Chatwin on The Estate of Maximilian Tod

Would that I had such an estate. I had this story in my "stories" tab but thought I'd push it here...for reasons.

A Brief on Maximilian Tod [by Bruce Chatwin]
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What has this to do with retirement finance or trading? Nothing, of course. I just wanted to highlight a weird excerpt from a story by Bruce Chatwin, sadly gone for __ years now, that has been bouncing around my head for about 30 years. I give Chatwin some small respect these days because while I had gone to decent enough schools, it was clear, even when I was in those schools, that I had read almost nothing. When, in later life, I started reading again, a particular book by Chatwin intrigued me which happened to then lead to a sorta semi-related book by Paul Theroux, which then led, in turn, to the various fictions and non-fictions of Borges, which then in turn led to almost everything else written by anyone anywhere at any time. Kind of like: trickle to creek to stream to river to ocean. Thanks Bruce.

One of his stories, in his compilation of shorts "Anatomy of Restlessness," was about the estate of one Mr. Maximilian Tod. At the time, and still today, the story struck me as the oddest example of the combination of imagination and list making. Chatwin, who apparently had an eye for "things," honed by years working at Sotheby's, described in this particular fictional story a list of objects kept by an odd, reclusive collector/glaciologist/snob/climatologist/murderer in a small house or "pavilion" in an unknown and more or less undiscovered valley in southern high Patagonia. I'll quote at length because I like the list.

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Skipping over the description of the house, which is worthy of its own attention (here is the intro, to set the scene, and which goes on in similar and descendingly specific detail for another couple pages)...

"Mr. Tod's house -- for that was the name of the proprietor -- was an airy pavilion built on a knoll about one hundred yards from the water. It was thirty-five feet square, aligned to the cardinal points, and had five sash windows on each face, except for the north.  The walls were of battened vertical planks painted the color of pewter.  The glazing bars were a warm ivory.  No structure could be simpler. It owed its severity and perfect proportions to the utopian projects of Ledoux and the houses of Shaker communities in New York State..."

...I'll jump to the inventory of the fictional estate which is oddly fun. I have bulleted and condensed all of it in the interest of comprehensibility and readability:

"Mr. Tod said he had no time for furniture that would not fit on the pannier of a mule.  There were, however, two wing chairs with decisively cut linen covers.  And on three grey tempera tables were arranged the collection of curiosities that Mr. Tod, by a process of elimination and the exigencies of travel, had reduced to the bleak essentials.  In none of the works of art was the human image to be found.  Inventories make tiresome reading, so I shall confine the list to

·         a Shang bronze fang-i with the 'melon skin' patina

·         a Nuremberg sorcerer's mirror

·         an Aztec plate with a purple bloom

·         the crystal reliquary of a Gandharan stupa

·         a gold mounted beozar

·         a jade flute

·         a wampum belt

·         a pink granite Horus falcon of Dynasty I, and

·         some Eskimo morse ivory animals which, for all the stylized attenuation of their features, seemed positively to breathe

I must, however, single out three cutting implements since they were the subject of Maximilan Tod's essay Die Ästhetic der Messerschärfe, published in Jenna ­in 1941, in which he claimed that all weapons are artificial claws or canines and give their users the satisfaction known to carnivores as they rend warm flesh.  These were:

·         An Acheulian flint hand-axe from the Seine Gravels with the added attraction of Louis Quinze ormolu mounts and the dedication, 'Pour le Roi'

·         A German Bronze-Age dagger excavated by Mr. Tod's father from a tumulus at Ueckermünde on the Baltic

·         A sword blade from the collection of his friend and teacher, Ernst Gruenwald, dated 1279 and signed by Toshiru Yoshimitsu, the greatest swordsmith of Mediaeval Japan.  (A mark on the blade signified that it had successfully performed, on a criminal, the movement known as iai, an upward thrust that severs the body clean from the right hip to the left shoulder.)

Nor shall I omit a description of three other items from the Gruenwald Collection:

·         a tea bowl by Koetsu called 'Mountains in Winter',

·         a box of woven birchbark from the Gold Tribe of Manchuria, and

·         a block of blue-black stone with green markings and the inscription: 'This inkstone with Dead Eyes comes from the Old Pit of the Lower Cliff at Tuan Hsi and was the property of the painter Mi Fei.'

In the bark box Mr. Tod kept his two most treasured possessions

·         a calligraphy by the Zen Master, Sen Sotan, with the tenet: 'Man originally possesses nothing,' and

·         a landscape scroll by Mr Fei himself -- painter of cloud-like mountains and mountain-like clouds, drunk, petromaniac, connoisseur of inkstones, hater of domesticated animals, who roamed about the mountains with his priceless art collection always beside him.

The walls of the room were bare but for

·         a framed Turkish calligraphy, written on a gilded skeleton leaf with a line from Rûmi (Mathnâvi VI, 723): 'To be a dead man walking, one who has died before his death.'

Mr. Tod's library - the visible part of it at least - was not a library in the usual sense but a collection of texts that held for him some special significance. They were bound in grey papers and kept in a shagreen travelling box. I shall itemize the order of their arrangement, since this order itself furnishes a measure of insight into their owner's character:

·         Cassian's treatise on Accidie;

·         the Early Irish Poem The Hermit's Hut;

·         Hsien Yin Lung's Poetic Essay on Living in the Mountains;

·         a facsimile of the De Arte Venandi Cum Avibus by the Emperor Frederick II;

·         Abu'l Fazl's account of Akbar's pigeon flying;

·         John Tyndall's Notes on the Colour of Water and Ice;

·         Hugo von Hofmannsthal's The Irony of Things;

·         Landor's Cottage by Poe;

·         Wolfgang Hammerli's Pilgrimage of Cain;

·         Baudelaire's prose poem with the English title Any where out of the World and

·         the 1840 edition of Louis Agassiz's Étude sur les Glaciers with the appendix of chromolithographs of the Jungfrau and other Swiss glaciers.

It should be clear, even to the most unobservant reader, that I am Maximilian Tod. My history is unimportant. I detest confidences. Besides, I believe that a man is the sum of his things, even if a few fortunate men are the sum of an absence of things... "