I have to confess that I decided to read this book because a Genshin Impact version update was named after it, and I was curious what they were referencing. It turned out to be exactly up my alley — such a weird book, with so many funky, interesting things to say about reading and writing and books as objects. The prose winds around itself in fun ways, and there are probably too many colons and semicolons, which I love. Please read it!
I highlighted so many things that I ended up editing this list down because it got a little embarrassing. Sorry for the imprecise citations — I read an .epub, so page numbers would not be helpful.
highlights
chapter 1
…in fact, on sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is. Chapter 1
Where would I go out to? The city outside there has no name yet, we don’t know if it will remain outside the novel or whether the whole story will be contained within its inky blackness. Chapter 1
…in fact, it was established that I would go through here without leaving any traces; and instead, every minute I spend here I am leaving more traces. Chapter 1
This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. Chapter 1
Very Genshin Impact. Even from the first chapter, it was obvious why they chose to reference this book.
chapter 2
Of course: there are themes that recur, the text is interwoven with these reprises, which serve to express the fluctuation of time. You are the sort of reader who is sensitive to such refinements; you are quick to catch the author’s intentions and nothing escapes you. Chapter 2
I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that was written in second person. I loved it — so video-game-y to be told that you are the person in the story, and that you feel a certain way about the things happening to and around you.
What you would like is the opening of an abstract and absolute space and time in which you could move, following an exact, taut trajectory; but when you seem to be succeeding, you realize you are motionless, blocked, forced to repeat everything from the beginning. Chapter 2
Another bit that reminded me of video games, and Genshin Impact especially.
chapter 3
They want problems to debate, general ideas to connect with other general ideas. Chapter 3
Evergreen.
…seashells as a deceptive harmony, a container concealing the true substance of nature… Chapter 3
Just thought this was such a cool, funny description of a seashell.
In any case, the person who finds this diary will have one certain advantage over me: with a written language it is always possible to reconstruct a dictionary and a grammar, isolate sentences, transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me every day the world’s intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing that there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things. Chapter 3
chapter 4
“Books are the steps of the threshold…All Cimmerian authors have passed it…Then the wordless language of the dead begins, which says the things that only the language of the dead can say.” Chapter 4
This reminded me of something one of my high school English teachers said once that I have never forgotten: reading is time-travel.
How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist? Chapter 4
“Reading,” he says, “is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead…” Chapter 4
chapter 5
…the mournful patience of overnervous people and the ultrasonic nervousness of overpatient people. Chapter 5
Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others. Chapter 5
This (and the following) quote also remind me of Genshin Impact, and all the times they have teased the idea of a larger time loop that the Traveler is part of as they “witness” the world.
I can be sure that even in this tiny, insignificant episode there is implicit everything I have experienced, all the past, the multiple pasts I have tried in vain to leave behind me, the lives that in the end are soldered into an overall life… Chapter 5
I’m producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any moment or place, you encounter always the same density of material to be told. Chapter 5
chapter 6
The chronology is also uncertain: there are letters that refer to previous communications, which, however, prove to have been written later; there are letters that promise further explanations, which instead are found in pages dated a week earlier. Chapter 6
Video games! Video game readables!
“…I had managed to persuade that elderly author of thrillers to entrust to me the beginning of the novel he was unable to continue, assuring him that our computers would be capable of completing it easily, programmed as they are to develop all the elements of a text with perfect fidelity to the stylistic and conceptual models of the author.” Chapter 6
This was written in 1979 btw.
…the mere fact that I can be called to a telephone suffices to make it possible or at least conceivable that I may be called by all telephones. Chapter 6
chapter 7
This was probably my favorite chapter. Lots to say about reading and writing and the function of books and authors and readers — which exists in the rest of the novel, too, but was a bigger focus here.
Your relationship with objects is selective, personal; only the things you feel yours become yours: it is a relationship with the physicality of things, not with an intellectual or affective idea that takes the place of seeing them and touching them. Chapter 7
In short: are you tidy or untidy? Your house does not answer preremptory questions with a yes or a no. You have an idea of order, to be sure, even a demanding one, but in practice no methodical application corresponds to it. Obviously your interest in the home is intermittent; it follows the difficulty of your days, the ups and downs of your moods. Chapter 7
…perhaps for you each book becomes identified with your reading of it at a given moment, once and for all. And as you preserve them in your memory, so you like to preserve the books as objects, keeping them near you. Chapter 7
Obviously you have the habit of reading several books at the same time, you choose different things to read for the different hours of the day, the various corners of your home, cramped as it is: there are books meant for the bedside table, those that find their place by the armchair, in the kitchen, in the bathroom…your mind has interior walls that allow you to partition different times in which to stop or flow, to concentrate alternately on parallel channels. Chapter 7
This all struck me as being very relatable. Of course you have different books for different moods; of course the tidiness of your house fluctuates depending on the day.
