Book Beast

Daily Dose

From Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, 1834 - 1881, by James Anthony Froude

THE OLD MAN (WORDSWORTH)

"The old man has a fine shrewdness and naturalness in his expression of face, a long Cumberland figure; one finds also a kind of sincerity in his speech.  But for prolixity, thinness, endless dilution, it excels all the other speech I had heard from mortals.  A genuine man, which is much, but also essentially a small genuine man."

From a journal entry quoted in Book One, Chapter One

A Bookstore Bird

Daily Dose

From Tono-Bungay, by H. G. Wells

INORDINATE

"I became an inordinate cigar smoker; it gave me moods of profound depression, but I treated these usually by the homeopathic method, -- by lighting another cigar."

From Book 3, Chapter 3, Soaring

In Memoriam

A few years ago I spoke at a friend's memorial service.  She was a coworker, a remarkable little woman, full of dark humor and fellow-feeling, a friend.  She was a spitfire named Jennifer Kuhn, and we all loved her.  I miss her still.  She had asked me to speak at her memorial and so I did, as did many others.  (She would have been glad, I like to think, to have seen such a crowd.)

After her memorial, our boss, the CEO of the company, a young man, then in rude good health, joking or not, asked me the same thing. "You have to promise to do that for me," he said, "if I die I want you to do the eulogy."  Other people said similar things to me that day.  Having lived in San Francisco in the Eighties, I have some experience of speaking at funerals.  It isn't something about which to brag, but people are kind, and one wants to say something after, I know.  I may have said it to someone myself.

When Bryan Pearce said it to me, I'm pretty sure it was a joke, or if it was sincere, I don't expect he would have remembered saying it, or thought much of saying it after.  As I've said, our boss was still a young man, and when he died recently, after an impossibly difficult illness that lasted nearly a year to the day from his original cancer diagnosis, it was not only a blow to us all, and a shock, but also frankly difficult to accept.  Death leaves a kind of chaos in it's wake, always.

I've just been to Bryan's memorial service.  He was an important figure in our industry.  His service was well attended.  A number of people spoke; colleagues with whom he worked closely, personal friends, and most movingly his wife and daughters.

I'm glad I went.  I did not know the man as they did, obviously.  I had some sense of who he was beyond our roles as employer and employee, though that had more to do with his friendly and generous nature than with any presumption on my part.  Bryan would have everyone a friend.

It is perhaps presumptuous of me now to say anything more in his memory.  I've already written something here to mark his passing.  Still, today I remember the promise I made him years ago and joking or not, I've kept it.

It wasn't my place to say anything at his service.  So I'll just say it here, that these few words might have some small comfort to those of us who miss him.  I can't think what else to do.

A poet* said, "I remember from your life," and that's right, it seems to me, that's just how it happens.  When someone dies, but even before that happens, we can never have the whole life of another person.  When someone dies, that is what we lose.  Some of us will have had more of him than others; those that knew him best, that loved him and were loved by him, they will have the most, and that's right, that that should be so.  The people he loved best, the woman he loved, the children they made, they will remember him best, they will have memories we won't.  They will need more.  They've lost more.

Those of us who worked most closely with him, those with whom he worked every day and for years, they will remember differently, but still, they will remember too.  They will remember what he did, all he tried to do, and why, and why it matters, still.  

The rest of us will remember from his life just as much as is ours; what we learned from his example, what he gave and taught us, what we owe him, the man he was when he was with us, all too briefly.

Even in the aggregate, our memories from his life, can not be what it means to be alive, to have him still here, with us, and that is why his loss is felt so, and will be.   That is what we mourn, what we can not have again.

Another poet, a very different poet, said:

Can I see another's woe,

And not be in sorrow too?

Can I see another's grief,

And not seek for kind relief?

That is why we come here today, seeking that "kind relief."  That is what the memories we have from his life, the memories we each have, large and small, together, we offer one another now.  It is what we do.  It is all we can do for one another now, just now.  William Blake, a great poet, wrote the lines I just read.  In that same poem, called "On Another's Sorrow," he also says:

Can I see a falling tear,

And not feel my sorrow's share?

My share is small, but it is mine.  My memories: of Bryan smiling in the morning from across the bookstore's lobby, of Bryan laughing at something I said to make him laugh when perhaps he ought not to have, my memories of his many kindnesses, his enthusiasm, his integrity, his decency, his sense, his example, these are mine.  That is my loss; my kind boss, the boss who danced with me, and laughed, and did good.  That is "my sorrow's share".  

It is, as I've said, a small thing.  I offer it today to those for whom this loss is irreparable.  Not that it can mean so much to them, as it does to me, but that, with all the others gathered here today, we may remember, together, as much as we can, today, so that we may remember today -- our losses, and his gifts -- as long as we live.

He was a good man.  Remember that.  It matters.  It matters more than he knew.  What he did, the good he did, matters.  That he was good, that he was a good man, that matters more.  Remember that even I, who only worked for him, someone who never knew him as you did, someone who by all rights he should not have liked, but weirdly, miraculously, eventually he did, remember that even I knew that.  He was a good man.  There are too few.  

That is what I will remember from him.  He was a good man.  I will miss him.

