Michael Ondaatje. Divisadero

All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behaviour of the other. It's like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle's form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell (p. 136).

He thought, strangely, not of his family but about Marie-Neige, with whom he had rarely spoken since his marriage. For a series of nights his mind leapt with excited freedom all around her. He would recall something and force himself to journey across the episode, slowly. He had seen her rise from sewing and arch her back, slip her left hand up within the sleeve of the other arm and tug at the muscle there. If he had been more relaxed as a man, he would have crossed the room and kneaded the muscle free of its stiffness. There'd been some sibling-like desire in him towards her. He began sorting the evidence of that. Where he had turned right, he now turned left and entered a room with her, or helped her carry bundles of laundry when it started to rain --they rushed into the house, their arms full, his shirt and her blouse speckled, no, sodden, with rain. She picked up a towel from the basket and dried his hair. His palms rested on her thin shoulders while his head was bowed towards her, aware her taut body was made up only of essentials (pp. 247-48).



'We have art,' Nietzche says, 'so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.' For the raw truth of an episode never ends, just as the terrain of my sister's life and the story of my time with Coop are endless to me. They are the possibilities every time I pick up the telephone when it rings suddenly, some late hour after midnight, and I hear the beeps and whirs that suggest a transatlantic call, and I wait for that deep breath before Claire will announce herself. I will be for her an almost unrecognizable girl save for an image in a picture (Michael Ondaatje. Divisadero. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, p. 267-68).

(In the original, as Ondaatje notes in his Acknowledgements, it reads: Wir haben die Kunst, damit wir nicht an der Wahrheit zugrunde gehen.)