Free A Brief History of Portable Literature by Enrique Vila-Matas

excellence. At the same time, he has turned painter and draughtsman of the miniscule: of the thousand hairs in a braid or the iridescence of a coupling, for example. He sleeps in the same room as William Carlos Williams, who, less like an American every day, entertains himself trying to solve all the arcane mysteries, with recourse to a frame made of asymmetric, revolving, concentric discs, subdivided according to the Latin words on them.
    “His ex-lover, Georgia O’Keeffe, is still scheming away. She says she has been going around the theatres of an invisible city, that her imagination—voracious as gravity—is the epicenter of her convulsive passions and aversions.
    “Gombrowicz is writing his first book, some nonsense to do with a ballerina: seemingly an extraordinarily brief book, that is incoherent, absurd, and, in its own way, magnificent.
    “Your beloved Duchamp is drafting an essay on miniaturization as a means of fantasy. The text seems to have been conceived as a continuation of something Goethe began writing, called ‘The New Melusine’ (which is part of
Wilhelm Meister
), about a man who falls in love with someone—in reality a tiny woman, who has temporarily been made normal size, and who, without knowing it, is carrying a box containing the kingdom that she’s the princess of. In Goethe’s story the world itself is reduced to a collectible item, an object in the most literal sense. For Duchamp—like the box in Goethe’s tale—a book is a fragment of the world, but it is also a small world in itself, a miniaturization of the world inhabited by the reader.
    “All, as you can tell, have embarked on sharp, frenetic, desperate, portable projects—all, that is, except for Beta Bocado. Even Savinio (always the lead exponent of occasional slothfulness, that highly portable trait) has been working tirelessly and is immersed in a project as Shandean as it is unfathomable. So fed up has he become with encyclopedias that he’s making his own, for his own personal use. I personally think it’s a good thing; I mean, take Schopenhauer: he was so fed up with the histories of philosophy that he ended up inventing his own, for
his
own personal use.
    “It seems increasingly clear to me that we, the portables, were placed on earth to express the most secret and recondite depths of our nature. This is what sets us apart from our tepid contemporaries. And I believe us to be profoundly linked to the spirit of the age, with the latent problems plaguing it and defining its tone and character. We are always dual in appearance, because of just how much we simultaneously embody the old and the new. The future that so profoundly concerns us, we are also rooted in. We have two speeds, two faces, two ways of interpreting things. We are a part of transition and flux. Versed in a new style, our language is voluble, zany, and cryptic. As cryptic as this postcard, which is nearing its end: a postcard that, at heart, claims to do no more than inform you of our great creative fever and our constant bid to exalt a love of brief literary creations; a postcard lauding free and unobstructed language and denouncing any book that makes universal or pretentious claims.
    “I spoke to you about ‘the most secret and recondite depths of our nature.’ These corrosive secret depths are mentioned by Rimbaud in the following memorable verses:
HYDRE INTIME
, sans gueules, / Qui mine et desole
. This is what afflicted him and is so disturbing to us, poorly adapted to madness as we are.
    “To finish, decipher this, my dear racing car: life here in the International Sanatorium is like a murder sweet as snow, that is, cold venom covering desolate icy expanses on white nights of venerable silk.
    “Yours, with more to follow, from he who idles, twirls, and dwindles upon farewell’s futile brink.” *  
    * For the reader intrigued about to how such a long text could fit on a postcard, I’d like to make clear that Aleister Crowley’s