*Owen Dodson, "Poems for My Brother Kenneth"

Daily Dose

From Sonnets, by William Shakespeare

SONNET 71

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell;
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it, for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then you should make you woe.
O if (I say) you look upon this verse,
When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay;
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.

The Waves Return

Here then an example -- as if another was needed -- of how dangerous it is for a bibliophile to work in a bookstore.  The Bargain Books selection at the store where I work is full of snares.  For me, the walk across the bookstore's lobby can be harrowing.  I try, every day, to never let my eyes so much as glance at the recent arrivals of remainders, as I pass back and forth to the Cafe for diet sodas.  Most days I manage.

Just the other night, at a beloved coworker's farewell party and so already a somewhat gloomy occasion for me -- if a happy one for him -- a few of us of a similar age had a conversation on the sad topic of the unwanted libraries we will likely leave behind us when we go.  By "go" I mean "die."  We are all what one might call "lifers" at the bookstore.  We are all of us settled into middle age.  The day is coming when we must begin to simplify our lives before old age and illness, our own and or our partners, will necessitate divesting our lives of moveables.  We're booksellers.  Guess what constitutes the little we own?   The rising generations in all our families are unlikely to want what we got.  In my case at least, the likelihood that anyone would want the books I've been collecting for decades is slim to none.  Three distinct editions of Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations?  Okay, folks, who wants 'em?  What am I bid?  You see the problem.

In the past couple of years I have actually been making some effort to sort, sell and or donate a substantial number of my books, in anticipation of just the kind of conversation described above.  In addition to the growing motivation of my own slowly advancing mortality (one hopes,) there is also the unwelcome realization that there are by now in my private library whole categories of thing I no longer read, am unlikely to ever read again, and can't imagine my executors or the trash-man being much excited to find. 

Popular science took the biggest hit, followed by modern poetry, history and biography.  Fiction presents a special problem.  What I haven't read of this or that favorite author, I may yet.  What I liked best I may want to read again, mayn't I?  Modern Firsts and all that nonsense has never meant much to me.  The little it did, my time buying and selling used books has dispelled.  Likewise, to a considerable extent, signed copies.  The truth is, someone other than me would need to be found who wants to read the complete and collected works of the now late, and personally regretted Louis Auchincloss for any of my copies of his "firsts" to be valuable hereafter.  Alas.  Will I ever read another of his novels?  Even the ones I haven't yet read?  Even my favorites among the ones I have?  Ah, the fleeting of fame, etc.  It is to sigh.

But our remainder-buyers are a Mephistophelian crew.  Just when I've been congratulating myself, however prematurely, for my new-found thrift and discrimination, I am confronted yet again by the kind of attractive, all-too-reasonably-priced, clean and well designed little hardcover classics that may well yet be the death of me.  I'll write another of these about the books that got me this time, but just here I would mention three books I neither need nor want, but want, and worry I might need... hereafter.

 It's faintly ridiculous, even to me, that I should think of buying books by Virgina Woolf.  I own nice editions of all the essays, the letters and the diaries.  In these I have been reading, with great pleasure and some benefit for a long time.  Her novels, however, have always been and are likely to always be well beyond me, or at least my patience.  As I recently remarked to a young friend interested in reading same, her stream of consciousness, fuliginous and thin, has always seemed to me to have too few fish in it.

It's startling to think how many people I specially respect love Woolf's fiction.  It is even more so that I've only ever managed one novel, Orlando,and that when I was young and might read anything through.  To the Lighthouse?  The Waves?  Mrs. Dalloway?  I've tried them all, that last more than once, more than thrice, come to that.  (When dishy Michael Cunningham wrote his very good book, The Hours, in which you'll remember that novel features muchly, I tried very hard indeed, ashamed never to have finished it.  I think I skipped ahead to the end, but beyond that?  I can't really claim to have read Woolf's novel, not really.)

Perhaps I will some day be mature enough, and quiet enough, not to find the novels, as opposed to nearly everything else the old girl ever wrote, dull.   Of Virginia Woolf there is nearly no end, so I don't feel I haven't done her some justice.  Hell, I've even read her husband and her girlfriend and her nephew and her dad, among her family, to say nothing of her wider acquaintance!

So why then be tempted by these British, hardcover Penguin Classics reissues?  Well, look at them!  Aren't they pretty?!  The design is elegant, there are interesting new introductions, and there they now sit on the Bargain table, at only $7.98 before tax and discount!

A Room with a View, her brilliant long feminist essay, (seems wrong to call it, "seminal,") I have read.  I don't know that I have it in my library anymore.  I took it to lunch yesterday and was frankly spellbound again by her astonishing rhetorical performance.  I'm not such a student of these things to be bothered much by the current analysis that seems to fault her for her snobbish assumptions about class and culture, etc.  Points well made, I'm sure.  Surely though by now, nearly a century after its original publication, the book may be read as literature and history -- at least by a common reader such as meself?  This one I will get, if only just to read in it again, as I've been talking about anyway.

But the two novels?  My collector's sense for"sets" makes my fingers twitch to scoop up all three books today.  Let's just see if I can resist, shall we?

And if I die tomorrow, maybe the junkman will think better of me for owning this unread copy of The Waves.  Even in death, I should think, one hopes to make a good impression.