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We are also happy tonight to have Anne Carson among us. Anne
Carson is a poet, essayist, and translator and professor of
classics. She also teaches ancient Greek, which I only did three
years of and therefore cannot appreciate what a fourth year is
like. She has published 20 books which blend the form of poetry,
essay, prose, criticism, translation. In other words, something very
fluid and very interesting, actually I think. And her first book, Eros
the Bittersweet, was named one of the 100 best nonfiction books
of all time by the Modern Library, and so on and so forth. And I
decided before she came to speak that I would read something
that is not irrelevant to today. And it's something she wrote, so
bear with me if I read it wrongly. And Anne, please forgive me if
my rhythm is wrong. Sunlight slows down Europeans. Look at all
those spellbound people in Seurat. Look at monsieur sitting
deeply. Where does a European go when he's lost in thought?
Seurat had painted that place, the old dazzler. It lies on the other
side of attention, a long and hazy boat ride from here. It is a
Sunday rather than a Saturday afternoon. Seurat has made this
clear by a special method, (speaking in foreign language) he
called it rather testily when we asked him. He caught us hurrying
through the chill green shadows like adulterers. The river was
opening and closing its stone lips. The river was pressing Seurat
to its lips. Thank you, and Anne, welcome among us. (audience
applauding) - Thank you. And thank you for coming, and thank
you Claire for arranging everything, and thank you Andre for
reading a short talk. That was a short talk. And I had the notion,
I'm gonna give a lecture in a minute, but I thought since this is a
conference and nobody is yet having a very good time that we
could begin with a short talk (audience laughing) of the interactive
nature. So a short talk when it's an interactive one is a 13-second

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lecture that has a part by me and a part by you which comes

together to form a short meaning. So in this one, your part
actually has two parts. So I have to divide the room in half, which I
will do silently. (footsteps clicking) Here, chorus A, chorus B,
okay? (audience chuckling) So chorus A, chorus B. Chorus A, your
line is let's buy it, with an exclamation mark at the end. One, two,
three. - [Chorus A] Let's buy it! - Super. Chorus B, your line is what
a bargain, exclamation mark at the end. (audience laughing) One,
two, three. - [Chorus B] What a bargain! - Okay, got your lines?
(audience laughing) Short talk on the sensation of airplane
takeoff. Well, you know that could be true love running towards
my life with its arms up, yelling. - [Chorus A] Let's buy it! - [Chorus
B] What a bargain! - Thank you. (audience laughing) (audience
clapping) That is the most fun you're gonna have for an hour.
(audience laughing) Okay, now we're gonna do the lecture. This is
a lecture on corners. Corners, part one. The man comes into the
kitchen. It is just before dawn. There is thunder outside which
pleases him. There is a woman sitting in the corner of the room. I
can see her shadow reaching up the wall. The text does not say
this, and yet I can see it. The woman is grinding corn, bent over a
mill wheel. The other 11 women responsible for grinding the corn
of the house are in bed asleep. But this one, who is the frailest
and slowest of them, did not finish her portion of grinding during
the day, so she grinds at night. She too hears the thunder and is
pleased. Thunder from a clear sky means the gods are paying
attention. The woman stops her wheel and addresses the gods.
Father Zeus, ruler of gods and men, things are bad here.
Accomplish a prayer for me as I say it. Let this be the last and
final day on which the suitors feast in the halls of Odysseus.
Every time I reread Book 20 of the Odyssey, every time the man

