Another man speaks satirically of those people who out of restlessness or curiosity embark on long journeys, who keep no diaries and write no descriptions, who carry no notebooks; who go to see things, and who either don’t see them or forget what they have seen; who are only anxious to look at unfamiliar towers [...]
So I was reading Paul Fussell’s book about travel, Abroad. Of course it’s not just about travel, though he does spend some thirty-odd (or more or less, I’ve returned it to the library and cannot refer to it now) pages lamenting the impossibility of true travel1 in this degraded age of tourism, it’s about literary [...]
Since selling off most of the books earlier this year, I’ve been trying to avoid purchasing more, which has led to increased, or perhaps simply more self-conscious library usage. The following are the books I have most recently checked out of the public and local university libraries (including three interlibrary loans):
Aksakov: Years of Childhood and [...]
Life is too short for this book which smells of potpourri and afternoons misspent in faded floretry. I cannot tell whether it is the cloying stink or the dullness of the matter (promising to tend where I do not care to follow: to gossip and muddle and the human failing of overestimated importance) that caused [...]
Between the limits of affection and antipathy for the author’s personality, the relationship of author and reader may take a score of different forms: admiration and respect without affection, as in the case, perhaps, of Thomas Hardy; exasperated affection as in the case of Kipling; devotion for Jane Austen; sheer worship or utter dislike for [...]
They took away sixteen boxes of books, a future, a past, & a half-baked dream, and left a bill of sale, a cheque, and an increasing sense of freedom.
My bookshelves look like a fighter’s mouth, full of painful and surprising gaps. Even books I thought I could not do without, books that shaped my taste and who I am, are gone.
Let me explain. When we decided to move abroad I knew, of course, that most1 of the books would have to be sold. [...]
The trouble with epigraphy.
A fog has settled in for the winter and, although the café is warm and bright, the bustle and noise merely accentuate the drizzle and dark outside.
It is my favorite time of year.
It feels right to be inside, to be making things with my hands and reading books. Not as though there [...]
Cataloguing one’s home library has its good points. Entering in ISBNs and publication information is a wonderful way to devour time. One also gets a chance really to look at one’s books; one so seldom has the opportunity. One buys the book, sometimes one even reads it,* and then it goes on the shelf, jumbled [...]
books, libraries, and necromancy
springtime and Cyprus
Relics of the book trade; but see also a more impressive collection.
O. W. Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table:
Joyce Kilmer, Trees and Other Poems:
ibidem
H. W. Auden, Greek Prose Phrase-Book:
A. Kiesling, ed. Seneca Rhetor:
Newton & Treat, Outline for Review: Roman History:
Lord Houghton, Life and Letters of John Keats:
Charles E. Bennett, Latin Composition:
R. C. Seaton, ed. [...]
obstinate.
identity crisis.
Books to be packed.
She sat rather glumly looking at her own hands, her chin drawn in as though suffering from indigestion, or a surfeit of English.
– Patrick White
The Vivisector, p. 317.
I am, as it were, at sea. The most difficult part of packing books is deciding which ones I am most likely to want to [...]
…the judgement that someone is unliterary is like the judgement ‘This man is not in love’, whereas the judgement that my taste is bad is more like ‘This man is in love, but with a frightful woman’. And just as the mere fact that a man of sense and breeding loves a woman we dislike [...]
meme (ex machina):*
Intrigue me?1 The impression is that the lay-out of the whole area resembled that of the Seraglio in Constantinople, with palaces, barracks, and other royal buildings set in an area of parkland.2 A house of sin you may call it, but not a house of darkness, for the candles are never out; and [...]
it was the distance…
To my great embarrassment, I mistook this overview of William Blades’s Enemies of Books (via) for a poem1; e.g.:
Bagford the biblioclast.
Illustrations torn from MSS.
Title-pages torn from books.
Rubens, his engraved titles.
Colophons torn out of books.
Lincoln Cathedral
Dr. Dibdin’s Nosegay.
Theurdanck.
Fragments of MSS.
Some libraries almost useless.
[...]
The care that should be taken of books.
Enjoyment derived from them.
Incidentally, I am still [...]
Among the Romanes a Poet was called Vates, which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or Prophet, as by his conjoyned words Vaticinium, and Vaticinari, is manifest, so heavenly a title did that excellent people bestowe uppon this hart-ravishing knowledge, and so farre were they carried into the admiration thereof, that they thought in [...]
adventurous students always read classics.
For the words and facts of the ancients are as bricks, from which we build the fortresses of our arguments, ever quarreling over the lines of the walls. These walls are torn down and rebuilt with such haste and such fury, that it does not seem strange when they are torn down again, or prove [...]
For no good reason1 I’ve been reading The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson (ed. W. Martin, CUP: 2002). It is somewhat refreshing to find books which do not concern Cicero. And it is interesting to step outside the charmed circle of academics and then to peer back in, as though through windows. For one can [...]
The first day alone; on my own. Faded grandeur of a forgotten self. Searching for lost books. Remembering old friends, neglected, of course, as they too often are. Baking scones, making tea. Existence in fragments. One cannot expect more. Even so.
Just a note: I realized what it was, that most important thing that I’d forgotten. [...]
To be more joyful, and border less on abject self-pity, I have taken to pillaging the shelves in my former room (now the library—which is apt) for books to take away; I fear my parents shall be left with hardly any modern literature at all. They merely smile at me, though, as I pilfer a [...]
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ego hoc feci mm–mmviii
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