ALBERTO MANGUEL READING : 'ONCE AGAIN TROY' / LEBANON LEBANON BOOK LAUNCH SEP 2006 _ AL SAQI BOOKS

I'm going to read a piece by the writer, essayist, biographer Alberto Manguel. It's called once again, Troy. When I think of Beirut, three images come to mind. The first is the one my mother described to me after visiting the city in the early 50s. She'd been to Paris, to Rome, to Venice. She thought there was no city as lovely as Beirut, as elegant as welcoming. Whenever things would go wrong in Buenos Aires and they would go wrong often, she would complain and shake her head. And instead of repeating. Moscow. Moscow. Like one of Chekhov's Three sisters, she would sigh. Beirut. Beirut. As if her life in that Paradise would have been different had she stayed. Perhaps it would have, because Beirut was, for her, an impossibility and impossible. Things tend to be perfect. The second image is that of the city I visited in 2004. The friendship of the people are extraordinary courtesy, the constant shift in tone bred from the variety of cultural backgrounds, the pride and relief in seeing their city built up again after the war, the lack of shame with which they showed their scars, their ingrained and shared belief in the vital importance of poetry, music, good food, intelligent conversation left me as I returned home with a sudden nostalgia for what I had experienced as civilisation. The third image is the bombed city I see now in the evening news. Like any ravaged city, it is both a place of incommunicable daily personal suffering and also the image of every city in no matter what war.
A place in which walls that took so long to build lie crumbled in the streets. And someone stares at a fallen roof. Under which lies a brother, a sister, a friend, a parent, a child. And soldiers race past. There is a fourth Beirut. I think it's made less of, stories rebuilt and stones demolished than of the perseverance of memory. In one of the last books of the Iliad, the murderous Achilles runs after Hector, the murderer of Achilles friend Patroclus. Both are soldiers. Both have blood on their hands. Both have loved ones who've been killed. Both believe that their cause is just. One is Greek, the other Trojan. But at this point, their allegiances hardly matter. They're two men intent on killing one another. They run past the city walls, past the double springs of the River Scamander. And at this point, Homer, the ancient presence we call Homer, breaks off his description and pauses to remind us. And here, close to the springs, like washing pools scooped out in the hollow rocks and broad and smooth, where the wives of Troy and their lovely daughters would wash their glistening robes. In the old days, the days of peace before the sons of Achaea came past. There. They raced past there they raced.
Thank you. Good evening.