The Dusk: Tales for Twilight by Charles Wilkinson & Colin Insole & Jonathan Wood & Benjamin Tweddell & et al

Author:Charles Wilkinson & Colin Insole & Jonathan Wood & Benjamin Tweddell & et al.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Side Real Press
Published: 2023-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Another Invisible Collection

Louis Marvick

“Collectors are happy people…”[1]

My travelling companion’s last words about the blind, retired civil servant and his invisible collection lingered in my mind after he got out at the Frederick Street station. Were they true, I wondered? I am something of a collector myself, of books and autographs mostly, and I know the joy that a new discovery can bring. But sometimes, poring over my treasures by lamplight, considering their number and quality, reliving the chases that led me to them, and telling myself that they are mine, I am troubled by a sense of pointlessness. What have I accomplished by acquiring them? What, beside other people’s remains, will I leave behind? My own autograph is of no interest to anyone, unless it is on a cheque, for I have done nothing worth remembering. Even my delight in the thought that the subject of a photographic portrait must have come face to face with herself when she signed it, and that by doing so she envisaged (rather than endorsed) that record of how she had looked at a moment of her past, loses its piquancy when I reflect on my irrelevance to the object before me, the irrelevance of one excluded from that trace of self-reflection, that circuit of locked eyes. On the evening of my return to Berlin I sat down to dote upon one such picture, signed with a slash across the throat by a famous beauty of the cinematic screen; but the story my travelling companion had told me deepened my sense that I was a voyeur, albeit one whose gaze was permitted by right of legal acquisition. I was just going to return the picture to its place in the cabinet when the thought struck me that the old man’s joy had probably never been so pure, so sharp as it became after he lost his power of sight, and could not see that his treasures were gone. Was blindness, then, a desirable quality in a collector? Only if he believed in the presence of what he could not see; in that case, he might yield to the delusion.

Following this train of thought, I remembered a colleague from my working days, a man who had impaired his vision by devoting himself excessively to research. Bertrand Habeck was an art historian and authority on Mannerism, that period of cold and artificial contrivance that followed the High Renaissance. In countless hours at his desk, he had demanded so much of his eyes that the retinae had crumbled, leaving him groping in a permanent fog. Having seen, he could no longer see—or only enough to perform the most basic tasks of everyday life. We had once been on friendly terms, and I wondered what had become of him. If anyone had a worthwhile point of view on the question that teased me, it was he.

In the old days, it would have been easy to find Habeck hunched over some early edition at his usual seat in the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.