2025 Readings 114

     "You should understand, Mr. Blodget, that one thing I have come to trust is that people find what they are looking for, what they believe on some level that they either need or deserve. I think this is proven moment to moment, so I take it as more than mere happenstance that you are here. I take it as a measure of your will, which honors us and obliges me to be honest."

     Blodget looked up from the Tibetan pieces to find the doctor's eyes directly upon him. "Please."

     "Well. Something else I've come to trust is that truth is provided in precisely the measure and form appropriate to each of us individually. I find, more over, that the disposition of truth is not, as it may sometimes seem, to withdraw and then appear. That is a function of our concentration. The disposition of truth is to remain constant. That way, when a man chooses to look, directly at whatever happens to be surrounding him - whatever it may be - he will find the truth there waiting. Am I clear?"

Brooks Hansen, The Chess Garden

This morning I finish my latest, I'm guessing my fifth, reading of Brooks Hansen's The Chess Garden. As always, I sobbed. I didn't cry because the ending is sad, although it is in a way, but because of its almost crushing beauty. As I was saying to my great friend Sarah this morning, The Chess Garden is, to me, a remarkably generous gift. I mention Sarah mainly because she's the only person that I've recommended the novel to who has loved it like I do. Seriously, we can't talk about it without getting misty-eyed. Every other person I've recommended it to (and I've dragooned so many people into reading it) have either not finished it or tried to gracefully cover up how mystified they were by my love for the novel. It's on that short list with Dickens's Bleak House or Proust's Remembrance of Things Past or Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet (if that's actually a novel) or Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio for the designation as my favorite novel. I don't know if I completely understand it - or that I'm supposed to understand it - although I also feel that I come a little closer with every reread. Recently I purchased an Emanuel Swedenborg (his life and philosophy play a huge role in the novel) reader, hoping that will give me more tools for my next reread. In the spring I'm going to start my latest reread of Remembrance of Things Past, although this will be my first with the new translation, with the more appropriate title In Search of Lost Time, I recently acquired. My plan was to finish the reread so that I wouldn't feel the pressure to take all seven volumes in my suitcase this summer to Sicily. My logic was much the same with The Chess Garden, especially since my copy is falling to pieces. However, the thought that I would go anyplace without the novel is madness. Obviously, The Chess Garden is remarkably, impossibly highly, recommended, and I'll apologize in advance. I would like to point out that Doctor Uyterhoeven, who is talking to Blodget above, and I share the same birthday. Like Doctor Uyterhoeven, I plan on leaving my cane hanging from the apple tree outside the cabin when I head overseas.