Read Online The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas - Free Book Online Page A

interesting and at first connected it to Duchamp, with his perfume
Air de Paris
, then to the geometry textbook he gave his sister when she got married, that she had to hang outside the kitchen window, letting the wind flick through to choose the geometry problems to solve: that volume Duchamp titled
Unhappy
Readymade
, guessing its fate, as in the end the wind left not a single trace of the gift.
    However Duchampian
The Invisible Pull
might be, that did not stop them from placing that breeze at the heart of Documenta 13, placing it at its spiritual center. It was a brilliant notion on its own account and even generated a certain happiness. Actually, it also allowed me to experience at moments a hint of an “aesthetic instant,” something I recalled was one of the things I’d come to Kassel to find: a sort of instant of harmony. I didn’t quite know what that might consist of, but I was keen to sample it. Still, what the hell, I thought: that invisible breeze filled me with a strange but interesting sense of well-being. It seemed to me that this on its own already justified my whole journey to Kassel. I was fascinated by it. I didn’t need to know why it exercised such a hold over me, it was enough to know that it put me in a good mood, which was the same thing that happened with the intrinsic pleasure of mornings—I compared this to the art of forgetting, that art of forgetfulness as light as the first morning air and always liberating—while the evenings and above all the nights only drove me into a malaise inasmuch as they turned out grim and bitter, like the very art of remembering. That art of remembering brought only the tenacious memory of the past and, in tandem with resentment and melancholy, was terrible.
    The bad thing about this divide between mornings and evenings—between these states of mind that in themselves signaled whether it was daytime or night—was that it was so systematic in nature: in over five years, there had not been a single day during which I managed to escape from this monotonous rule of well-being in the mornings and anguish as night fell.
    I turned and went back to where the plaque was, reread it, smiled happily, and then returned to my previous position beside Boston, standing looking at her golden sandals, the same ones I’d found so charming in Barcelona. Now they seduced me less and her voice, too, seemed to have lost something of its devastating force on the day of our first meeting; but all this was to be expected and, in any case, she still seemed to me an extremely agreeable presence (though I never lost sight of our age difference and, above all, the “fond glance toward the old man,” which, as if it were a question of target practice, seemed to be her favorite pastime).
    For this and other reasons, I decided to concentrate on the invisible breeze. And then, aware of what it meant to go down a certain path, I wondered about that sentence by some author about the space a work of genius leaves behind, when it burns this space away, which is always a good place to light one’s own small flame. I didn’t remember who the author was, nor do I recall it now. The fact is, for that current of air, there was a before and an after, and that current seemed to me, over and above everything else, to be the creator of its own light.
    Perhaps it wasn’t the best work of art in that Documenta—how could I tell, after all, when I’d only seen two pieces up to that point and one of them was a darkened room?—but a light issued from there, settling firmly within me, and it did not leave me again for the duration of my stay in Kassel.
    From the work of genius, I thought, something always springs that inspires us, pushes us forward, leading us not only to imitate what has dazzled us, but to go much further, to discover our own world. . . . There was nothing that could be done now to change my opinion about the genius of that breeze. Boston at no point tried to quell an enthusiasm she