Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

never, never leave thee, nor forsake thee; immediately it occur’d, That these Words were to me, Why else
should they be directed in such a Manner, just at the Moment when I was mourning over my Condition, as
one forsaken of God and Man?” And just over 150 years after that, Bathsheba still turned to the Bible to
find out whether she should marry Mr. Boldwood in Far from the Madding Crowd.
Robert Louis Stevenson astutely noted that the oracular gift of a writer such as Virgil has less to do with
supernatural gifts than with poetry’s mimetic qualities, which allow a line of verse to signal, intimately
and powerfully, to readers across the ages. In The Ebb Tide one of Stevenson’s characters, lost on a
faraway island, seeks to know his fortune in a tattered copy of Virgil, and the poet, replying from the page
“with no very certain or encouraging voice”, stirs in the outcast visions of his native land. “For it is the
destiny of those grave, restrained and classic writers,” wrote Stevenson, “with whom we make enforced
and often painful acquaintanceship at school, to pass into the blood and become native in the memory; so
that a phrase of Virgil speaks not so much of Mantua or Augustus, but of English places and the student’s
own irrevocable youth.”
Constantine was the first to read prophetic Christian meanings into Virgil, and through his reading Virgil
became the most prestigious of all oracular writers. From imperial poet to Christian visionary, Virgil
assumed an important role in Christian mythology, enabling him, ten centuries after Constantine’s
encomium, to guide Dante through hell and purgatory. His prestige even flowed backwards; a story
preserved in verse in the medieval Latin Mass tells that Saint Paul himself travelled to Naples to weep
over the ancient poet’s tomb.
What Constantine discovered on that distant Good Friday, and for all time, is that the meaning of a text is
enlarged by the reader’s capabilities and desires. Faced with a text, the reader can transform the words
into a message that deciphers for him or her a question historically unrelated to the text itself or to its
author. This transmigration of meaning can enlarge or impoverish the text itself; invariably it imbues the
text with the circumstances of the reader. Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence,
through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of
the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.
“Hospice de Beaune” by André Kertész. (photo credit 14.2)

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