The Other Shore by Jackson Michael;

Author:Jackson, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

EIGHTEEN

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Writing in the Dark

PREFACING HIS ESSAYS, Michel de Montaigne says that he writes not for the world at large, in prose decked out to secure public favor, but for a select audience of close friends and kinsmen, so that when he dies they will find in his writings some traits of his character and of his humors. “They will thus keep their knowledge of me more full, more alive.”1 As it turned out, Montaigne’s writing outlived his friends and family and found favor in quarters to which he claimed to be indifferent. There are many like myself who are beneficiaries of his unintended bequest. But grateful though I am for these remarkable writings, published posthumously by his widow in 1595, I often ponder the anonymous graveyards of history in which so many individuals, as brilliant as Montaigne, disappeared without a trace. Though one’s own work is indebted to a long line of named precursors, one is bound also to pay homage to those whose names have not survived and whose absence is also a precondition for our own presence.

In a typically aphoristic vein, Walter Benjamin observes that “Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell,” and that the storyteller “has borrowed his authority from death.” That is to say, Benjamin continues, “it is natural history to which [all] stories refer back.”2 To illustrate his assertions, Benjamin summarizes a story by Johann Peter Hebel, called “The Unexpected Reunion,” that builds on the events surrounding the mysterious death of a young Swedish miner named Mads Isaksson in 1687. Benjamin is particularly fascinated by the way in which Hebel embeds his story in natural history, so that the devastating loss suffered by a young woman whose fiancé vanished without a trace on the eve of the midsummer day she was to be married reminds us of the historical calamities and countless deaths that occurred in Europe in the forty-two years before the fateful day Mads Isaksson returned from the dead.

A few years ago, I was in Western Sweden, attending a conference, and seized the opportunity to visit the great copper mine at Falun, now a World Heritage Site.

The first thing you see as you approach the mine are various eighteenth-century buildings clustered around the open-cast pit—the old mine entrance, the dressing plant, the machine director’s house, the miner’s lodge, the shaft heads, and hoists and water wheels. Then you come to the edge of the great pit itself, 325 feet deep and between 1,000 and 3,000 feet across, its present shape the result of a massive cave-in on June 25, 1687, when underground galleries and chambers collapsed down to a depth of 1,000 feet, together with the rock walls dividing what were at that time three separate open pits. Time did not allow me to tour the old buildings, some of which were now museums, but after putting on a waterproof cape and gumboots I joined a tour party that was making the first descent of the day.

I

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