In libris

I’m sitting in the National Library, sucking down latte and wi-fi in about equal quantities. This is because we have moved house and so far have no internet at home. Hence the blog silence. I’ll be back soon with more posts and a fresh look for the blog; apologies in the interim.

I’ve posted about moving before, since I seem to do it about annually. Being married to a minimalist has curbed my tendency to keep everything in case it matters later. His view is: if in doubt, throw it out. So this move was a bit leaner than previous ones. And it was, I admit, pretty cathartic to throw away letters, papers, notes that I’ve been carting for a couple of decades that really won’t ever matter again.

I also threw away some books (gasp!) but I find books are a bit like the magic pudding. No matter how many you give away, you always seem to have just as many – way too many to make moving easy. But it’s good to keep one’s book collection dynamic. As you add to it, you can cut away some of the dead wood. You can think seriously about whether this or that book matters now in the way it did then, and if it ever did at all. You can audit your reading habits and history. You can cleanse your reading palate, and thus your intellect, and your imagination. It’s a way to ensure your books live and breathe in your life, that your library is not a museum.

In the quiet evening hours

Thinking of Isabel's sad wandering in Rome made me think of one of my favourite Christina Rossettis: 'An End'. To me it speaks about an ending that's not tempestuous or anguished, but quiet and still, sad and soft.  There's even almost relief, after the heat of death-strong love, in the coolness of it.

Love, strong as Death, is dead.
Come, let us make his bed
Among the dying flowers:
A green turf at his head;
And a stone at his feet,
Whereon we may sit
In the quiet evening hours.

He was born in the Spring,
And died before the harvesting:
On the last warm summer day
He left us; he would not stay
For Autumn twilight cold and grey.
Sit we by his grave, and sing
He is gone away.

To few chords and sad and low
Sing we so:
Be our eyes fixed on the grass
Shadow-veiled as the years pass,
While we think of all that was
In the long ago.

Isabel in Rome

I showed you Dorothea in Rome at the beginning of her suffering, and Isabel in Florence affronting her destiny with no hint of what would follow. Here she is in Rome, after her great doom has come upon her.

She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a sun-warmed angle on a winter's day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness. Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater. She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where people had suffered. This was what came to her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a companionship in endurance and the musty incense to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers.

The year has two faces

January is named for Janus, Rome's two-faced god of gates. The Renaissance poets loved this idea, and often used Janus, who looked backward and forward at once, as an emblem of their own vocations. Here's Edmund Spenser, from his 'Amoretti' sonnet sequence (1595), describing the emergence of a new year from the gate of the old.

New year forth looking out of Janus' gate,
Doth seem to promise hope of new delight:
And bidding th' old Adieu, his passed date
Bids all old thoughts to die in dumpish sprite.
And calling forth out of sad Winter's night,
Fresh love, that long hath slept in cheerless bower:
Wills him awake, and soon about him dight
His wanton wings and darts of deadly power.
For lusty spring now in his timely hour,
Is ready to come forth him to receive;
And warns the Earth with diverse colored flower,
To deck herself, and her fair mantle weave.
Then you fair flower, in whom fresh youth doth rain,
Prepare yourself new love to entertain.

Happy old year

Being conscious of time, last days and first days matter to me. What I seek most is significance, which in these days, first and last, is innate. On its last day, a year is gone forever. All its doings sink into the past and we put on a fresh one. Yet it's a significance that's hard to realise, since the sun will come up tomorrow just as it did today; at one minute past midnight we will be exactly the same as we were a minute before. Perhaps that's what surprises (disappoints?) us year by year. But these peregrinations of clock and calendar are our invention, the “little circles of the humanly known and believed.” Better, as this poem suggests, to break them open, and leave off counting. This is Wendell Berry, “2007.IV” from the collection “Sabbaths.”

In our consciousness of time
we are doomed to the past.
The future we may dream of
but can know it only after
it has come and gone.
The present too we know
only as the past. When
we say, “This now is
present, the heat, the breeze,
the rippling water,” it is past.
Before we knew it, before
we said “now,” it was gone.

If the only time we live
is the present, and if the present
is immeasurably short (or
long), then by the measure
of the measurers we don’t
exist at all, which seems
improbable, or we are
immortals, living always
in eternity, as from time to time
we hear, but rarely know.

You see the rainbow and the new-leafed
woods bright beneath, you see
the otters playing in the river
or the swallows flying, you see
a beloved face, mortal
and alive, causing the heart
to sway in the rift between beats
where we live without counting,
where we have forgotten time
and have forgotten ourselves,
where eternity has seized us
as its own. This breaks
open the little circles
of the humanly known and believed,
of the world no longer existing,
letting us live where we are,
as in the deepest sleep also
we are entirely present,
entirely trusting, eternal.

Is it concentration of the mind,
our unresting counting
that leaves us standing
blind in our dust?
In time we are present only
by forgetting time.