The Rings of Saturn

It’s been a long time since I’ve written about a book. The last time I bothered to extensively write about a novel would be sometime in highschool for an AP course. Choose a few books, write a summary — I think one of them was Steppenwolf or, no, I think it was Narcissus and Goldmund. I also selected Portrait of an Artist, and the last one escapes me. At the time you could either choose a tomb (as my friend did, with some Ayn Rand selection) or three books. Or maybe it was two after all.

Throughout schooling the rigidity to which the student body moves gradually loosens until but a suggestion. Of course you’ll still have to attend classes, but what was once a segue into congregation and club inevitably turns into the methodical dodging of parking lot cars and an unfound urgency to beat the lights, make a lunch, get to the gym, ignore all the homework you did between classes. In a way it is a preparation for the complete freedom adults are often afraid of, and rarely know to the fullest too.

Within this slackened schedule so I do remember, on one or two occasions, finding myself in the certain deserted school library. It was one of the few places with more of an incandescent invitation against the fluorescents of the classes and halls. Because of the loosened schedule, it was rare to find any student there: after all, why go to the library when you could instead slot in a more meaningful activity for your budding future?

I too relished in the loosened freedom, so on such sparse days where necessity brought me through the library’s six door entrance I felt myself entering limboland, of a vestigial comfort one could have hoped in their education. You are here for knowledge after all, and yet I found myself somewhat unsettled amongst the regulars there, whether volunteers or sitting there waiting for their parents, after school programs. It could be a place to saunter and gentle conversation, perhaps the springboard to something that ascended beyond one’s mandatory school attendance, morphing toward a community, away from our sparkly prison, but it felt like bordering a necromancism, watching a mechanical diorama slightly broken through a viscous glass. The world I was in had no room for such alternative ways of living.

It is with the same feeling of necromancy that I read through The Rings of Saturn. Maybe a little more magnified, seeing as the spare library attendance through the four years held a linearity while, in contrast, I can’t confidently say where I was, or where I’m going with the author, other than landmarks. Even if I clearly can read the next location of focus, even if I flip the pages back and retrace how he introduced his current reflection, so I still find myself disoriented how we ended up here, where we’re going next, which is part of the book’s point: forgoing a rigid timeline in favor of impressions. One could also admonish my lack of diligence in pausing and following along with a map of the countries and cities referenced.

Nevertheless as it progresses so I am to witness the rise and fall of a beautiful hall stuck between eras. Or watch the budding and death of fishing industries, of lifetimes grown and passing, how the herring glows in its infarct-sourced death. Here I stand bobbing amongst the rest of the common folk in the water, to witness the aristocrats enjoy their seaside ball brightness before they all disappear, before it all disappears, gardeners pending. Through dementia Chinese quails and bombing raids over Germany so the author reinforces transience and degradation. Of both which, I will admit, are themes I write about often, and thus can see why it was recommended to me.

And yet, one hopes, at least it seems this book suggests, that through our meandering of the rich history, even within a beach castaway bottle, so there is some redemptive streak to be had, elevating the mundane and lifeless and resuscitating it to an eternal glory, perhaps. And while I won’t deny the relative importance of the past, I’m not sure if I could share the same sympathies. Frankly I’m not sure if the author even has these sympathies: it seemed more like a mechanical detailing while on his travels. Regardless, it was something I fought about the entire time I read. And, nevertheless, I think this is squarely where the feeling of necromancy comes from.

I may have learned much more of this section of Europe, or traced through another history beyond as I traveled with the author, but I do not find drenching everything in history, references, sidelines and imagined lives to be invigorating, maybe. Whether this reveals me as a philistine — it probably does — so I even admit that maybe I can no longer grasp the beauty one could resurrect from a world I would figure better to lay dormant. What appears to be a long stretch of research and consideration, well-lofted thoughts and reflections, to me, amplifies the weight upon the present moment, a weight I am desperately trying to evict from my mind.

It does not help that, though one could be relieved by the “present” day travels, references to McDonald’s, so the author still lives in a world undeniably unknown and distant. After all, this was published in 1995 and in the thirty years since so the world, though some argue it maintains the same form, has a stark disconnect. For back then there was still a discourse between reality and technology: it was before the Internet devoured most of the souls walking after DARPA unleashed, as precedence, a Facebook upon the populace. It was also before the full front of the nomadic scourge which continues to disintegrate any semblance of a persisted history through a people.

