Borges, "Laberinto"

A work ("Labyrinth") by this Argentine man of letters.  You can read the original here.

To this place there will never be a door.  
The fortress straddles all the universe, 
Yet no reverse possesses or obverse, 
Without external wall or secret core.  

Do not expect the rigor of your course,
Which obstinately forks into another, 
Which obstinately forks into another, 
To have an end.  Your fate was its true source

Just like your judge.  Await not the assail  
Of the man-bull, whose plural form through mists  
Lends horror to the snarl in which you flail,

This endless grey and interwoven stone.  
Expect no thing.  For here no thing exists;
Here even dusk-dull'd beasts will never roam.  

Hugo, "Je la revois, après vingt ans, l'île où Décembre"

A work ("Again I see that isle, where two score gone) by this French man of letters, written on August 8, 1872, on returning to this island.  You can read the original here.

Again I see that isle, where two score gone, 
Most foul December sought and cast me out;  
That very isle indeed! Pale shipwrecked lout!  
That isle, a room still undisturbed, anon.  

Yes, this is how it was; this sweet isle seems  
To laugh, while I detect the same bird's flight, 
The same lush flowers trembling through all night, 
The same bright sylvan dawn in its mad beams. 

Again one more mirage, how those fields call, 
The orchards and the ripest fruits untorn; 
And in the firmament looms the same storm, 
The same grass at the foot of every wall. 

The same white roof awaits that loves me still: 
Beyond the scolding stream, eternal flow, 
That vision of my Eden, lost I know 
Down where the selfsame dazzling depths run chill.  

I recognize, 'tis true, this magic shore, 
As it appear'd to me in days more sweet; 
Where Acis and Galatea we seek, 
And yet where Booz and Ruth will linger more.

Because no isle, no mountain, and no beach,
Is better made amidst these bitter depths, 
To hide the rose of idyll in its breast, 
Beneath the tragic horror of the sea. 

O Heaven!  O this Ocean!  An abyss 
Of silence, the same nature, and of noise; 
Who knows what crack unfathomable is poised
Against both night and day in mortal vis.

It was these hamlets, yes, it was these beaches; 
It was the same fleet, volatile regard; 
That acrid scent of savage heath discharged,
Into the tumults of that same wind's reaches.  

Those waves, in silver laces ripp'd out, now show
The ruins whence derived their foamy mast.    
In them one finds the same pale shadows cast 
Upon the same eternal, changing flow.

Because the acrid sea's so full of grief,  
These same ignored, eroded paths lose steam;
Waves which still worry in terrific dreams, 
About the shape of those remaining reefs.

The same immense bird flocks weave here their lines, 
Atop the mounts where God makes thunder loud;
Those same trees' peaks, collected in a crowd, 
Have not stopped trembling, trembling all this time.  

I saw again, atop the humble lea, 
The same breath undulating in the ryes;
Those same stray eagles, those same butterflies,  
Above the ocean's boundless vanity.  

The same tide cloaks this isle of foam retread, 
Just like a horse a snaffle soon makes white; 
'Twas the same blue, 'twas the same mist alight. 
How many then once lived who now are dead!

Los buques suicidantes

A work ("The suicide ships") by this Uruguayan man of letters.  You can read the original here.

There are, as it were, few things more terrible than finding an abandoned ship at sea.  If in daytime the danger is minor, during the night the boat cannot be seen, nor can there be any possible forewarning, and the shock affects one vessel just as much as the other.

These boats abandoned by A or by B continue their voyage obstinately with the backing of currents or the wind; that is, if they have their sails open.  In this way, capriciously changing course, they travel the seven seas.

Not a few of the steamships which, one fine day, do not arrive at port, will have stumbled in their paths across one of these silent boats sailing off on their own.  The probability of finding them always exists, at every minute.  As chance would have it, the currents tend to entangle the boats in the Sargasso seas, and here or there, the boats finally stop, forever immobile amidst a desert of seaweed.  And thus they remain until, little by little, they disintegrate.  Others, new boats, arrive every day and take up their places in silence, so that this tranquil and lugubrious port remains ever frequented.

