep imagining that wonderful show.
One night I tried to find Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, which the distinguished scholar and statesman wrote while awaiting execution as a victim of false accusation in 524 in Pavia. It is a story about a man who suffers because of injustice, mourns his fate and has extensive conversations with Philosophy, who appears to him as a lady of high birth and tells him that wisdom and happiness can be found even in adversity, because she frees us from the slavery of transitory, earthly things. things, or something to that effect. I couldn't find that book, so I consoled myself with David Hume, the famously obese Scottish philosopher from the XNUMXth century, whose contemporaries claimed that every chair broke under him. Flipping through his Treatise on Human Nature, I came across this little parable:
"If a traveler, returning from distant countries, tells us that he met people who are in every way different from us, completely devoid of greed, ambition and vindictiveness, who know only the pleasures of friendship, generosity and general benefit, we are obliged to immediately, without hesitation, let us accuse him of being a liar, with the same certainty as if he had embellished his narrative with tales of centaurs, dragons, and other wonders."
I thought that this reminded me of reports from the Soviet Union under Stalin, from the pen of some Parisian intellectual, or one of our politicians who believe in American exceptionalism. But as a sedative this reading is not good. I could get excited and start thinking of all the ways Hume's parable could apply to our circumstances, and then I wouldn't sleep for the next week. Fortunately for me, the next one I got my hands on was Barry Hanna's book. As the great French writer from the XNUMXth century Chamfort nicely remarked: "A day is lost in which we did not laugh at least once". As a medicine for melancholy, laughter is better than philosophy, and the stories and novels of this writer from Mississippi are of the kind that would cheer up even a man condemned to death.
To give you an impression, this is the beginning of his story entitled Water Liars from the Airships collection:
"When I'm run over and tired of the world, I go down to the Farta cove down the Jaza river, take a beer and sit on the dock where the old liars hang out and gossip about each other. The composition of the team is always different, some get lost somewhere, others suffer from constipation, hide in their cabins and wait for a convenient day when they will come out and lie again leaning against the fence with pockets full of bran cookies. The son of the man after whom the bay is named is often there. He pronounces his surname Fartay, with a heavy French accent on the last syllable. You can laugh at that or just ignore his name written on the road sign (Fart).
I'm glad that's not my name.
This poor proud man has to prove his nobility to semi-literate Americans every time before they even start a decent conversation about anything. On the other hand, Farte Junior is a big liar himself. For years, he has been claiming to see ghosts around the lake and telling big lies about the big fish these ghosts are pulling out of the Farta bay..."
Having read this story before, I knew what happened next, so reading just this paragraph was enough for my needs, which is to close my eyes and drift off to sleep with a smile on my face.
(The New York Review of Books; Peščanik.net; translated by: L. BUDIMLIĆ)
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