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comes out at dawn to find the woman in the corner grinding corn,
I am returned to the days of living with my father in his dementia
years. I was familiar with kitchens at dawn in those days. I had the
gun to get up earlier and earlier in the morning to avoid Dad. No
sooner did he hear me in the kitchen than he appeared, dressed in
pajamas and fedora, to begin the barrage of questioning that was
his defense against inner chaos. He needed to control something.
And if I were going for a walk, he wanted to know every twist and
turn of the route I would take. If I were going for a swim, we lived
on a lake, he insisted on coming down to the shore with me,
launching the rowboat, and following me up and down the water
as I did my laps. Odysseus is a stranger in his own house in
Odyssey Book 20. I have come to place this scenario in my mind
alongside myself stealing about a sleeping house at dawn as if to
collapse the two scenes into a single false memory where I was in
the kitchen grinding corn one morning when interrupted by my
father, and delightfully, we both went swimming. Memory can edit
reality in some such way, and then the edited version is too good
to let go. Memory makes what it needs to make. The fact of the
matter was, however, that I swam up and down the lake while he
rode along behind me, and no good omen, thunder or other,
appeared. The lake at that hour was still as glass, Dad and I, the
only commotion. At a certain point, one day, I paused my front
crawl to turn around and look back at this man in pajamas and
fedora, rowing doggedly after me on the silent lake. I can still see
this in my mind as if it were a scene in a play. Not an epic poem of
Homer after all, but a stage play. As Dad, dementia, and I
contemplated one another from three corners of what might be
called a Pinter pause, the theater of the absurd presented itself,
not just because of the early dawn silence and weirdness of it all,

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but the feeling that we could not do otherwise, the whole

sensation of being caught in a script with moves blocked out for
us and characters inescapable, for a Pinter pause rests on silence
and suppression, "the abyss under chat," as somebody called it.
But it also makes use of movement and precise blocking of
characters. "I do think choreographically," Pinter said in an
interview. Living within the bizarre daily choreography of someone
else's dementia, it was a relief to feel that Harold Pinter had been
there first in works of art with a beginning, middle, and end. I have
sometimes wondered if this is what Aristotle meant by catharsis,
but I don't really think so. Corners are what make a grid different
than a line, a plaid shirt different than a striped one, a soccer pitch
different than a field, an elbow different than an arm, light as a
wave different than light as a particle. Corners make personalities
out of persons, maps out of surveillance, and a healthy brain into
a demented one. Brain cells depend on nutrients delivered by a
cell transport system that has straight lines like a railroad track.
The tracks are normally kept straight by a brain protein called tau,
unless its function is disrupted by plaque, which tangles, disrupts,
and disables the lines. Then clumps and corners form and the
brain starts to starve a bit. The starving brain is surprised. It
doesn't know itself or know the world. It keeps arriving at
difficulty. Difficulty is dealt with in different ways by different
brains. And all of this happens bewilderingly gradually. A common
feature is to keep pretending everything is normal as long as
possible. You know what daily life is supposed to sound like and
look like and taste like. You can put that surface together, keep it
running long after there stops being anything inside. You can act
the parts. There is a kind of drastic psychic economy to it, a
costume of standard behavior constructed out of shreds of the

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original person and tatters of his old relationships with other

people. He is becoming an X-ray of himself. You work with that.
His language diminishes to word salad. You converse with that.
His fatherliness dissolves a pace with your daughterliness. You
fake it. You both fake it, maybe. You wonder this. Heroic and
deeply funny, he sends out coded messages from the interior of
himself using whatever tools he has left. One evening, I was in the
kitchen making salad. He drifted through the room in his vague
way, in his fedora, and over his shoulder, as he left, he said, "The
letters of your lettuce are very large." And he laughed. I laughed. It
was a good evening. Speaking of faking it, here is a passage from
Antonia Fraser's memoir of life with Harold Pinter, her diary entry
from June 14, 1975. A summer's day of unusual heat, and the day
after, she had agreed to marry Harold Pinter without yet informing
the current husband, whose name was Hugh. (audience laughing)
Quote, "The next day I had to tell Hugh. "It was beyond ghastly,
"beginning with the moment "when I fetched him inside "from the
thunderous garden where he was smoking "and reading the
Financial Times. "It now thundered inside. "In the end, I
summoned Harold round. "Harold drank whiskey, "Hugh drank
brandy, I sat. "Hugh and Harold discussed cricket at length, "then
the West Indies, "then Proust. "I started to go to sleep on the sofa.
"Harold politely went home. "Nothing was decided." (audience
laughing) We could quote Oscar Wilde here, but Aristophanes of
Byzantium said it earlier, addressing the comic playwright,
Menander. "Oh Menander and life, "which of you imitated the
other?" Clearly, Lady Fraser's diary entry from June 14, with its
surface of mad affability, its undertow of pain, its thunder inside
and beautiful triangular economy, would make a great Pinter play.
Economy in particular was important to Pinter. He said in an

