What I’ve learnt from a lifetime of reading

Alberto Manguel traces back to the pages of fiction almost everything he knows about life’s essential things

For many years now, the British Postal Service has busied itself with correspondence addressed to Mr Sherlock Holmes, Esq, at 221B Baker Street, while Charles Dickens used to receive an angry

stream of letters blaming him for the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. Contrary to appearances, fictional characters at their best often seem more alive than our friends of solid flesh. Far from sticking to their stories, they change the plot at every one of our readings, adding a startling episode that we had forgotten or a detail that was previously unnoticed. Heraclitus’s warning about time is true for every reader: we never step twice into the same book.

Biology tells us that we descend from creatures of flesh and blood, but intimately we know that we are the sons and daughters of ghosts of ink and paper. Ages ago, Luis de Góngora defined them with these words:

In his playhouse built on lofty drapes,

Sleep, the author of dramatic scenes,

Dresses up phantoms of becoming shapes.

In my adolescence, thanks to a quirky high-school teacher, we read the writings of Edmund Husserl on phenomenology. While most of the adult world seemed to insist that only tangible things were worth caring for, Husserl, to our delight, argued that we can forge a bond, even a deep bond, with things that are deemed inexistent. Mermaids and unicorns, as far as we know, have no proven tangible existence, even though medieval Chinese bestiaries declare that the reason unicorns are not often seen is because of their extreme natural shyness. And yet, Husserl argued, the human mind can be intentionally directed towards those imaginary beings and create between us and them what he unpoetically calls “a normal dyadic relationship”. I have established many such relationships with hundreds of these creatures.

One can build one’s autobiography in many ways: through the places one has lived, through the dreams one has had and still remembers, through remarkable encounters with unfading men and women, through mere chronological accounting. I have always thought of my life as the turning of the pages of many books. My readings, the ones that form my imaginary cartography, define almost every one of my intimate experiences, and I can trace back to a certain paragraph or line almost everything I believe I know about the essential things.

Eliot says in The Waste Land:

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

My feelings exactly. The earliest “handful of dust” to show me fear that I can remember was the handsome Robber Bridegroom in the Grimms’ fairy tale, whose promised bride arrives secretly at his house to discover that he is the leader of a band of murderers. Hiding behind a barrel, she sees her future bridegroom and his mates drag into the house a screaming, sobbing girl. “They gave her wine to drink, three glasses full, one glass of white, one glass of red, and one glass of yellow, which caused her heart to break. Then they ripped off her fine clothes, laid her on a table, chopped her beautiful body in pieces and sprinkled salt on it.” The story ends, of course, with the punishment of the criminals “for

Husserl argued that we can forge a deep bond with things deemed inexistent