House of our light

"Within a gift economy.. objects in exchange form a kind of connective tissue between giver and receiver.. The reciprocal character of the connection is implied in its reversible termin-ology: in Greek the word xenos can mean either guest or host, xenia either gifts given or gifts received.. Such an object carries the history of the giver into the life of the receiver and continues it there."


So remarks poet Anne Carson in The Economy of the Unlost, a scholarly and imagined poetic confrontation between Paul Célan and Simonides of Keos - dealing with problems of grief and survivorship which she addresses again in Nox, reviewed by Dan Chiasson in The New York Review of Books, where these statements were encountered. Readers are probably aware that she has titled her recent transla-tions of Euripides, published by New York Review Books, Grief Lessons (2008).


There are artists who work with inheritance in part, consciously, to honor it, feeling a recompense in their motivations. In Western civilisation so much of that inheritance has passed through Alexandria as to have made of that city both a magnet to poets for thousands of years, and a metaphor in their creativity's self-conscious domicile in a space in which they have faith. This paradigm of redemptive reciprocity is embedded in the language, and the literacy of xenia.


The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is in the life of all its recipients. The lighthouses are gone. The house of our light is ours still.

House, coffeehouses, neighborhood: setting
that I see and where I walk; year after year.
I crafted you amid joy and amid sorrows:
out of so much that happened, out of so many things.
And you've been wholly remade into feeling; for me.

Snøhetta Architects
Hamza Associates
2002
Aga Khan Award for Architecture

Edmund Keeley
Cavafy's Alexandria
  Study of a Myth in Progress
Harvard University Press, 1976©


Constantine P. Cavafy
In the Same Space, 1929
  Collected Poems
Daniel Mendelsohn, translator & editor
Knopf, 2009©


Dan Chiasson, The Unfolding Elegy 
The New York Review of Books, LVII, 15
October 14, 2010