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interview that he prided himself on economy of movement and

gesture, of emotion and expression, both the internal and the
external, so there is no wastage and no mess. So, too, did the
ancient Greek playwrights value economy and make decisions
about stagecraft based on this, which returns us to the topic of
corners. Three corners make a Sophoclean play work. His extant
plays consistently present a triangle of three speaking actors.
According to Aristotle, it was Sophocles in the 5th century BC who
introduced the third actor to a dramatic tradition that had
contented itself with two until then. It seems that the practice of
using three actors became canonical. Scholars refer to this as the
three-actor rule. No one knows why it was a rule. Why did they
stop at three? One hypothesis is economic. Actors were highly
trained and highly paid professionals with salaries underwritten
by the state. Since the plays were presented in the context of a
competition, the Festival of Dionysus, as soon as one playwright
decided to use three actors, everybody would want three actors
and the annual theater budget would sharply rise. Besides that,
the evidence of Sophocles' stagecraft might suggest that three
actors are really all you need to make a tragedy work. Each of his
plays presents harrowing triangular situations where two
characters bring pressure to bear on a third who is trapped
between them and cracks open, or two knowledges that collide
together to force out a third that nobody wants to see. We can
think of the opening scene of the Ajax, where Athena and
Odysseus hunt down poor mad Ajax, or Oedipus the King, where
the king, the messenger, and the herdsmen lock in a
conversational pattern that spits out the guilt of Oedipus. No one
can operate this three-cornered machinery better than Sophocles.
So I wonder what it was like to be one of his rival playwrights in

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the year Sophocles decided to demand a third actor. Suddenly, the

other guys too would have to come up with a new way to make a
play work, having a third body on stage, a third psyche in the
chemistry of the cast, a third corner to the concept.
Circumstantial evidence suggests this took place in 458 BC.
Sophocles' principal rival that year was Aeschylus, who was 67
and two years away from death. He had spent the last 40 years
producing plays for the Festival of Dionysus and had won first
prize 12 times. None of these plays had any use for a third actor.
But in 458, Aeschylus produced the Oresteia trilogy, which makes
use of a third actor in all three parts. Sadly, we don't know what
play Sophocles presented that year, but Aeschylus' Oresteia won
first prize. Let's look at two of the scenes where his third actor
figure is. There is a gleam of one-upmanship in the manner of it.
The Agamemnon opens with an announcement of the fall of Troy.
Then Clytemnestra comes on stage to await the return of her
husband. Clytemnestra, first actor. Next, Agamemnon enters with
an entourage of prisoners of war. Agamemnon, second actor.
Amid the prisoners is Cassandra, princess of Troy and concubine
of Agamemnon, third actor. But this third actor doesn't speak for a
long, long time. Husband and wife trade apologias of their virtue
back and forth for 192 lines while Cassandra listens, or doesn't
listen. It is unclear whether she is stubborn, stupid, psychotic or
doesn't know the language. (audience laughing) All of these
possibilities are advanced by Clytemnestra, who interrogates
Cassandra after Agamemnon has gone inside. Cassandra's
silence remains impermeable. Clytemnestra, in a rage, exits. As
soon as Clytemnestra leaves the stage, Cassandra screams and
launches into 258 lines of prophecy, outlining the past, present,
and future of the House of Atreus as well as the imminent doom