You are always a possible you. Chapter 7
…to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others’ words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other. Chapter 7
Putting into words what feels so special about sharing a book with someone.
But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Chapter 7
The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot. Chapter 7
How is it possible to defeat not the authors but the functions of the author, the idea that behind each book there is someone who guarantees a truth in that world of ghosts and inventions by the mere fact of having invested in it his own truth, of having indentified himself with that construction of words? Chapter 7
…between the book and her there would always be insinuated the shadow of mystification, and he, identifying himself with every mystification, would have affirmed his presence. Chapter 7
This doesn’t mean much without context, but it kind of blew me away.
Speculate, reflect: every thinking activity implies mirrors for me…Maybe this is why I need mirrors to think: I cannot concentrate except in the presence of reflected images, as if my soul needed a model to imitate every time it wanted to employ its speculative capacity. Chapter 7
I want to conceal, in the midst of so many illusory ghosts of myself, the true me, who makes them move. Chapter 7
In a catoptric world enemies can equally believe that they are surrounding me from every side, but I alone know the arrangement of the mirrors and can put myself out of their reach, while they end up jostling and seizing one another. Chapter 7
From mirror to mirror — this is what I happen to dream of — the totality of things, the whole, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror. Or perhaps the knowledge of everything is buried in the soul, and a system of mirrors that would multiply my image to infinity and reflect its essence in a single image would then reveal to me the soul of the universe, which is hidden in mine. Chapter 7
The mirror walls reflect on my image an infinite number of times. Had I been kidnapped by myself? Had one of my images cast into the world taken my place and relegated me to the role of reflected image? Had I summoned the Prince of Darkness and was he appearing to me in my own likeness? Chapter 7
All of the stuff about mirrors reminded me of Genshin Impact some more. The whole book did, but given the time that they chose to reference the title, I think this was the most relevant bit. (iykyk)
chapter 8
Another chapter I really loved, because so much of it was about the torment of writing, lol.
At times I convince myself that the woman is reading my true book, the only I should have written long ago, but will nver succeed in writing, that this book is there, word for word, that I can see it at the end of my spyglass but cannot read what is written in it, cannot know what was written by that me who I have not succeeded and will never succeed in being. It’s no use my sitting down again at the desk, straining to guess, to copy that true book of mine she is reading: whatever I may write will be false, a fake, compared to my true book, which no one except her will ever read. Chapter 8
How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone’s ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Chapter 8
…all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities. Chapter 8
It is not in order to be the spokesman for something definable that I would like to erase myself. Only to transmit the writable that waits to be written, the tellable that nobody tells. Chapter 8
At times I think of the subject matter of the book to be written as of something that already exists: thoughts already thought, dialogue already spoken, stories already happened, places and settings seen; the book should be simply the equivalent of the unwritten world translated into writing. Chapter 8
…the book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten word; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness. Chapter 8
There is thought in the universe — this is the constant from which we must set out every time. Will I ever be able to say, “Today it writes,” just like "Today it rains, “Today it is windy”? Only when it will come natural to be to use the verb “write” in the impersonal form will I be able to hope that through me is expressed something less limited than the personality of an individual. Chapter 8
If we assume that writing manages to go beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through his mental circuits…The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, “I read, therefore it writes.” Chapter 8
I like this idea of the author as a mouthpiece, or a medium, or an oracle for the universe.
The romantic fascination produced in the pure state by the first sentences of the first chapter of many novels is soon lost in the continuation of the story: it is the promise of a time of reading that extends before us and can comprise all possible developments. Chapter 8
To oversimplify it: tfw season two sucks.
The copyist lived in simultaneously in two temporal dimensions, that of reading and that of writing; he could write without the anguish of having the void open before his pen; read without the anguish of having his own act become concrete in some material object. Chapter 8
I, too, would like to erase myself and find for each book another I, another voice, another name, to be reborn; but my aim is to capture in the book the illegible world, without center, without ego, without I. Chapter 8
The book of my memory? No, memory is true as long as you do not set it, as long as it is not enclosed in a form. Chapter 8
(whispers) Genshin Impact.
If I think I must write one book, all the problems of how this book should be and how it should not be block me and keep me from going forward. If, on the contrary, I think that I am writing a whole library, I feel suddenly lightened: I know that whatever I write will be integrated, contradicted, balanced, amplified, buried by the hundreds of volumes that remain for me to write. Chapter 8
chapter 9
To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished. Chapter 9
chapter 10
“…As long as I know there exists in the world something who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading’s sake, I can convince myself that the world continues…” Chapter 10
Gotta do it for the love of the craft.
chapter 11
“Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.” Chapter 11