Third Monday Musing

The last word

By Eric Meub

There are sentences I come across that stop my pulse, like a precipice across the trail. I have to set the book aside and take a breath. I look out the window, try to hear if there’s a bird somewhere, then slowly settle back into my skin again. I read one of these sentences recently in Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems. It was near the end of a poem titled “Merengue”:

What book will you be reading when you die?

    That really set me back: the unexpectedness of death nestled in the next anthology I take down from the shelf; the optimistic plans I make that won’t get finished; the Turner monograph beside my mother’s bed the day they came to take away the body. How strange to see a book outlast its owner.
    Ruefle’s sentence reminded me of the first Moristotle & Co. post I ever read, which started with the question “When is the time to stop learning, and instead start sharing the knowledge of a lifetime?” (Third Monday Random, September 16, 2013, which is, ironically, the very slot this current column now fills. At first I reminded myself that, as far as I can recall, I’ve always tried to share while I learn: recently digested knowledge is my daily fuel for conversation and advice. “When to start learning and start sharing?” seemed a silly question. But then I arrived, a few paragraphs on, at motomynd’s less palatable perspective: “At some point, gaining more knowledge, instead of sharing it, is as pointless and self-indulgent as earning extra money so one can burn it…Isn’t it time to give up the delusion you are going to ‘learn it all’ before you go?”
    I felt quite chastised. Really.
    (I hate being called self-indulgent.)
    Then I got over it. My father sired twins when he was seventy, and he saw them all through college: I don’t need anyone hammering his timetable onto my front door, thank you.
    Then I felt bad for getting uppity. After all, people who constantly tell others what to do are really trying to tell themselves what to do, only they aren’t listening. The author had my condolences.
    (I really hate being called self-indulgent.)

Then I admitted he just might have a point.
    And so I asked myself why, at the age of fifty-five, I still read. I had to blow a whistle to restore order. I asked the group to give me just the three most important reasons. I waited.

Reason One: I am curious.
Reason Two: I am insatiably curious.
Reason Three: I am my own best friend.

    Curiosity is a love affair with the world. Every time I learn the rudiments of a new language, or the work of another poet, or the details of a historical event, or a fact of natural science, I become more intimate with the world. I become more open. I become less angry. I become a lover of the world. And no, that sentence doesn’t pit the world against the spirit or God or the Body of Christ or anything my potentially less sympathetic brethren choose to slice it all into. It does not mean just the rosy good bits. It does not mean pluralism. It does not mean the monad (delicious word). It does not mean passive acceptance. The sentence merely means complete receptivity to the little bits of reality I’ve heard, seen, touched, and tasted. At what point does one stop loving the beloved?
    Insatiable curiosity is the paragraph above on steroids. It is more common than many people think. There is so much of the world to know. The sheer abundance within the smallest niche of the smallest niche of the smallest niche of human knowledge can truly never be mastered. Take contemporary poetry, for example.
    If there remains within your province of the modern world a bookstore, you may find these titles: The Poetry of Derek Walcott (at 600 pages), The Later Poems of Adrienne Rich (at 500 pages), or Poems 1962-2012 by Louise Glück (at 625 pages). The Dao De Jing, one of the classics of world literature, is a mere pamphlet next to these behemoths. Furthermore, the tomes are not stuffed with essays, epics, or editorials. They are not padded with diaries or personal letters. These collections contain, for the most part, little poems of the type called lyric, a type that (among the best poets) usually requires for the capture of a line or word a labor equal to a chapter drafted out in prose. To thumb through one of these volumes is to scan a football field of Fabergé eggs.

Derek Walcott

    One lesson surely is that the laws of publication do not reward brevity. Abundance, however, is a great fact of the natural world. If there is an author behind it all, her Collected Works is massive. The other lesson is that I will likely not read all of The Poetry of Derek Walcott. I don’t even know who Derek Walcott is. Yet. (See Reason One.) In an Augustan mood a few years back, I wrote:

We envy, from a golden age we’ve missed,
The eighteenth century its classicist,
Whose reasoned balance of the world’s affairs
Was perfectly proportioned, like Voltaire’s.
They spoke ideas to one another then,
But didn’t rant; they limited the pen
To what an honest man with skill could heed
Without devoting centuries to read.

    But I admit I am drawn to Walcott’s 600 pages. The sheer size of an oeuvre invites my reading the way the mass of a planet invites its satellite, or the way the height of a mountain invites the climb. That is what insatiable curiosity does.

We pause for a moment to consider: how many more books will I read, can I read in my life? The number is constantly shrinking, which makes me more hesitant to read a book for any reasons other than delight. I seldom read a gift to satisfy a friend; I allow myself to wait until I truly want to read it. I hardly ever read a book to prove that someone else is wrong. I don’t finish a book that bores me. I limit myself these ways to ensure the pages that remain to me are golden.