The principle cause of these abandoned vessels is doubtless the storm or fire which leaves in its drift stray black skeletons.  Yet there are other, more singular causes, among which we may count the occurrence involving the María Margarita, which weighed anchor from New York on the 24th of August in the year 1903.  On the 26th it communicated with a corvette without any news.  Four hours later, not receiving an answer, some numskull dispatched a launch which boarded the María Margarita.  There was no one on the boat.  The sailors' shirts were drying on the prow.  The stove was still on.  A sewing machine had its needle suspended above the seam, as if it had been forsaken but a moment ago.  Not even the slightest indication of a struggle or panic could be found; everything was in perfect order.  And yet everyone was gone.  What could have happened?

On the night I learned of this, we were assembled on the bridge.  Europe was our destination, and the captain was regaling us with seaman's tales.  Perfectly true ones, however.

Our female audience, won over by the suggestion of whispering waves, listened with a shudder.  Against their own will, the girls lent an ear to the hoarse cacophony of sailors on the prow.  A very young, recently married woman ventured a comment:

"Could it have been eagles?"

The captain smiled a kind-hearted smile.

"What, ma'am?  A crew carried away by eagles?"

Everyone, including the young woman, laughed, although her laugh was a bit shy.

Luckily enough, one of our passengers knew something about the matter.  We gazed at him with great curiosity.  During the voyage he had been an excellent companion, traveling at his own expense and risk, and speaking little.

"Ah, sir!" said the young eagle theorist.  "If you could tell us all about it!"

"I have no objection," assented the discreet fellow.  "In a word: once upon a time in the seas of the north we, like our captain's María Margarita, came upon a sailing ship.  Its singular air of abandonment, unmistakeable in a ship, caught our attention and we slowed our pace as we observed it more closely.  At length we dispatched a launch.  There was no one to be found on board and everything was in perfect order; yet the last entry in the captain's log was four days old.  Nevertheless, it provided us no better impression of what had happened.  Still, we laughed a bit about those famous sudden disappearances.

"Eight of our men stayed on board to steer and manage the new boat.  We were traveling in convoy.  At nightfall, the newcomer put some distance between our ships.  Come the day, we had caught up to it again but could see no one at all on the bridge.  Another launch was dispatched and those on it scoured the boat in vain: everyone had disappeared.  Not a single object was out of place.  The sea was absolutely smooth to every corner of its horizon.  In the kitchen a pan with potatoes was still aboil.

"As you will surely understand, the superstitious terror of our crew now reached its zenith.  Eventually, six men stepped forth to fill the empty ship and I was with them.  Hardly had we boarded when my new companions decided to drink so as to banish all other preoccupations.  They were seated in a circle and soon enough most of them were singing.

"Noon came and then siesta time; at four o'clock the breeze died down and the sails fell; a sailor approached the edge of the vessel and gazed upon the oily sea.  Everyone was already awake and walking about without, as yet, any desire to make conversation.  One of them sat down on a rolled-up cable coil, removed his shirt, and set to mending it.  He sewed for a while in silence.  Suddenly he got up and gave off a long whistle.  His companions turned around.  He looked at them vaguely, in equal surprise, and then sat down again.  A moment later he left his shirt atop the coil, walked up to the boat's edge, and threw himself in the water.  Upon hearing the noise the others turned their heads, their brows somewhat furrowed.  But almost immediately they seemed to forget the incident and returned to their collective apathy.

"Some time thereafter another of them, rubbing his eyes as he walked, was seized with despair and threw himself in the water.  A half-hour passed; the sun was sinking.  I suddenly felt someone touching my shoulder: 

"'What time is it?'

"'Five o'clock,' I answered.  The old sailor who had asked me the question looked mistrustful, and kept his hands in his pockets.  For a long while he studied, with a distracted air, my trousers.  Finally, he threw himself in the water.

"The three remaining quickly approached one another and looked at the eddy.  They sat down on the edge of the vessel, whistling slowly, their gazes lost in the distance.  One of them descended and, tired, lay down on the bridge.  The others disappeared one by one.  At six o'clock, the last one of them all got up, straightened his clothes, pushed his hair to the side of his forehead, and, still walking sleepily, threw himself in the water.

"And thus I was left alone to gaze like an idiot upon a deserted sea.  All of them, without knowing what they were doing, had hurled themselves into the sea, swaddled in that morose somnambulism that haunted the boat.  When one would throw himself in the water, the others would turn, momentarily preoccupied as if they remembered something, only to forget it all almost immediately.  This is how they had all disappeared, and I suppose that the same thing had happened to those of the day before, and those others on all those other boats.  That is my tale."

Out of justifiable curiosity, our gaze did not quit this strange man.

"And you, you felt nothing?" asked my cabin mate. 

