'A Lovely Lightness of Spirit'

My understanding of “deliquescing” goes back to high-school chemistry: a solid melts or becomes liquid by absorbing moisture from the air. Kay Ryan uses the word in an unexpectedly metaphorical way in her review of This Craft of Verse (2002), a transcript of the lectures Jorge Luis Borges gave at Harvard in 1967-68. Ryan may be the most precise writer at work today. There’s no mushiness in her choice of language, no sense of almost the right word. When she chooses a surprising word, it’s not sloppy or generic. It means something. She writes in the Borges review:

 

“[I]t was instead a lovely lightness of spirit. Behind all the lectures I could feel Borges’ abiding dream of deliquescing into the glories of literature. At first this was hard to see because it’s mixed up with his worries about getting things a bit scrambled up, but then there it is: this big egolessness. Borges simply apprehends the inexhaustible radiance of literature and would walk into it naked and without a name, such a lover is he.”

 

By “deliquescing” in this context I think she means being absorbed by the books we love, so the line where we stop and literature begins is beyond recovery. Like any dedicated reader, much of me – my ways of thinking, my emotional life, the things I find beautiful or otherwise rewarding – come out of books. Reading is a big part of life experience, not a segregated realm. What do I owe Tolstoy or Fulke Greville? I can’t tell you. Here’s the next paragraph in the review:

 

“And that’s another thing; there is an emphasis upon passion in these lectures and a reliance on feelings that is, I suppose I shouldn’t say contrary to, but outside the universe of Borges’ cool, impersonal, intellectually thrilling fictions. After all, Borges is a thinker who can squander what would be a dozen other writers’ whole intellectual careers in a single story such as ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.’”

 

A writer needn’t shriek and moan to prove his emotional chops. Borges wrote about gauchos, for God’s sake. Ryan concludes her review:

 

“Borges’ aesthetic ‘tingling’ recalls Nabokov's famous 'frisson.' The sensation along the spine was probably much the same for these similarly exhilarating masters who grew old so differently--Nabokov becoming ever more defended and riddling, Borges becoming ever more transparent and universal.”

 

[Ryan’s review of the Borges volume is published in the Winter 2003 issue of The Threepenny Review.]