On Mar 7, 2020, at 8:27 PM, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From the 2-28-2020 issue of the Times Literary Supplement: “Clouds Left Far
Behind, the impulse to transcend physical limitations through writing,” an
article by Darran Anderson, the author of Imaginary Cities, 2015, and
Inventory: A River, a city, a family.
The title had me thinking of Tolkien who literally got so caught up the world
he had created that he transcended his limitations, but the author has in
mind prisoners who transcend their circumstances by writing. His first
prisoner wrote, ‘Come then, let us start! Follow me, all ye whom the ‘pangs
of despised love’ or slights of friends keep within doors – follow me far
from the meannesses and unkindnesses of men. Be ye unhappy, sick, or weary,
follow me. Ye idle ones, arouse ye, one and all.’
Anderson tells us, “These exultant words are to be found in A Voyage around
my Room (1794) by the aristocrat and military man Xavier de Maistre. Placed
under house arrest in Turin for forty-two days after a duel. De Maistre kept
his spirits up by imagining his navigations between the walls around the
furniture as a great journey. His ‘voyage’ is like an Oulipian attempt to
exhaust a place and poetically reframe the familiar. This ‘travel writer’
thinks of his bed, for example, in universal terms; it ‘sees us born and sees
us die. It is the ever-changing scene upon which the human race play by
turns interesting dramas, laughable farces, and fearful tragedies. It is a
cradle decked with flowers. A throne of love. A sepulchre’. Though it is
an intentionally absurdist work, A Voyage Around My Room is a testimony to
the transporting power of writing. ‘Be he miserly or prodigal, rich or poor,
young or old, born beneath the torrid zone or near the poles’, de Maistre
tells his readers, ‘he may travel with me.’ It was a best-seller, and he
eventually wrote a follow-up, charting his room at night – a ‘cell’ to which,
this time, he voluntarily confined himself.”
