want never to leave here.
I have only just begun reading the pages I found in this wall—Each day I wake to them, as if, like Lady Su Hui, they’ll show me a pattern I can enter, a place where, no matter how much I wander, I’ll somehow not get lost—
When you fled you left your laboratory notes behind. Though I carry them with me, mostly I have no desire to see your handwriting in front of my eyes (it pains me to see it). But once, as I unpacked my few things in the woods, a note from Clerval slipped out from your papers, and I read it:
My friend, I know you’re suffering and wish there was more I could do to bring you comfort. I still worry about your fever, though I know it’s much better. I worry about the tremor in your hands, the look in your eyes I find troubling but hard to describe, the way you stay always alone (though I myself mostly prefer to be alone). Sometimes I think you’ve mistaken my tenderness for a kind of frailty, some central flaw, an inability to face the harsher aspects of who you are. But I’m less foolish than you think. We’ve known each other from before I can even remember—an intimacy such as ours becomes almost a separate creature, composed of cells we can’t see or hardly fathom. Maybe in some ways we are simply each other’s native tongue. Caxton wrote in Sonnes of Amyon, “It is sayd, that at the end a frende is known.” I don’t believe this. I understand you’re unknowable to me. Still, I’d have liked to comfort you. Now I’ve decided to go east—it’s what I’ve wanted for so long. I’ve told no one, just you. I wish to live out my life among books, even those written in a language I don’t yet understand. I plan to find a teacher in London, then make my way to China. I hope never to return. Your friend always, Henry Clerval
I hadn’t known a human being could sound like that. He used the words “comfort” and “tenderness.” He called you “My friend.” Nights I’d lie in the woods thinking only that I wished I could see him, and wondered, if he saw me, what might he think? Would he flee from me like you did? But he wrote those words … I imagined him not fleeing.
Now I watch his slender fingers turning pages, the way he’s careful with each one, and a feeling almost of peacefulness comes into me.
Sometimes I imagine he left that note for me, not you. And that, along with Sonnes of Amyon (I have since read many books) he also knew this line from Turner, “rais’d by the Comfort of The Sunne to water dry and barren grounds.”
Clerval rubs his eyes idly with his hands, gets up for a cup of water or to make tea. He’s been reading for hours. Mostly he stays very still, as if the words coming into his eyes demand of him great stillness, the way a harbor needs to be calm for its ships. Often he goes nearly a whole day without eating.
Already noon-light streams in from the small window. I feel like I’ve been in my chair for a few minutes, but it’s been hours.
Never have I read such a curious book. As if the pages were turning to vapor in my hands—I can’t get a proper hold. Every time I think I’ve found a steady voice to guide me, it complicates itself, fractures or leaves and is replaced by other voices (though it’s true the first voice eventually comes back).
The first chapter begins: “This is the opening chapter of the novel. In writing this, the author wanted to recall certain of his past dreams and illusions.” This is written in the same hand as the paragraphs that follow, in which the author, now speaking in first person, says, “Though my home is now a thatched cottage with matting windows, earthen stove and bed of straw, this shall not stop me from laying bare my heart.”
So who’s speaking? And why this shift from third person to first? (This book seems to have many beginnings.)
I’ve learned the author is Cao Xueqin, who exiled himself to the outskirts of Peking. These papers I’ve found in the wall are one of several handwritten copies of his novel, though no two are exactly alike.
Some say he wrote all the pages himself. Some say he found a