My Favorite Polish

"It is good to rub and polish one's brain against that of others." - from The Essays of Michel de Montaigne

"When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind." - ibid

Where now are Michel de Montaigne's books? Where is his library? I've watched two videos online, touring his chateau and in neither was there so much as a Bible on his desk. His study is still a beautiful room; round and bright, the beams lined with favorite quotes. Much has be preserved or restored. The bed in his bedroom may be his bed for all I know. There is the sense, looking through the windows that we might see just what he saw. But where are his books?!

I imagine that those books that survived him he was anxious to preserve. Books in his day were more precious for being rare, and I can not imagine he would have left them in any other than a safe place, though I likewise can not imagine him parting with any of them before he died. I like to think his books still exist, that his Cicero sits somewhere, if under glass, still to be read, or at the very least seen. I could no more read his Latin and Greek than I can read his own French, I haven't his languages anymore than I have his library, his leisure or his wisdom. But still, I like to think that his library not only survived him but survives, if not intact then at least in individual volumes, acknowledged as having been once his and whole.

I expect no such conservation of my own collection. My books may go, en masse, after me, to anyone who will haul them out. When I am dead, my library as such dies with me. A. may want to keep this room as it is now, for awhile, but it will be more a burden, should he survive me, than a sanctuary to him. I would not want him here alone, in the room to which I so often retreat, even from him. Better he remembers me, if it comes to that, in our bed, the big bed we bought together and where we've slept together night upon night, the bed we've moulded to our own forms, his side and mine and the space in the middle where we've shared so much of our life together; taken our meals, watched our shows, told our secrets, exchanged dreams, affection, wind. (Montaigne would not approve of that last prudish euphemism, by the way.) Yes, better my lover remember me, or I him, in our bed than in our books, not every book in this house being mine, whatever the numerical imbalance. So when I die*, any friend may take from among my books any he or she may want. I tell you now, in the hope somebody will. Ask A., if he's here, and he will understand. Any he doesn't want, any left unclaimed, he can sell, I'll leave him little else.

But I've strayed from Montaigne's library here, and into my own, and apologize, to you, the reader, though not to Montaigne's shade as I feel sure he'd understand. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, aristocrat, diplomat, traveller, advisor to Kings, Mayor of Bordeaux, born February 28, 1533, died September 13, 1592, owned a library of some 1,500 books, into which, at 38 he withdrew from public life. There, in his tower, he wrote his Essays, if not inventing then perfecting a form that answered better to his subject, himself, than any he might otherwise have mastered. In his Essays, one may meet him as one might meet a friend and know him better than most of us will ever know ourselves. In his Essays are his books as well, that other self, external to his mind but made to furnish it as handsomely as his books must once have filled his tower.

Quoting from my books is, or began at least, as something of an affectation, a way, like smoking cigarettes in a holder, of assuming a sophistication I desperately hoped one day to have. I don't know but what the habit, to some small extent, fulfilled the hope. I am smarter for remembering, when I do, what I have read. "I quote others only in order the better to express myself." said Montaigne. I should like to think I do the same, or at least intend as much. But reading the Essays, I am gobsmacked by the breadth and resonance of the author's quotation, by the subtlety of use, by his delight, sometimes unbridled in all he read, in anecdote and history, in poetry, philosophy, in nature, in himself.

If, as Montaigne wrote, the most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness, then Montaigne is the wisest of writers. I turn to his Essays, from among all my books, not only for example, or for the pleasure of his erudition, but for his company. If he is occasionally long-winded, or he tells more stories than required to make his point, if he assumes too much of his reader's education, and more of his reader's good sense, if he can not resist a joke, or a quote, or keep his thumb from pulling down yet another book, how does that make him anything but the best possible friend on a cold night like this, here, in my own little library, the shadow of his?

And so, yet again, he answers my question for me. Montaigne's library survives, if not intact, then at its best, in Montaigne Essays, just as he does. Where are his books? Here.


*But not before. I would rather buy a friend a book than loan one.

Attempts

An extended illness has its obvious metaphoric uses, (see Sontag, Susan.) Otherwise, to be ill for any length of time is little more than a state of uselessness. It is not leisure. It is not restfulness or time for contemplation or a chance to catch up on one's reading. The specifics in the present case, which appears to be a resurgent and violent head-cold; eyes water, nose runs, head aches, throat closes, etc., preclude the kind of wistful, lingering reflections on the preciousness of life that traditionally justify, if for the reader and not the sufferer, a long spell of illness and ick. I have no wisdom to share. My disease is too pedestrian to be interesting of itself. My thoughts likewise. I can not justify my rising to write here. It is habit now. It is reflexive. I do not, at this moment, feel the cold touch of mortality, just cold, cranky, damp. What Edith Wharton called the "date of disintegration" seems, at least tonight, still far off and so urgency enters into this not at all. If I am compelled by anything other than the most stubborn resolution to not not write, then any alternative motivation must remain unreproduced and fruitless, too tangled in my mucky thoughts to be teased out tonight. So, here I sit filling up the blank with ramblings, to no higher purpose than to mark the one hundredth entry made here in a month plus a bit on either side.

