Last year I had written, in a horribly rambling manner, of my fascination for what I call "American Gothic", not just the painting by Wood, but the whole feeling about New England as a place haunted by witches and Puritans. I've never been to the US, so I guess my ideas will seem lamentably cliché. But maybe the very existence, in my mind, of that huge junkyard of ideas about the US and New England in particular could be material for a story.

I imagine the tale of someone who lands in Boston and from there makes his way first through Massachussets and Connecticut, visiting the old little towns and Ivy League campuses, and stopping at cliffside scenes, topped by a lighthouse, that look like straight from a Hopper painting, then goes up North to the great forests of Vermont and Maine.

The odd numbered chapters in his travel journal describe what he really sees: Hartford, Connecticut, the insurance capital of the world, with neat gleaming skyscrapers, traffic jams in the Big Dig at Boston, hardworking young people in Harvard, cheerful forest rangers in Maine. Travelling combines a huge amount of boredom and frustration ( complaining about hotel rooms, waiting for trains for hours then rushing in them to stare at the window for more hours) with some beautiful moments. In the odd numbered chapters, he dutifully records the quaint sights and conversations he has with some people who, he guesses, "are representative of the spirit of the place”.

The even numbered chapters will, you probably guessed it early on, record his imaginary travel in a New England where the sky is eternally overcast and all nights are thunderstorm nights. He is continually roaming in old cemeteries, hunting for epitaphs amidst the tumbled mausoleums of whaling magnates, hunting for mysterious cues of a hidden, long buried monstrous secret. We even see him scaling the walls of windowless bunkers of Greek fraternity buildings at Harvard and Yale, and somehow making his way inside where, stepping lightly next to drunk, deep sleeping frat boys, his trembling fingers reach for a dusty tome on the ancient bookshelves. As he opens the terrible Necronomicon and recites its blasphemous verses, the very air seems to shiver, and a hairline crack appears in the old streets of Providence, Rhode Island…

Well, Gao XinJiang already used this technique in “Soul Mountain”, in which he travels in the remote valleys of Sichuan, and the chapters alternate between realistic ethnography and a tormented soliloquy/ dialogue with an imaginary girl. Frankly speaking, you get quickly bored of the soliloquy bits, and start to skip over them. It is the same with this story I’m thinking of : realism and fantasy are bad sleeping partners, and the reader would quickly start paying more attention to the journey in the real New England, while the imaginary bits would sound childish ( just the above few lines in the preceding paragraph, already....). Reading a story asks for a suspension of disbelief, it is a mild form of hypnotism. But travel writing is a hybrid genre, it mixes the romance of travel with the grave concern of journalism at the state of the world. It is hard for a reader to keep switching from one mood to another, and in the end he settles for the realistic part, the way someone who cannot go back to sleep finally puts on the light and starts reading a newspaper.

Yet clichés, like all deeply entrenched ideas, have a powerful hold on reality, as they influence our view of the world. We spend enormous amounts of time and money to travel to places because of images of temples in India, palm trees in the Tropics and romance in Paris. However much I may try to put aside my odd obsession with New England, it keeps lingering in my mind, like the sleepless man who, though he keeps on reading his newspaper, yet cannot forget a tenacious dream.

Given that a trip to New England would be a rather expensive therapy, I guess a cheaper way out of it would be to ask myself what it is about the place that fascinates me so. Its prestige, I think. It has quite some of the allure of England (the Ivy League universities, the writers like Thoreau, Melville and Poe, the pretty old towns) combined with a pretty grandiose landscape too: huge forests, beautiful coastline. I’m especially fascinated by its coast - I who live in super duper palm beach island, have a bizarre craze for cliffs and lighthouses in cold countries. I keep remembering that old footage of Kennedy at the helm of his yacht, off the coast of Hyannis, Massachussets. Maybe for me, New England combines some of the allure or snobbery of Europe, and the rugged grandeur of America. It sounds so pat when I spell it out.

Let’s leave it at that and not talk of the other things that New England evokes for me - Lovecraft, the witches of Salem and all that. Some things are better left unsaid....

This is about two situations where we would need a new word to express the correct nuance:

(i) “ understanding the context”

You hear about historians getting into trouble because they said that this or that “has to be placed in its relevant context”. They are not trying to play down the negative aspect of some phenomenon. The problem comes from the word “context” which we associate with “circumstances” like in “you have to understand my circumstances”. It’s even worse if one says “You must understand the context” which is straightaway misunderstood as a request for empathy. To understand the historical context is not to look for an excuse, or to minimise the bad side of what happened: it just means “to have a cold comprehension of the historical background against which something happens, and to assess its impact in that light”.

