His reasoning resembles that of my father, and reminds me of an after-dinner conversation that I recently had with him. I had just explained that my original intention in requesting access to the Archive had been to investigate cases of artists and intellectuals persecuted or recruited by the police, but that given the state of disarray of the documents and the time that would be required to catalog them, this had turned out to be impossible.

“And so?” my father asked.

“I have been allowed to see other things,” I explained. “There are a number of documents from something called the Identification Bureau, led for several decades by a certain Benedicto Tun . . .”

“And that interests you?”

“Yes, I find it interesting.”

“So,” my father concluded, “your interest degenerated.”

I had to laugh and tell him that that was partly right.

Monday. Stop in Cobán.

In a way, reviewing history is dealing with the dead. We do not read history; we always reread it, as we reread the classics, according to Borges. Before reading it, we have a general idea of what it will say.

Like Zagajewski in his “Intellectual Krakow,” I saw the Archive as a place where the stories of the dead were in the air like filaments of strange plasma, a place where one could get a glimpse of some “spectacular machines of terror,” like stage machinery that has been hidden from view. I wonder: Might other researchers see something else?

This is also from Zagajewski:

To describe new varieties of good and evil—there lies the great task of the writer—and, now he does convince me, in an essay titled “Against Poetry.”

To describe new varieties . . . And what if the new varieties were to obliterate the old ideas about good and evil, of what one or the other can be or become in each person’s subjectivity?

Even the best of us—and I am thinking of “us” in the widest possible sense—needs to constantly choose between good and evil. Then, it becomes obvious that the choices are never identical, nor can they be, between two different people, because their circumstances—of time and place at the very least—are necessarily different. Time and place: both concepts are understood in their entirety—that is, in their tendency to infinity.

Poetry, that little grain of ecstasy that changes the flavor of the Universe, Zagajewski writes.

Saturday morning.