Among a
thousand unforgettable images in the Divine
Comedy is one in the nineteenth canto of the Inferno in which the pilgrim Dante likens himself in simile to a
mendicant confessor at the execution of a murderer. “I stood, like the friar who is confessing a
treacherous assassin that, after being fixed, recalls him and thus delays the
death.” There is a ghastly glimpse of
social history behind these lines. The
punishment for hired assassins in medieval Florence was to be asphyxiated, and
in horrible fashion. The condemned man
was stoutly affixed to a post and placed head-first in a hole to about his
waist. The executioners then filled the
hole with loose earth. The criminal has
made his confession and received his absolution. But to hold death at bay even for but an
instant, he “remembers” an unmentioned sin, and calls the friar back.
The
prospect of annihilation is a powerful stimulus to the narrative imagination. A great work of world literature, one that
most readers will know and love, exemplifies the point. I mean the Arabian Nights, also known as the Thousand Nights and One Night, an ancient compilation and a
treasure house of great old stories like “Sinbad the Sailor”. The rather gruesome premise of this
collection is that a pathologically jealous eastern potentate each night takes
a virgin for a bride. In the morning, in
order to give her no opportunity to betray him, he has her executed. Eventually they run out of virgins—all too
easily done, even in conservative circles--but a particularly clever young
woman, Scheherazade, daughter of the vizier, volunteers. In bed, she tells her new husband an
intriguing story—but breaks off before its denouement. The potentate decides to allow her a second
night to complete the tale. This she
does, but immediately begins, but only begins, another. Once more the fascinated husband grants her
an “extra” night—and so it goes for 1001 nights, by which time he is
permanently hooked or booked.
Ferdinand Keller : Scheherazade and the Sultan (1880)
Neither
from the sexual nor the existential point of view are my circumstances so
dramatic as those of Scheherazade, but they are not without a certain
parallelism. I am finally, within a very
few weeks, having to submit the copy for a long “finished” book. I think it’s a good book, and certainly one I
have worked hard on, but I realize I have been doing almost everything in my
power—such as writing two other books in the meantime—to avoid letting it
go.
I had a good college
friend—now many years dead, alas—with whom I used to discuss possible life
plans. He had an excellent one, though
it went unfulfilled. Step one was to
marry a very rich woman. Step two was to
get a bathrobe and a pipe. He could
shuffle around the house endlessly in the bathrobe. If asked what he did, exactly, the answer
would be “I am writing a novel”. An
occasional puff on the pipe would seal the plausibility of the vocation claimed. “You see,” he said, “to be a writer you don’t
actually have to publish anything. All
you have to do is be writing something.”
I do have a permanently unfinished
novel, but it hardly counts among the half dozen or so unfinished scholarly
books. The thing is that writing leads
to more writing, while finishing something leads to a void, awkward questions,
snarky reviews. I also note, thanks to
the little device provided by Google, that this is the 364th weekly
essay on “Gladly Learn, Gladly Teche”.
Since there are seven days in a week, and fifty-two weeks in a year—well,
even I can do the math in my head. I am
just about to complete seven years of weekly blogging. And I also recall that my very first essay,
in addition to being way too long, was in part devoted to Luis de Camões and to
the book that I even then had been working on (off and on) for the first three years of my retirement. So that makes a full decade of purposeful
delay, meaning that I have surpassed the famous advice of Horace in his “Art of
Poetry” that you should wait nine
years (…nonumque prematur in
annum…) before releasing your
manuscript from the desk drawer in which it has been moldering. But I have achieved this through honest sloth
without recourse to the active nocturnal sabotage practiced by Penelope.
"Penelope Unraveling
Her Work at Night" by Dora Wheeler (1856–1940)