"I did, I did: both a great indifference, and the obstinacy of these same ideas, but nothing more.  I do not know why I did not feel anything more.  I assume that the reason is this: instead of becoming parched in anxious self-defense, and at all costs against what I felt (as everyone ought to have felt; even sailors do not realize it), I simply accepted this hypnotic death as if I had already been destroyed.  Something very similar must undoubtedly have happened to the sentinels of that celebrated guard who hanged themselves night after night."

Because such a statement was sufficiently complicated, no one responded.  After a little while our narrator retired to his cabin.  The captain followed him out of the corner of his eye.

"Charlatan!" he mumbled.

"On the contrary," said a sick passenger, headed to die in his native land.  "If he were a charlatan, he wouldn't have stopped thinking about it, and would likewise have thrown himself into the water."

Rilke, "Übung am Klavier"

A work ("Piano practice") by this Austrian poet.  You can read the original here.

The summer drones, the afternoon will drain;
Dazed breathing sweeps her still-fresh dress;
In her étude she cogently invests
An eagerness for realms ungained.

Tonight, tomorrow, these may come to be;
Perhaps they came, yet chose to hide;
With all things flush, before the windows high,
She sensed the spoiled park suddenly.

Here she broke off, looked out, her hands enlaced:
"A lengthy book would do me well."
And angrily dismissed that jasmine smell,
Because it piqued her young, sweet face. 

The Werewolf in Lore and Legend

From time immemorial skeptics and dull-minded empiricists have tried to thwart any belief in the preternatural: if none of our five senses can perceive it, it must not exist, a credo which remains our most lamentable form of arrogance.  Since the advent of space exploration and a heightened awareness of our universe's dimensions, however, these same doubting Thomases have been readily assured that the orbs they behold in their manmade telescopes are realer and truer than any ghost, spirit, or heavenly swath of consciousness.  What has obtained is a belief system in a reality that created itself at some point in the distant past by means and motives unknown to us, a reality that appears endless and beyond all immediate comprehension, a reality that while gazillions of miles in size (there is probably no way to quantify it) could not possibly contain some higher, benevolent force at its origin.  Why does this unending darkness, as unproven and unprovable as any deity or miracle, appeal to the modern mind?  Because unlike a spiritual explanation for our beginnings, faith in the cosmos has no moral consequences.  We gaze upon the unresponsive emptiness around us and see a reflection of our own souls.  Now it is no longer of any import how we treat others, what choices we make, and how we decide to raise our children because in the end we are all amoebae battling for survival in a massive autonomous laboratory.  The upshot of such an argument is and can only be bitterness and strife, feelings that are exacerbated with age.  Instead of a slow march to eternity and, perchance, immortality, we grow more aggressive and impatient at missed opportunities, at the hopefulness of younger generations, and, most horrifically, at the adherence to any sort of lofty ideals.  After all, we are nothing but mammals, so let us behave as such and tear at each other's throats for the last piece of grub.  And both man and beast are conjoined in unprecedented eloquence in this rather extraordinary work.

A brief flip through the appended bibliography should be warning enough to the uninitiated: beware, you are dealing with a polyglot of exceptional ambition. Summers's opus is a joy to those who appreciate original research, old books, and a concatenation of centuries of wisdom – an unholy trinity for many modern readers who like plain and simple explanations for their plain and simple categories.  Nevertheless, the constant citations in the classical languages, French, German, Italian, and Spanish (from his sources, it is evident that Summers also had some Slavic and Scandinavian training) can only enrich your experience should you decide to bother looking up a few key words and may even encourage further, independent study.  If I sound snooty, it's because the world has changed.  College-educated persons in our privileged societies with access to a library card and the internet should no longer be allowed to use ignorance as an excuse for fear, prejudice, and misunderstanding.  Never in the history of mankind has the average citizen had this level of opportunity to acquire information, and never has the average amount of acceptable education – for those, admittedly, allowed to attend school, not always a universally held right in olden times – been lower.  Some may call this the price of democracy; but to be truthful, it is more likely attributable to a rise in human pride, a complex of superiority born from a puerile dissatisfaction with not knowing everything about everything.  All the greatest minds in history have implacably sought as complete a survey and probe of information as time and effort permitted them, and almost all came to the same conclusion: full knowledge is impossible.  Yet deep and wide knowledge buttressed by an invincible moral framework lets us make decisions based on prior experience and, should we indeed be immortal, gives us the basis for understanding the other world into which we may well pass. 

