Beers & Books CXI – Alexandre Dumas

...

Alexandre Dumas (24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870)

Doors ... and the Great Wall of China

Door is an insidious thing… I have thought about it time and again.

It is only for the possible – or what is more, the positive – existence of a door that one keeps on looking around a walled area… If there were no doors, walls could utterly maintain and stand by the significance of the impasse, to wit the constraint, evermore. Still, if so, every wall could be a decisively negative certitude and knew well what to do confronting everyone…

If there were no doors, each wall could, without a hitch, resound with the inscription suspended by Dante at the entrance to hell; but, regrettably, one has to confess that doors have deprived them of so impeccable and sheer a sense.
***
More than that, a door is a full-blooded parasite.

Its personality is totally subject to that of wall; still one should suspect this point, in that though only walls can justify the existence of doors, they cannot sustain the finality and their arrant emphaticness I referred to before, in the presence of doors. But, there would not be after all anything more useless and ludicrous than a door if there were no walls. However I do not know a thing about painting, I can easily paint such a door:

What is more ludicrous than a door that – separate and independent from a wall – tries to have a personality?

Yet, a door that is not constructed in any wall has the astounding potentiality of provoking thought…

I have given my mind to such a door; and sometimes it has made my mind think about borders and passageways of borders, with no change in its form necessarily.

Actually, a free-standing door that can be nothing, is a good passageway for thinking, through which one can find way to many realms.
***
The necessity of walls is felt soon by observing a door. I ask if we sense accordingly the necessity of doors by observing a wall.

I do not suppose so. It may be so, but not that much to me, at least. I find walls more logical than doors, and believe that doors are vacuous hopes: they repudiate the character of walls when opened, and their ((own's)) when closed.

A wall is simply not more than an obstruction if there is no door in it; but nothing betrays its own entity as a door that bears a heavy lock… Maybe that is the reason why we cherish Roman and Greek castles more than old fortresses, and maybe that is the reason why we feel relieved and restful by recalling those sumptuous and colonnaded castles; and feel dubious and anxious by remembering those stealthy citadels; maybe... I do not know...

One more point: the uncertainty that makes us to construct walls…

The lofty walls before which we feel a dire need for doors…

And the doors which should be secure and specifically invulnerable, and have heavy locks...

As though life would be impossible but among walls and doors, but among this hurly-burly, this ambivalence, this opening, closing, and reopening:

Building a wall,
Constructing a door in it,
And
Closing the door!

Is it not a laughingstock? Why, yes. On the whole, it is hilarious.
***
The Great Wall of China has been a matter of discussion at times – and each time with a different outlook. It is said that the Great Wall of China was founded to fortify the country against the invading northern tribes.

It was an interesting point, having had one third of a Chinese generation victimized; let us say, a whole generation… because the graveness of such a matter is not weighed through the number of its victims.

The truth is that what immolated an innumerable group of people was not the main surmise of the theory i.e. the possible invasion.

It cannot be said that only the general principles of this theory are modified here; the blind spot of the theory is that the constructors of the wall (not indeed their commanders) did not construct a door in that wall! As a result, the main catastrophe they wanted to ward off beforehand by wall-constructing, changed readily and came forth more unsparingly in the same form and structure they had walled! Ah! And this is, I think, the destiny of all those who overlook the importance of doors. The northern did not invade but the southern did not find any door to escape through.

I would like to confess that I was ungrateful to doors in the beginning of this discourse.
In the history we human beings make, nothing is more remedial to us than a door to escape through.

Doors are essential; even a door constructed in no wall…

In this world – of no validity – we live in, doors are more requisite than everything else, even the Great Wall of China…


Ahmad Shamlou (12 December 1925 – 23 July 2000)
Tr. by Mohammad Forough

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Beers & Books CIX – Richard Morgiève

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Antonio Manetti (6 July 1423 – 26 May 1497)

Philippo Brunelleschi (1377 – 15 April 1446

Beers & Books CVII – Michael McLaverty

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Michael McLaverty (5 July 1904 – 22 March 1992)

Pavane and Gigue

William Byrd (c. 1540 – 4 July 1623)

Saturday Night Music

 

Franz Schubert (31 January 1797 – 19 November 1828)

Alfred Brendel * 5 January 1931

 

Beers & Books CVI – George Sand

"Simplicity is the essence
of the great, the true, the beautiful in art."

George Sand (1 July 1804 – 8 June 1876)

Beers & Books CV – Assija Djebar

Les Nuits de Strasbourg, 1997
*
"My father was a nobleman
when he spoke his mother tongue,
and a worker from the lowest class
when he went over into French."
**
“Writing in a foreign language
has brought me to the cries of the women
silently rebelling in my youth,
to my own true origins.”

Assija Djebar (30 June 1936 – 6 February 2015)

Beers & Books CIV – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Little Prince
*

Antoine Saint-Exupéry (29 June 1900 – 31 July 1944)

Saturday Night Music – Khatia Buniatishvili

Khatia Buniatishvili * 21 June 1987

Beers & Books CIII – Muiris Ó Súilleabháin

 

. . .

Maurice O'Sullivan (19 February 1904 – 25 June 1950)