How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
"Books are the steps of the threshold.… All Cimmerians have passed it.… Then the wordless language of the dead begins, which says the things that only the dead can say. Cimmerian is the last language of the living, the language of the threshold! You come here to try to listen there, beyond…Listen…" (7.13)
Professor Uzzi-Tuzii is translating a book from a dead language by a dead author. Shmoop can dig that, but he has way more to say on the matter. The prof insists that there's a connection between books and an essential silence that lies beneath their words. He thinks that this silence is somehow connected to the death that awaits all of us as mortal creatures. Especially at this point in the novel, we're meant to be a little confused, don't worry.
Quote #5
"Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead." (7.19)
The dear professor Uzzi-Tuzii expands on his theories concerning what (if anything) reading is able to communicate to us. Here, he's responding to Ludmilla's insistence that there is something about a novel that obviously "exists." Yes, he admits, books are real physical "things." But lying beneath their thinginess is something invisible and unsayable that all humans measure themselves against. It might be some sort of perfection that human beings aren't fully able to understand. For example, you might know in your mind what a perfect circle should look like, but it's impossible to find one in the real world that's truly perfect. Plato would be proud.
Quote #6
And so it is with authors: he deals with them every day, he knows their fixations, indecisions, susceptibilities, ego-centricities, and yet the true authors remain those who for him were only a name on a jacket […] The author was an invisible point from which the books came, a void traveled by ghosts, an underground tunnel that put other worlds in communication with the chicken coop of his boyhood.... (9.77)
While visiting Mr. Cavedagna at the publishing house, you come to understand that on the production side of things, people have a unique perspective on the relationship between books and readers. Authors might be real people with real hang-ups, but on the publisher's desk, the authors are just names that refer to other books (and maybe certain styles of writing). The author is actually destroyed by his or her existence in print, since this existence on a book's cover actually overshadows and erases him/her as a real person. Yeah, not the most motivational thought for people who are thinking about becoming writers.