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of all three major characters. Aeschylus has taken the device of

the third actor, introduced by Sophocles for who knows what
technical reasons of his own, and used it to transcend normal
limits of space and time and intelligence. Cassandra shines with
mental power, which is also moral power, and she has more forms
of truth than she can live with. She is merely a third angle of the
tragic triangle, but her silence pulls all the focus of the story into
her corner and explodes it. Silence is a big, crude, theatrical
substance. Pinter uses it to Aeschylean effect in a play from
1961 called A Slight Ache, in which a husband and wife, Edward
and Flora, interact with a man who sells matches in much the
same way Clytemnestra interacts with Cassandra in the
Agamemnon. The match seller stands silent for the entire length
of the play while Edward and Flora interrogate him. Violent forms
of truth emerge from both husband and wife. The end is tragic.
Edward suddenly, for no reason, falls to the floor and is replaced
as husband by the match seller. It is a typically unpleasant Pinter
play. The characters exist in a suspension of humaneness.
Edward and Flora strike poses rather than talking or touching. It's
hard to feel pity or fear for either of them, or for the match seller,
whose silence pulls all the focus of the story onto himself, but
them swallows it. He never speaks. We never know what things
are like on his strange side of reality. Pinter has said in interviews
that he thinks most human talk is an evasion, a desperate
rearguard attempt to keep ourselves to ourselves. He intends his
characters who speak to speak the language of what we say
instead of what we mean. The silent match seller is a step beyond
that. He neither speaks nor means anything. He has given up on
language. In the Agamemnon, Aeschylus uses Cassandra's
silence, at first to tease us into thinking she has given up on

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language, and at the same time, perhaps, tease us into thinking

this playwright doesn't know how to use his third actor. Then her
mouth opens and language pours all over the place. Aeschylus
does something equally adept in the Choephoroi, which is the
second play of the Oresteia trilogy. It has a third actor in only one
scene, the scene where Orestes murders his mother. The third
actor is Orestes' trusty comrade, Pylades, who enters the play
beside Orestes at line 20 and stands unspeaking, unaddressed,
and unmentioned through 898 lines of action and dialogue. Then
at line 899, Orestes, hesitating to murder his mother, turns to
Pylades and says, "Pylades, what should I do?" And Pylades, from
his all but forgotten corner, utters three lines of encouragement,
and the tragedy plunges on to its grizzly end. It would be hard to
mistake Aeschylus' dramaturgic control of Sophocles' newest
innovation. Corners, part two. The person I live with says our
house is too dark. It's true we have no big overhead fixtures or
lighting tracks, just small thrift store lamps placed here and there.
It constitutes a main difference between him and me, between
extroverts and introverts, generally, between people who prefer to
live in a centrally and democratically-lit open space and people
who like a darkish room with a small pool of lamplight in one
corner, between exposure and retreat. To be withdrawn into one's
corner can be a situation of personal peace if we think of the
corner as a sort of half box, part walls, part door. That is, as a
place offering defense at the back and mobility at the front, a
perfect middle term in what Bachelard calls the dialectics of
inside and outside. One thing I noticed about my dad as he
disappeared into his dementia, he lost the sense of the personal
peace of corners. A seriously introverted man who had always
preferred to sit in a rocking chair in the corner of his room with the

