Tag: CD Rose

‘Henri Bergson Writes About Time’ by C.D. Rose

It may be self-serving of me to pick this story out from a uniformly brilliant collection—my reading habits as a lazy student were both adventitious and incomplete, and being these days in close service to my own efforts, have not improved—so it isn’t often I can truthfully say “Yes, I’m somewhat familiar with this philosopher’s work”.

Bergson sits at his desk and considers time. And time, and time again. And again. Rose laces the story with Bergson’s concept of duration and the fluid, immeasurable nature of what language obliges us to call the moment as we pass through.

And yet, and yet—it is also a story about cold coffee and tired women, about the 20thcentury, about age and arthritis.

It isn’t the first Rose story to strike me as something of a Gymnopedie—a series of variations, a circling, a fugue of not-quite-repetitions. I’m misusing the musical terms, but you will know what I mean. Like walking around a sculpture and never getting bored.

Collected in Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, Melville House, 2024

‘At the Gallery of National Art’ by C. D. Rose

I pick this because C. D.  is my current literary hero, with his expanding galaxy of books about books about photos of writers who write about reading books about typewriters… I like the way that he uses the form of the short story (and the lecture, the compilation, the bibliography,) to build up one large, hilarious oeuvre which basically expands upon the idea of “we love to read.” With Tintin jokes.

In this story, a blankly desolate man meets a visitor: “sometimes I am startled into feeling: this morning, for example, a young girl came to me and asked me a question at which I marvelled.” So says the narrator, who is, as he repeatedly states, a Warder at the Gallery of National Art. We don’t know the question, let alone the answer, as he’s unable to reply to her, then or years later. Time bundles and tangles in the gallery and in the Warder’s mind, as it does right through this collection, and through Rose’s other books. 

The ‘A Brief Note on the Translation’ that precedes this collection of stories includes the useful observation that “I once knew someone (who was an idiot) who claimed they would never read a work in translation, as it was not authentic. But there is no authentic text, no original.”

In The Blind Accordionist, Melville House, 2021