My original intention, should I manage such, was to mark this mild milestone by writing an appreciation of the father of the essay, the originator of the "attempt" as a literary form, Michel de Montaigne. In preparation, during the brief window this week between infections, I bought myself The Complete Works, translated by Donald M. Frame, published in 2003, by the Everyman's Library in one clumsy volume, two and a half inches thick, in keeping with the long tradition of that institution of preservation by compacting, commemoration in bricks. My resistance to the format overcome by the temptation of having everything in translation added to the Essays, I bought and hauled the thing home. I needn't describe my unhappiness in handling the book. Anyone reading here, anyone who knows me, must know by now what I think of such compendious clunkers. In bed, unable to countenance or follow even a favorite, a ritually watched Thursday night dose of televisual reality, I hefted my new book into my lap and tried to read without dew-dropping on the fresh, white pages. But I failed my friend Michel; the type is smallish, at least to my rheumy eyes, Montaigne's clear mind rendered inaccessible by the opacity of my own. Oh, reading "On Experience," a ray or two manage to pierce the fog -- thus today's quote, but I was eventually forced to concede defeat, close the book and blow and moan and feel very sorry for myself indeed.

I feel denied the company of a friend. Earlier today, another ritual, that of my Thursday morning breakfast with my dear friend N., was marred by the necessity of a certain distance being kept between us so as to avoid, hopefully, the very real risk of infecting him with my present discomfort. So he sat just there, while I stayed some distance away. Usually we sit, our heads very much together, at a small cafe-table, exchanging intimacies, gossiping, reviewing books, reviewing each other's week. But this morning, woolly-minded and cotton-mouthed, unable to even taste my danish, I too often lost the thread of our conversation, the words went dry, the sentences snapped rather than stretched. I speak, as I write, in paragraphs that require patience, perhaps because I read Henry James at too impressionable an age, though probably just because I haven't the confidence for brevity. But this morning, feeling the words unraveling out of my mouth, I knew poor N.'s patience was being tested. He is the dearest listener I know, a writer with a cultivated expertise in story-telling, impatient only to understand, to encourage, and most days he keeps a firm grasp and tugs me back when I unspool too far, but this morning the task was too much, even for him, and we sat staring now and again, at a loss. Poor N. I failed him too.

I ought not to have gone in to work today at all. I ought to have conceded my unfitness and stayed home, but I have missed too much work in being repeatedly sick this winter, and Thursdays are the only days when there is no one else at the desk to buy until noon. I stayed just long enough to be replaced. No idea what I bought or from whom. This day, it seems safe now to say, has been something of a loss in toto -- a phrase that calls to mind, aptly enough, the reluctance dear Dorothy's dog must have felt in being dragged back to dusty Kansas where he had no voice, no say, as it were, in anything, his only option being mute, or rather barking compliance with the wishes of another to be elsewhere. And so, at last, just here at the end, a metaphor for my illness, which carried my home, reduced me to this frustrated barking and left me no better option tonight than to circle my miserable, smelly bed, whine and go, as I do now, to sleep.

If I'm lucky, I'll dream feverishly of OZ, that magical place where illness does not exist, where dogs and chickens talk, and where I wish I was tonight.

Daily Dose

From The Complete Works of Michel de Montaigne,translated by Donald M. Frame

SELF REFERENCE

"... because I write of myself and my writings as of my other actions, because my theme turns in upon itself -- I do not know whether everyone will accept it."

From On Experience

Beyond the Hunter's Reach

My father hunts. My brother hunts. All the men in my family, presumably back as far as the first poacher of some Ducal deer lost in the mists of the anonymous history of the English peasantry, hunted. My father took me with him once. I was little. I did not, as I remember, carry a gun. I got water in my boots. I don't doubt I cried. I got pneumonia. I was brought home and left there with my dolls and my books.

The instinct is still in me though. I still remember with a mouth-watering vividness the smell of frying venison in my grandmother's kitchen. I wasn't averse to killing you see, I was simply disinclined, as I still am, to being out-of-doors in the cold when I might be indoors reading. My hunting has been turned. Going to the movies this afternoon, to see The Reader (quite good) and to celebrate my head-cold abating sufficiently to allow for an outing, I made the patient A. stop at the little chain used bookstore out by the mall. This is a part of any outing that takes us that way, just as is shopping in the Big Box store for toilet tissue and the pillow-sized bag of peanut M&Ms. The stop at the not very good bookstore became part of our established way years ago, when I found one very good thing there, a copy of the Essays of Montaigne, in two volumes, from Oxford University Press, translated by E. J. Trenchmann. The volumes were handsome, the translation is now my favorite, the price, as they say, was right. Finding that Montaigne marked the rather awful little store for me, put it in my range.