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cat on his lap, reading or thinking or watching the world go by,

began to be found perched all alone on a folding chair in the
middle of the front lawn, or standing halfway down the driveway
with a baffled look, or simply wandering room to room with his
hat on. "I am the space where I am," says Bachelard. Demented
people do not seem to experience the self as a shelter. There is
some basic animal certainty that you are who you are and it's
okay that is deleted from them. No more dialectic of inside and
outside. You are simply exposed. You are open to all the winds.
Your life is taking place in that space that the ancient Greek
philosophers called to apeiron, the unbounded, which was
synonymous with chaos for Hesiod. While to Shakespeare it
might be the heath, to Emily Bronte, the moors, to Samuel Beckett,
a late evening in the future, but which my dad acutely described in
the last complete sentence I had from him in this way, "Fires are
the furthest in you are "and the worst you are." Notice the direction
of the fires. I'm pretty sure Emily Bronte and Shakespeare and the
Greek philosophers would chart a course for the unbounded by
going out, not in. But when the unboundedness comes after you,
when you can't escape it outwardly because it is already inside
and already burning, then you really have no shelter. This is a
question commonly asked by the last character left alive at the
end of a Greek tragedy. Now where can I go? Most extant Greek
tragedies have substantially the same set. The action takes place
in and out of a house as human tragedies take place in and out of
a mind. The house of a Greek play is most often the home of the
protagonist, Agamemnon's palace, for example, or else a
surrogate home some place the protagonist feels safe or locates
their identity like the tent of Ajax in the Ajax. "Our house is our
corner of the world," Bachelard says. The house of Greek tragedy

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though is also a kind of riddle. With its dialectic of inside and

outside, the house is a container holding an answer to some
question that is posed on the space of the stage. The aim of the
play's action is to bring the inside out to expose what lies hidden
in the house, some knowledge contained there. Remember the
warning remark of the watchman in the opening scene of the
Agamemnon. He says, "The house itself, "could it but get a voice,
"would speak out all too clear." When the house speaks, it will ruin
the people inside. We look forward to that ruination from the time
we take our seats at the start of the play. Greek tragedians found
a sensational way to maximize the theatrical effect of that
moment when the house speaks by making it explosively plastic
and visual. Aeschylus is sometimes credited with the invention of
a piece of stage machinery called the ekkyklema, which means a
thrust out thing or rolled out platform. Experts disagree on this,
but we know that the device, a wooden platform on wheels, was
used in the centuries after Aeschylus, and think how spectacularly
well it would have worked at the climax of the Agamemnon when
Clytemnestra makes her final appearance on stage, standing over
the dead bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra, and launching
into her famous declaration, "I stand where I struck." Presumably
when she says this, she is visible to the audience, amid a tableau
of bloody victims. At any rate, the violent extrusion of inside to
outside would effectively cap the suspense of the action so far,
which Aeschylus has been ratcheting up for 1,300 lines as we
watch people go in and out of the house, saying ominous things
about it and sending back the odd blood-curdling scream. It is a
mark of Pinter plays that he achieves an Aeschylean effect, a
sense of some private horror extruded to public view with ruinous
consequence, without blood-curdling screams or dead bodies on

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view or mechanical platforms. The action is inside a house. The

violence is inside chitchatting characters. The explosion of
knowledge, if there is one, happens inside the audience. The
dialectic of outside and inside has been reabsorbed by the play as
an atmosphere of menace pervading banal conversation and light
gestures. There are questions and answers everywhere, but they
don't fit together. When Edward, at the end of A Slight Ache,
suddenly falls to the floor, the play gives no reason for this. If he
has been felled by the ax of his wife, it was done internally. The
big riddle of the match seller remains unsolved. All our knowledge
of these people and their motives is left mysterious. And yet
another interesting thing about Pinter, for all its repression and
menace and horrible emotions, there is something cozy in a Pinter
play. Compare a Beckett play, say, Waiting for Godot. What is so
immediately desolate about Waiting for Godot as soon as the
curtain rises? Maybe simply the fact that it has no house. Pinter
plays generally take place in a house. Each character starts out in
their little corner of the world, however ruined, psychotic, or
hopeless. The stage set for the opening act of Waiting for Godot
is given as an undefined place with tree. Bachelard says a house
is a psychic state. Waiting for Godot offers no state. Here is no
inside or outside, no structure that might open up to reveal
something else. If the play contains a knowledge or opposes a
riddle, it is a riddle distributed everywhere structurelessly. I
wonder why he added the tree. Beckett wondered this too,
eventually. In 1961, when the play was revived in Paris, he hired
Giacometti to make the tree. One can see the attraction.
(audience laughing) Well, not just the desolation and gashed
surfaces and primordial manner of Giacometti's figures, there was
also a sense of self-consciousness, almost despair about the

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limitations of their art that Beckett and Giacometti shared.

