How long does it last, the trace of someone’s life ?

How long does it last, the trace of someone else’s life in yours ?

Finished reading a slight, tiny book called Menus souvenirs (Slight or Tiny Memories) by José Saramago.In Portuguese, Saramago means horseradish. The story goes the clerk was drunk when José de Sousa’s father showed up to register the birth of his son in 1922. Saramago was a surname. Life proved kind : his father’s surname wasn’t Tiny Prick, as was the case for another local. Hence, the surname Saramago provided a ready-made pseudonym when José started off in the writer’s life.

He went on to become a Nobel prize winner but that isn’t his biggest claim to fame in my life. That claim belongs to a novel of his called The History of the Siege of Lisbon, I bought in Lisbon on March sixth of the year two thousand and thirteen (says so in my copy).

My copy also includes what has become my stamp of ownership in the books I buy and intend to keep : a small wooden block, carved with incredible precision. I’m particularly impressed by the detail of the tiny serrated lines within  the three curved forms that represent…something that looks organic, like a long-ago life form from the seas. I also bought the wood block in Lisbon during that same trip when I made of point of posting every day, every day, even running myself ragged on one occasion when all public internet connections were unavailable.

Since then, the connection to the blog on which I posted has become severed. I blog here instead. The imaginary reader hasn’t changed – maybe the imaginary reader never does. But he’s very quiet now. I write. He listens (my imaginary reader is a man, c’est comme ça. Maybe I just like the thought of a man who reads what I write.)

Lisbon. The story I wrote back then wasn’t all that good? Maybe.  Maybe it’s salvageable. I rarely spend any time revisiting things I wrote.

Allez? Allez.