Rereadings by Anne Fadiman

Author:Anne Fadiman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

One of the most popular oracles in late antiquity and the Middle Ages was the sortes Vergilianae, in which the petitioner opened a copy of the Aeneid and chose a verse at random, without peeking, to predict the future. The practice was based upon the belief that Virgil’s poems, like those of Homer, contained all human learning and wisdom; if the consultation gave an unreliable forecast, at least it might offer some good advice. Nowadays, if somebody says a book is magical, chances are he’s trying to sell it to you. Yet every now and then a book comes along that appears to exert an uncanny influence on your life. I don’t mean that in the sense that its ideas change your way of thinking, but rather “uncanny” in the old Scots sense of the word, meaning that it possesses occult powers—like the predictive ability the Romans attributed to the Aeneid.

As I reread my sortes Conradensis, the thought that kept recurring to me was how closely it had predicted my own life. On the second page, before flashing back to Jim’s school days, the book describes his later career as a “water-clerk,” or salesman for a ship chandler: “Thus in the course of years he was known successively in Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia.” I reread those words sitting on the porch of my house in Jakarta—as Batavia has been known since 1949. Since my travels in Asia began sixteen years ago, I too have spent some time—been known, you might say—in those places, all except Calcutta; it’s still on my “not yet” list. I have been a party to a few after-dinner storytelling sessions at hotels in Singapore, though the verandas now are usually glazed and air-conditioned. I have slept in the jungle of Borneo, in a village much like Jim’s. Dain Waris is Buginese, born on the island of Celebes, now called Sulawesi, and so is my own best friend, my partner Rendy. Conrad writes of the Bugis: “The men of that race are intelligent, enterprising, revengeful, but with a more frank courage than the other Malays, and restless under oppression.” The words could have been written to describe Rendy, except that as far as I know he has never exacted revenge of any sort. I’m certain that he would be restless under oppression, but since I have known him, he has refused to submit to anything like that. Conrad might have added “stubborn” to the list.

Our house in Jakarta isn’t as tranquil a literary refuge as my boyhood room, though it’s quite as comfortable, perpetually breezy thanks to the L-shaped garden that encloses it. It can’t really be described as a quiet house; we’re just around the corner from the neighborhood mosque, which broadcasts a loudly amplified call to prayer five times a day. After the predawn call on the first night we spent here, I announced at breakfast that we would have to leave the house, that I couldn’t possibly live with such a racket.

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