The Invention of Solitude

thing happened: nothing. But A. and D. were undaunted. All through the years of high school, they continued to commemorate that day. Not with ceremony, but simply with acknowledgement. For example, seeing each other in the school corridor and saying: Saturday is the day. It was not that they still expected a miracle to happen. But, more curiously, over the years they had both become attached to the memory of their prediction.
    The reckless future, the mystery of what has not yet happened: this, too, he learned, can be preserved in memory. And it sometimes strikes him that the blind, adolescent prophecy he made twenty years ago, that fore-seeing of the extraordinary, was in fact the extraordinary thing itself: his mind leaping happily into the unknown. For the fact of the matter is, many years have pased. And still, at the end of each November, he finds himself remembering that day.
     
    Prophecy. As in true. As in Cassandra, speaking from the solitude of her cell. As in a woman ’ s voice.
    The future falls from her lips in the present, each thing exactly as it will happen, and it is her fate never to be believed. Madwoman, the daughter of Priam: “ the shrieks of that ill-omened bird ” from whom ” .. .sounds of woe / Burst dreadful, as she chewed the laurel leaf, / And ever and anon, like the black Sphinx, / Poured the full tide of enigmatic song. ” (Lycophron ’ s Cassandra; in Royston ’ s translation, 1806). To speak of the future is to use a language that is forever ahead of itself, consigning things that have not yet happened to the past, to an “ already ” that is forever behind itself, and in this space between utterance and act, word after word, a chasm begins to open, and for one to contemplate such emptiness for any length of time is to grow dizzy, to feel oneself falling into the abyss.
    A. remembers the excitement he felt in Paris in 1974, when he discovered the seventeen-hundred line poem by Lycophron (circa 300 B.C.), which is a monologue of Cassandra ’ s ravings in prison before the fall of Troy. He came to the poem through a translation into French by Q., a writer just his own age (twenty-four). Three years later, when he got together with Q. in a cafe on the rue Conde, he asked him whether he knew of any translations of the poem into English. Q. himself did not read or speak English, but yes, he had heard of one, by a certain Lord Royston at the beginning of the nineteenth century. When A. returned to New York in the sum mer of 1974, he went to the Columbia University library to look for the book. Much to his surprise, he found it. Cassandra, translated from the original Greek of Lycophron and illustrated with notes; Cambridge, 1806.
    This translation was the only work of any substance to come from the pen of Lord Royston. He had completed the translation while still an undergraduate at Cambridge and had published the poem himself in a luxurious private edition. Then he had gone on the traditional continental tour following his graduation. Because of the Napoleanic tumult in France, he did not head south—which would have been the natural route for a young man of his interests—but instead went north, to the Scandinavian countries, and in 1808, while travelling through the treacherous waters of the Baltic Sea, drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Russia. He was just twenty-four years old.
    Lycophron: “ the obscure. ” In his dense, bewildering poem, nothing is ever named, everything becomes a reference to something else. One is quickly lost in the labyrinth of its associations, and yet one continues to run through it, propelled by the force of Cassandra ’ s voice. The poem is a verbal outpouring, breathing fire, consumed by fire, which obliterates itself at the edge of sense. “ Cassandra ’ s word, ” as a friend of A. ’ s put it (B.: in a lecture, curiously enough, about HSlderlin ’ s poetry—a poetry which he compares in manner to Cassandra ’ s speech), “ this irreducible sign— deutungslos —a word beyond grasping, Cassandra ’ s word, a word from which no lesson is to be drawn, a word, each time, and every time, spoken to say nothing…. ”
    After reading through Royston ’ s translation, A. realized that a great talent had been lost in that shipwreck. Royston ’ s Engl ish rolls along with such fury, such deft and acrobatic syntax, that to read the poem is to feel yourself trapped inside Cassandra ’ s mouth.
    line 240… An oath! they have an oath