Mary Ruefle

    We started with a poem by Mary Ruefle. She is also a writer of prose. Her recent book Madness, Rack, and Honey, is one of the most delightful six hours I’ve spent in a book lately. In her essay “Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World,” she says:

I can calculate that I have probably read 2,400 books in my life, which may well be more than people read on average, but in light of all the books there actually are, or in light of even another fact – that in the year 2000, 200,000 books were published – it is a raindrop (though a very human one). Out of those 2,400 books I probably remember two hundred, or 8 percent. If asked to list them, I might not even get that far.

At the end of her essay, she does list them. She does not, indeed, “get that far,” but reading her list is a moving experience. It is a very personal biography. As love is a personal biography. I would not mind being known for my books, even the forgotten ones.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

But I am worried by forgetfulness. I walked past my Ray Monk biography of Wittgenstein after reading Reufle’s essay. I asked myself how much of it I remember. I have impressions of trips Ludwig took; various obsessions and failures to emote; I have glimpses of Bertrand Russell’s rooms at Cambridge, and long arguments therein with the boy genius; I remember Ludwig’s diatribes against printers of the Tractatus. That’s about it. I made it through eight hundred pages, and that’s all that’s left.
    But I also remember my feelings of euphoria – about half an hour’s worth – at first being exposed, through that book, to the field of mathematical philosophy, and my rushing out to get Russell’s books on the subject. I still remember a great deal about what’s in them. Half an hour of euphoria: I do believe that is worth eight-hundred pages.

Which brings me to that third reason why I still read: the bit about being my own best friend. I have discovered over the years a singular motive that attacks me every time I consider the purchase of a book. It took many years to hunt this prey, so please don’t mistake the brevity of its disclosure for psychological clarity on the author’s part. The hidden motive is this: each time I purchase a book I am actually purchasing a volume – no, that’s not the right word, it sounds like a book – let’s call it an envelope of time. This envelope, when I purchase it, is pressed into the tightest possible rectangular solid, but, properly manipulated, it fans open to a myriad of marvelously populated stages, a universe of human souls between my very hands.
    A book is more than just the total of its words. It is first of all a physical presence. On the first bright morning of fifth grade, while my classmates chattered, I cracked open my new World History and thrust my face into the seam, brushing my nose against the cool cold-press bond, waxy with its glaze of fixative, inhaling the fragrance of binding glue and the blend of four-color-offset inks delicately lifting from their layered illuminations of temples, pyramids, and jewel-crowned monarchs, then slid my nose to the top of the book, where filaments of adhesive joined the paper edges, like lips about to part, or eyelids tugging lightly along the lashes to open onto a morning full of color, birdsong, and the fluorescent halo of a classroom ceiling.
    My old Complete Poetry of Samuel Johnson smells like the fourth basement of the Fogg Museum. My first Lord of the Rings smells like The Shire. But all books smell the same on a handheld screen, which led to this outburst:

Athena flickers in and out of rage,
Helvetica is simmered off the page
    as Kindle loads the text:
this Trojan horse, so aptly named, sets fire
to Alexandrias to feed its pyre.
    Whose library is next?

Samuel Johnson

    When I pick up a book, and feel the softness or crispness of its pages, and scent out its aromas, I am not preparing for a love affair with the book. I am, however, preparing for a lovely period of time, a great gift, which only a good friend can give. I am constantly under the illusion, of course, that I can purchase time. In reality, I know that I can only pass through the time that is allotted to me, but a good book, like good company, can flavor that time in extraordinary ways. Weighing in my hands the heft of a tempting volume, I can picture me curled in my favorite Saarinen – or a wingback – with Purcell playing in the background – or Julie London. I would no sooner give up an afternoon with a book than I would the same with my dearest companion. (All right: the latter ranks a little higher.)

Charlotte Bronte

    I will never forget those days three years ago when I was reading Charlotte Bronte’s Villette. Not only was it a long, luxurious read; not only had my father just passed away, decades too soon for any of his many children; not only was I spending that week sitting under a desert sun so startlingly in contrast with the drizzling Belgian countryside of the novel; not only was I moved by the cadences of the prose to write a eulogy for my father; but on top of all that, one unexpected night during that week in Villette my eyes came upon the face that would forever change my life, in ways that any Bronte heroine would understand.
    What book will I be reading when I die? Whose hand will I be holding? I shall count either scenario a great good fortune, even should my tombstone read “Self-Indulgent to the End.”
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Copyright © 2014 by Eric Meub

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