Beckett wanted a tree that cried out as Giacometti did once in an
interview, "I don't know if I work in order to do something "or in
order to know what I can't do "when I want to do it." It's a lot to ask
of a tree. (audience laughing) Beckett did not, at first, like the tree
Giacometti made. It was reconsidered, redesigned, and remade,
ending up as a straight, spindly white plaster thing that one
spectator likened to a drain pipe. The tree had six leaves. In the
end, Beckett called it superb. Looking at pictures of this stage set
and this tree, I was reminded of something told me by a friend
who is a child psychologist. When children get therapy, they're
often asked to draw a picture of their house, as this is believed to
be revelatory of life in the home and life in the mind. Most every
kid draws the same house: a square building with central
doorway, pointy roof, and chimney exuding smoke. Children of
happy families draw the smoke as billowing, cloudy curves.
Children of broken or difficult homes are inclined to make straight,
thin smoke. Straight, thin smoke is regarded as worse, more
depressing than no smoke at all or refusing to draw one's house.
(audience laughing) When the Swiss novelist, Max Frisch, was
dying, he gave a final interview in which he described a dream he
kept having. In the dream, he sees Max Frisch balanced on the
curve of the earth, but starting to slide off. An empty stage with
white plaster tree gives just enough curve to the earth, just
enough boundary to the unbounded to suggest the beginning of
real terror. The unbounded, in Greek, apeiron, a word formed by
adding the negative prefix alpha to the noun peirar, which is
thought to mean rope end. Unboundedness is a rope not tied off
at the end to prevent its unraveling. The first person to use this
word as a metaphysical value, the philosopher, Anaximander,

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described to apeiron as the arche of all things. Arche meaning

origin, first cause, first principle or beginning. And in Aristotle's
account, the unbounded is abhorrent because it is nothing but
beginning. Aristotle says, "Nature flees from the unbounded. "The
unbounded is imperfect or incomplete, "and nature always seek
completion." Corners, part three. So on the one hand, we might
regard corners as shelter, comfort, containment, completion, what
Stevie Smith calls four walls and a pot of jam, something valued
for their boundaries and useful in their form. On the other hand,
the phrase to be cornered can signify a wish to escape or dissolve
or deny the threat of angles closing. Let's say you're losing an
argument or retreating from an enemy army or you're a fox on
Saturday morning in a ditch outside Downton Abbey. And then on
third hand, there are people who want or need cornerlessness for
its own sake. I once gave a lecture at the European Graduate
School located in a small town, high in the Alps, and was taken by
a car up one of those death-defying switchback mountain roads
that circles round and round the edge of an abyss. We were
passed by several buses hurtling down the road in the opposite
direction. I asked our driver about accidents on the road and he
confessed he had wondered the same thing when he first moved
to the area and had gone to the local bus company to ask for
actuarial statistics. (audience laughing) The bus company told
him they'd in fact never had a bus crash on the road, but that four
times in their history, a driver at some point mid-route had steered
his bus to the side of the road, stepped out, and quietly dropped
himself over the side of the mountain. The lure of the abyss may
be fatal or it can be domesticated into a desire for infinite going,
restlessness, wanderlust, walks. You don't have to hit the ground
to experience cornerless space. Legend and literature offer a