For that reason will something like a book on the history of werewolves quoted in the original languages and written with an archaic flavor reminiscent of late 18th-century Gothic novelists either greatly attract or repel its readership.  Summers has set himself a bold task: examine the development of lycanthropy and its related manifestations in Europe from Ancient Greece to the modern day, with the assumption that shape-shifting into animals is not only real, but also evidence of some pact with the Devil.  The most common refutation of this premise, apart from a dismissal of all possible attestation in dozens of countries from thousands of witnesses, is that many of the crimes imputed to werewolves – and, to a lesser extent, vampires – have also been found in the foul stench of the twentieth century's version of the Devil, the serial killer.  Yet what is never mentioned is how greatly the crimes of these mass murderers resemble one another, with sadists who could not have possibly known the details of each other's gory sins having almost identical rituals and practices – almost as if they were being directed by some overarching evil power. 

It is precisely this pattern that Summers seizes upon in the first two parts of his book, "Lycanthropy" and "The Werewolf: His Science and Practice."  Here three potential explanations for shape-shifting are discussed: there is no actual transformation, and onlookers are deceived by virtue of some diabolic spell (Summers uses the older word "glamour," etymologically linked to "grammar" and "grimoire," or occult learning); the subject falls asleep, entranced by a demon, and his spirit takes over an animal and runs amok; or, what we have come to see in film and modern literature, the subject actually undergoes a physical change in form, often through the application of "certain ointments and words" (not through, it should be said, the lunar cycle, which is a more modern conceit).  Each point is elaborated with copious examples from literary sources and accorded almost equal plausibility, with the third explanation appealing most to Summers's taste.  Importantly, it is the Satanic nature of the wolf itself that makes this transformation or curse all the more compelling:

Not without reason did the werewolf in past centuries appear as one of the most terrible and depraved of all bond-slaves of Satan.  He was even whilst in human form a creature within whom the beast – and not without prevailing – struggled with the man.  Masqued and clad in the shape of the most dreaded and fiercest denizen of the forest, the witch [what Summers calls all persons in pact with Satan] came forth under cover of darkness, prowling in lonely places, to seek his prey .... If he were attacked and sore wounded, if a limb, a paw or ear were lopped, perforce he must regain his human shape, and he fled to some cover to conceal these fearful transformations, where man broke through the shell of beast in horrid confusion.  The human body was maimed or wounded in that numerical place where the beast had been hurt.  By this were his bedevilments not unseldom betrayed, he was recognized and brought to justice.  Hateful to God and loathed of man, what other end, what other reward could he look for than the stake, where they burned him quick, and scattered his ashes to the wind, to be swept away to nothingness and oblivion on the keen wings of the tramontane and the nightly storm.

The key word here is "justice," what any believer in any spiritual realm maintains is the aim of existence on earth and which, if not achieved then, will become the atonement that each shall face in the afterlife.  The view is very Christian, as are Summers's arguments throughout his work, a prideful fortress that has alienated many readers whose attention can only withstand what is casually referred to as "pure science."  As in this tome, reviewed earlier on these pages, Summers is seeking a logical and religious root for such an unusual manifestation, and after devoting half of his book to such a theory, he culls dozens of legends and attestations from England to Russia, Greece to Spain, all rather remarkable in their uniformity even in the days when the exchange of folklore was hardly widespread (such as the belief that a man with linked eyebrows was definitely a werewolf, as in this well-known film).  One may fillip a dismissive finger at the approach and system of credences that linger behind The Werewolf in Lore and Legend, but as an academic work it has no peers in its field.  And apart from being edifying, Summers and his resolutely Romantic views are always a stylistic pleasure, the labors of a poet who has traded wine, women, and song for a wall of oaken shelves.  Yes, it may seem counterintuitive to aver that horror and nightmares have always attracted Romantic minds, but from the most sublime of poets to the most notorious to this master of horror this has indeed been the case.  As Summers himself states:

Where there is mystery beauty may always lie hid.  There will be wonder, because wonder always lurks where there is the unknown.  And it is this longing for beauty intermingling with wonder and mystery that will express itself, perhaps exquisitely and passionately in the twilight moods of the romantic poets, perhaps a little crudely and even a little vulgarly in tales of horror and blood.

And for your own well-being it may be best, in those twilight moods, not to think of the beasts that may lurk in the hearts of man.