'That Chimerical Museum of Shifting Shapes'

Readers who read for pleasure, ever in pursuit of Nabokov’s ideal of “aesthetic bliss,” are reminded to celebrate today. It’s the birthday of two reliable literary pleasure-givers, Max Beerbohm (1872) and Jorge Luis Borges (1899). They share another quality: a quasi-aristocratic indifference to politics and the events of the day. Neither is cold-hearted. Both are natural-born observers, not “activists,” and have their priorities well ordered. Their sense of playful irony seems congenital. The pair crossed (forking) paths at least once, in 1940, when Borges published his anthology The Book of Fantasy and included Beerbohm’s story “Enoch Soames” (1916). Both prize memory and dwell in the bittersweet blurring of past and present. We sense they would endorse Charles Lamb’s dictum: “Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!” 

In his essay “No. 2. The Pines” (And Even Now, 1920), written in 1914, Beerbohm describes his youthful visits with Charles Algernon Swinburne, beginning in 1899. The title refers to the address of Swinburne’s home in Putney. Beerbohm writes:

 

“It is odd how little remains to a man of his own past--how few minutes of even his memorable hours are not clean forgotten, and how few seconds in any one of those minutes can be recaptured . . . I am middle-aged, and have lived a vast number of seconds. Subtract one third of these, for one mustn't count sleep as life. The residual number is still enormous. Not a single one of those seconds was unimportant to me in its passage. Many of them bored me, of course; but even boredom is a positive state: one chafes at it and hates it; strange that one should afterwards forget it! And stranger still that of one’s actual happinesses and unhappinesses so tiny and tattered a remnant clings about one!”

 

Borges writes in his poem “Cambridge” (trans. Hoyt Rogers, Selected Poems, 1999);

 

“We are our memory,

We are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,

That pile of broken mirrors.”