Talking of history in general is a minefield. History is supposed to be a boring subject, yet say something bold such as “Bush was a great president” and you’ll see how tempers rapidly flare up. Actually nowadays with the spread of literacy and news channels, everyone does have a pet worldview and a sure recipe about how to fix the world. And people will pounce on you like eager talk show hosts.

For example, suppose I say : “It’s a horrible thing to say, but maybe the world would have been a worse place had it not been for Hitler” people will think I’ve gone mad. Yet think about it: in the 20’s the Weimar democracy was tottering to its crash. Apart from the Nazis, the other big extremist party was the Communist party. Before 1932, you had serious fights in the streets of Berlin between Nazi and Communist hoodlums. Now suppose that it had been the Communists who had won the election in 1932, or maybe even earlier (the Weimar system was so weak, that they kept having elections all the time as they couldn’t have a stable government). Then you would have had a Communist Germany, probably allied to Stalin’s USSR. The two of them would have gobbled down Europe like a pack of wolves. Once France is conquered by a Communist Germany, the commissars spread out to “liberate” the French colonies by setting up Communist regimes there too. And the USSR, on its side helps the Communists take power in China. By 1955, you have a Communist bloc stretching from France to Vietnam, plus large parts of West and North Africa.

You see the kind of misunderstandings that arise from saying this kind of thing. People will say I’m saying that Hitler was a good thing for the world etc. I’m not saying all this, I’m just coldly looking at history as if I was doing a postmortem of a chess game, and saying: suppose they had played it differently.

(ii) “ reading quickly”

In our hurried times, do we always “read” books or articles ? The fast food culture does exist with books too. We don’t always “read”, sometimes our eyes go through some lines, but did we really understand what it meant ? I wonder if I’ve read anything with attention for the past 20 years. I mostly skim over beginnings of paragraphs, linger over some interesting lines, skip over the next one or two pages to settle on something more interesting. Even then, there’s scarcely any book whose last cover I’ve reached. Yet there’s no exact word for my greedy, lazy way of reading, coz in general we still tend to see reading as a grave pursuit and we especially tend to believe that intellectuals absorb deeply whatever they read. I’m sure lots of them are like me, they used to read with focus and intensity when they were 20, but now they skim through new stuff. In any case there’s some stuff which I couldn’t bear to read again with real focus, it’s too scary, stuff like Kafka. I’d rather have Thackeray. More and more I tend to like my inner self to be comfortably numb.

Maybe the afterlife is like this, you become a ghost eternally roaming in the junkyard of your mind, groping and rummaging through comfortable recollections, ideas and fantasies. Maybe the mind is like a heap of garbage that somehow knows how to evacuate the toxic bit, and keep the easy stuff.

I have been rereading bits of Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss. Lots and lots of talent, but the Booker ? I find the character of the judge a little bit wooden and stereotyped, for instance. Anyway, I find the poem by Borges on the page after the dedication really beautiful. It’s called “Boast of Quietness” , and was translated in 1999 by Stephen Kessler, from Selected Poems of Borges, Viking Penguin:

Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and my death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them.
Their day is as greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,
The willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.

In this poem, Borges the descendant of a distinguished but impoverished family ( alluded to in the line : My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword。 The portraits are family portraits, and the sword that of an ancestor who was a famous general during one of Argentina’s old civil wars) speaks without bitterness of the nouveaux riches in modern Argentina. He compares their greed, their feeling of self-importance with his own feeling of mortality and his habit of dwelling in the past.

The imagery is poignantly beautiful : the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls. Borges is able to put himself morally above the greedy and the ambitious by boldly stating that “we are all voices of the same poverty” and “My name is someone and anyone”. It is a bold act, in the sense that he was quite proud of his family lineage, and we can’t help wonder whether he really means it, while at the same time we feel amazed by this act of humility from such a proud man.

In the last lines starting from Time is living me, he lines up with great skill images of his identity being dissolved in a greater concept ( humanity, time). This poem starts with a startling, flashing line : writings of light assault the darkness and gradually gathers a ghostly, crepuscular beauty, especially starting from the line The willow grove’s visible prayer as the evening falls whose stunning beauty would be obvious to anyone who has observed how, at dusk, a darkening tree seems to radiate a mysterious presence.