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Lessons Learned from Literature

Maria Takolander October 18

In an age when commercial viability outranks all else as a measure for time-worthy pursuits, those involved in the arts – and the study of literature in particular – can be forgiven for feeling like ‘economic criminals’ in the face of ‘the real world’. Maria Takolander reflects upon some ‘intimate thrills’ and reminds us what is really to be gained from the experience of reading. A brief extract is below and you can read the full essay on our editions page.



At the end of the holiday to South America that my husband and I took, we found ourselves in Patagonia, traversing the side of a precipitous mountain during a snow storm on squat horses called Nena and Amilidor. We were in the Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, where the howling gales were as spectacular as the three granite towers of the sub-Andean mountain range, the chopped glacial-milk lakes—one with icebergs so fantastically still they looked as if they were playing statues—and condors, black and theatrical, circling in the sky below the snow line. We had organised this trek to the base of the three grand Towers of Paine, accompanied by a guide and a gaucho, from our expensive ranch-style hotel.

Before arriving there, our bus had stopped at a lonely saloon just outside the national park for what was announced as our last opportunity to buy supplies at reasonable prices. My husband, who had prepared for this trip by reading Bruce Chatwin’s travelogue In Patagonia—I had read Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel Death in the Andes—said that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had been down this way. Drinking a cup of tea near the rattling windows, I spotted a kitten being blown around on the deserted road like tumbleweed and an old man walking by with a worn axe languorously in hand. When we got to our hotel, a sprawling, red-painted wooden structure that was dwarfed by the hulking backdrop of a mountain range, musak was playing: it was the theme from Twin Peaks.

During the horseback trek to the Torres del Paine, our gaucho, whom I found impossible to discern from the knife-fighting cowboy myths of the nationalist literature of Argentina, rode behind. He was as squat and brown as the horses and generally as silent as them, except for when he would appear alongside us, suddenly furrow-browed and vigorous on his whipped-up mount, to whistle at our sleep-walking horses and kiss the air at them. And, indeed, at times the rocky path was so narrow and the gravelly slope we were traversing so steep that I had to put my camera away and, like our horses, close my eyes. My fear made me think about the sublime, a category that seemed to fit any encounter with self-annihilation, whether threatened by an immense landscape or the experience of being spectral in a literary world.


 

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