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number of examples of people who could not sit still, like Saint
James, the son of Zebedee, who walked from the holy land to the
Iberian Peninsula in the first century, inaugurating a famous
pilgrimage route to Compostela. Or Matsuo Basho, the 17th
century Japanese poet whose Narrow Road to the North is now
available in a Penguin paperback, or as a nine-day, eight-night fully
guided tour. (audience laughing) Or the English poet, John Clare,
who took it into his head one July day of 1841 to walk from High
Beach Asylum, a private institution near Epping where he had
committed himself in 1837, to London, a journey of eight days and
90 miles, during which he subsisted on grass and tobacco. The
walking impulse had something to do with his sense of humor. "In
the madhouse, I could find no mirth pay," he opaquely said. And
then there was Holderlin. Early December, 1801, Holderlin set out
from his mother's house in Nurtingen to walk to Bordeaux, a
distance of some 600 miles, having accepted a post as tutor in
the house of a certain Herr Meyer. He arrived at the end of
January, but resigned the post in mid-May and took to the road
again, reaching Stuttgart in early July. His friends did not
recognize him when he came in the door. His report from the road
was, "Apollo struck me." Holderlin explained his walking in a letter
of 1802. Quote, "I am pulled as rivers are "toward the end of
something, "something expanding like an Asia." He had, for some
years, been working on translations of Sophocles' Oedipus plays,
and in the process, began revising his own early poetry as if it, too,
were a foreign language, trying to travel ever deeper into German,
into his own sentences as if into another country. Men learn more
in the scorch of deserts, he wrote in a late fragment. His
manuscripts are sometimes illegible palimpsests of versions,
revisions, and afterthoughts. Whether he improved his poems by

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treating them as infinitely unraveling rope ends is unclear. He had

an absolute and religious faith in the powers and process of
nature, and seemed to believe his poetry was part of that process,
able to dissolve and reform as organic phenomena do. But
perhaps Aristotle is right, that there is something abhorrent in
endless beginnings. Holderlin's psyche felt the pressure. The state
of dementia in which he lived the final 37 years of his life in a
tower overlooking the river Neckar is well documented. This is the
comment of a friend who visited him in his tower. Holderlin
seems to be still walking. Quote, "For the last six years, "he goes
back and forth "from morning 'til evening in his room, "murmuring
to himself. "At night, he gets up and walks about the house "or
sometimes stops to blacken "any piece of paper he finds "by
covering it with words. "At the stairs, we had a final glimpse of
him, "striding in his room, pressing on." Holderlin not only denies
confinement by going for walks inside his room, he cancels the
conventional corners of legibility, blackening any piece of paper
he finds by covering it with words. It is a different kind of
restlessness, crowding the paper with words all the way to the
edge so there's no difference between text and margin.
"Language," he said in a late fragment, "is the most dangerous of
good things." I wonder if the danger he feared has to do with
control. Too little control, too much control, or just the very, very,
very intoxicating idea of control itself. You may be familiar with
the story by Borges called the Exactitude of Science, in which a
guild of cartographers decide to make a map of their empire that
is drawn on the same scale as the empire, and coincides with it
point for point. My question about that would be where do you
keep such a map? (audience laughing) Do you roll it up and store
it in the cupboard of another empire about the same size as the

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original one? Or does it lie over top of and coextensive with the
original empire as if to pin down every real-world coordinate with
the corresponding cartographic coordinate like a kind of lunatic
Xerox copy? Which is what my dad decided to do with his real
world towards the end of his time with us. That is, to pin down
every moment of his day by writing little scribbled notes to
himself, mapping out almost simultaneously with his life the
landscape of every action, responsibility or fear. Turn out the
lamp. Put the keys in a drawer. Go eat supper. We found these
notes all over the house after he was gone in books, in his
pockets, under the cat's dish, behind the clock. He was going for
control. Like Borges' mapmakers, he had a bit of a problem with
the scale. The first person credited with drawing a scaled map of
the world was Anaximander, that pre-Socratic philosopher quoted
by Aristotle, as we saw earlier

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