In short, sitting in my cerebrally stunted technologically infused outpost, what should be a book about the interplay of present and past, now only renders as past and further past, and I can only continue reading what isn’t only a tomb of worlds discarded for the cyber-Bacchus entrenchment, but a tomb sealed and dusted and, though it can be revived for this reading, leaves one unsettled at the level of disconnect modern reality encroaches, the disconnect of a supposed distant heritage of a people I shall no longer know, or never knew, and may only continue to float along with the author hoping to find some fragment one could pocket.

For what am I to do with the sagging armchairs, the faded curtains? One can only wrap around them and hope that, maybe with enough of a lifeforce, we could complete the transition from necromancy into a homunculus birth, some reclaim of dignity for our world reanimated, even if one cannot lose what they never had. Yet I am not sure if this is the direction one ought to take, sunk into this disconnected past once more: so again I find myself vaguely confused on what am I doing with this reading; half of this essay thus far feels completely divorced from the material, but I’m confident this was at least my experience.

Though I often write about transience, I never wrote of it this in-depth, and perhaps the largest takeaway from the book is that one cannot merely engage in transience and then turn away to block it, to continue one’s provisional life with a dilettante reflection now and then. If you keep seeking it and seeing the countryside seared and boarded up, begging orphans now missing, whole classes of people missing, chambermaids, seamstresses — if you swirl all of Europe’s history and press on, so one may eventually understand the gravity of the situation: life proceeds, and you must too.

Toward the end of the book, while still fighting with whether one ought to harvest and decorate the places they go, so I began to find a sympathy for it. If I were traveling along and visiting tombstones why wouldn’t one pull everything back from the past and onward? It also serves as a gentle reminder of the little play your life could be, or not.

Additionally, as the stories compounded, I found myself suddenly and amusingly congruent to the subjects: that they too, can only feel a smudge of a past forgotten, distant, cold. That they, too, could only see themselves wandering at great lengths with blindfolds toward something, supposedly. That even the author, at times, is not sure where they are, or where they’re going, but we are at least to document this, maybe.

There are a few passages I could extract and talk more in-depth about somewhat dispassionately, or I could try to thread something more moralizing, a defacto conclusion, as an American idealistically inclined, but when I finished the novel I must confess I’m still feeling a little stranded. There isn’t anything concrete immediate, but the experience does carry within. It was impressionable, and it’s probably something I’ll think about: I especially enjoyed the silkworm meditations toward the ending.

It’s strange: at the beginning the book felt somewhat depressing and heavy and poking at an inner emptiness with the commitment to an almost zealous devotion of unturning every stone through every marsh and past moment. But toward the end one shall find themselves chugging along, sometimes immersed, sometimes wondering, thinking about survival or thinking about nothing.

It makes one wonder why you could find yourself so invested in some stories while others hit flat. While reading so one is reminded how it’s getting harder and harder to tune into stories, even one’s own. Stories certainly make their current known through the common day, especially Today, and yet what use are stories without the next blank page? Living in a most definitely crazy time, where you can get stories anywhere, even random people alive today, and yet, I don’t know, it seems like an expertly sewn prison the same as the silkworms judiciously threading before boiled in a cocoon.

Maybe a motive behind reading stories falls into two strict categories: research or escapism. And I wouldn’t be sure where to slot The Rings of Saturn, but maybe it’s inclined toward the latter, despite the rigor of the author. Or that it’s instead instructional escapism: reaching a point where you can no longer escape. That stories are more interesting when you’re the one in them, writing them, or plain forgetting them too for the humility of the everyday. So the book, in some ways, echoes back to that humility of the everyday, widening the perception for a moment to see all the dilapidated and buried, washed as backdrop: an invitation for you to tend to your next page.

One line from the book, following a French nobleman, so states:

“But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight. Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life.”

And it struck me particularly because I purposely avoid memories when possible. It’s preferable to write toward some abstract ideals or other nonsense, faint thoughts fleeting over some strange moment. Revisiting and rekindling the tomb of one’s life fills me with ample dread. Everytime I deliberately attempt to do so results in something I’d rather delete. I’m not sure how anyone can stand to do it, and it is this characteristic which probably makes it uncomfortable to join the author and flip through history, through his travels.

The past is gone, and there is nothing more to do other than transfigure it, redefine it, reimage it, or march on. But, one could suppose, maybe there is merit to, as the Frenchman states, to evict one’s memories rather than lock them away. Maybe there is much more merit, than I could ever understand, to dragging a mind’s eye through all iterations of a plane and a people.

It’s hard to say.