That is the problem hunting books. One is likely to find but one treasure in any one shop. Going back, however much later, does not mean another will have turned up. But the hunter must to the trail, must follow the scent, must be patient above all things.

And so today, after a quick and pointless look through the "Collectible" shelves, where I've never found anything, and a quick track through the fiction, I sniffed around the boxes of unshelved books dumped in front of "Fine Letters" and found Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson, (1758 - 1800,) "Poet, novelist, feminist, first mistress of George IV." Edited by M. J. Levy, and published by Peter Owen, in a rather hideous striped dustjacket (an inexplicable tradition with Peter Owen,) this looks to be very much my usual prey; obscure enough, very English indeed, and by a woman I know if at all, only glancingly and by way of other books. Five dollars and ninety-eight cents, she was.

Also, in another box, I found The Death and Letters of Alice James: selected correspondence, edited, with a biographical essay by Ruth Bernard Yeazell, University of California Press, for six dollars and forty-eight cents. Now Alice is, to a degree, my least favorite James, simply because too much has been made of her, academically, and this at the expense of other more accomplished James siblings, to say nothing of her female contemporaries who did not spend their adult lives on sofas, lamenting their unhappy lot as invalids. But Alice really isn't to blame for the uses to which her diary has been put. Her letters and her diary are quite good, when loosed from the accumulated ivy of her 20th Century elevation to Feminist Sainthood. So to have a little book of just her letters, sadly only "selected," ought to be treat. The biographical essay may be the price to be paid for having a nice little hardcover collection to call my own. Remains to be seen. (There's often offal to be discarded when one takes home even small game.)

So, a hunter I am, if not of game, then of bookish bargains. And if I can not find anywhere in this benighted city a decent plate of venison at a reasonable or unreasonable price, I will content myself with a ham sandwich, great fist-fulls of peanut M&Ms, and two new books.

Ineffable Creature

"Morning, Weasel."

They've painted over the burns on the sidewalk where she stubbed out her cigarettes with the tip of a crutch. Somebody else gives out the dog cookies at the cash register, calls customers to tell them their special orders have arrived, organizes the shelves of customer "holds," solves paperwork tangles. But every time I hear a metal cart half full of books bump and ring off the elevator, or look across from the Used Books Buying Desk when voices get raised at the Check Out, or I have a particularly comic encounter with some eccentric soul, I still look for The Wolverine.

It's been a year. I was reminded just the other day, by a mutual friend. It has been as long as that, longer, since we last shared a bitter laugh, growled together at the fate of the world, grinned across the floor at each other at some fresh absurdity. We went to a play once, not very well done, and coming out at the intermission, unsure if we really wanted to go back in, she pointed down the sidewalk, hacked despondently, and said "Go ahead, you bastard, run away -- just leave me here to die." Death was not something she feared terribly much. She fought it, refused it's attendant sympathies and show, laughed at it even as it came to her. She was a small woman, my friend and coworker, Jennifer Kuhn. Polio took the legs from under her when she was still a child. Cancer took her job, her hair, her mobility, even her dignity from her, but she laughed even at that. At the end, in that strangely vast looking hospital bed, she looked as small and vulnerable as a baby bird. "I don't dress for visitors anymore -- hope you don't mind," and then, drugged and still wracked with pain, she laughed. It was a harsh laugh, but then it always had been; smoky and loud. The last time I was with her, only days before she died, she said, "Dying is hard -- I wish it was over. I'm ready to go. Can't imagine why it's taking so long." And she laughed again, less loudly, not long, but still true.

"... how little alteration in good spirits the approaches of death make" as Bacon observed.

She called herself a badger, a wolverine, worse. When I asked her once why she identified so with small vicious mammals she said, "Well, I am a small vicious mammal." Her wit could be unkind, and her attitude defensive, if not occasionally offensive, but she was really all bluster and bark. Really, she was profoundly empathetic, perhaps too much so, particularly with the truly vulnerable: the crippled, the mad, the old, the young, the four-footed and the misfit. If she snapped, she snapped at the privileged, the pompous, the thoughtlessly mobile, the sententious and the overbearing. Little ass on the hard floor, her braced legs straight out before her, shelving books, she looked up at most people but always said to me, "You don't look so big from down here, Weasel."

That she invited me into her den, saw in me just a brother mammal, called me "Weasel," and friend, was and is a point of great pride. Not everyone was called to be her familiar.

We at the bookstore still miss her so. But as Montaigne says, "our feelings continue beyond this life," and as mine for her are still tender, I remind myself how she would have rolled her eyes and barked at such sentiment. Yet she did say it, more than once, near the end.

"Love you, Weasel."

Love you still, Wolverine.