In mine I have a comfortable chair and a desk looking out the window on the garden, lawn and trees with a view of the ocean over the top of the seawall. I note, with no particular Luddite pride, but certainly with no feeling of deprivation either, that this private room has no television, computer, fax, telephone or cell. On the shelves that surround me I have the special books I am currently browsing through or studying. I read and write there in blessed peace. I am distanced from trouble in the streets. The virulent and contemptible exchanges of distrust and hostility between fellow Guyanese can be forgotten for a while. The perilous state of the nation is for another day’s, another week’s, another month’s consideration. I find myself retreating more and more into this quiet room, my books within easy reach, possessing the kingdom of the imagination beyond all squalor. I am increasingly reluctant to exchange such benison of private place for the boring and acrimonious turmoil of the world at work and play.
And so I sit here and write. And often enough I put down my pen to savour the infinite sweets of reading. Never a day passes without a discovery, a revelation, a wondrous fact, an incitement to further study, further reading, some spur to the imagination to go off in extraordinary directions or just stay still and quietly enjoy the infinite ramifications of mankind’s astonishing passage from silence to silence.
* But what books to read? Franz Kafka, the great Czech allegorical novelist, is a stern adviser. “Altogether,” he wrote in 1904 to a friend, “I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”
* I read of the Etruscans, a great and civilized people by the account of others. But a tragedy befell them. The writings they left behind have never been decoded so we cannot see into their soul. The poet Richard Wilbur sums up the tragedy that befalls a civilization, a culture, when it loses its readers:
To The Etruscan Poets
Dream fluently, still brothers, who when young
Took with your mothers’ milk the mother tongue,
In which pure matrix, joining world and mind,
You strove to leave some line of verse behind
Like a fresh track across a field of snow,
Not reckoning that all could melt and go.
* The limitless joy of books which those who hardly read cannot seem to fathom. Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and treasurer and chancellor to King Edward II of England in the 13th century, loved and collected books with a passion: “In books,” he wrote, “I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace. All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates: all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.”
Six centuries later Virginia Woolf understood his passion and described a similar love of books:” “I have sometimes dreamt,” she wrote, “that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards – their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, ‘Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.’”
* The exchanges between lovers through the ages are an endless delight. Ignace Gelb in his History of Writing (Chicago, 1952) tells us that in Eastern Turkestan, a young woman sent her lover a message consisting of a lump of tea, a leaf of grass, a red fruit, a dried apricot, a piece of coal, a flower, a piece of sugar, a pebble, a falcon’s feather and a nut. The message read, “I can no longer drink tea, I’m pale as grass without you, I blush to think of you, I shrivel in your absence, my heart burns as coal, you are beautiful as a flower, and sweet as sugar, but is your heart of stone? I’d fly to you if I had wings, I am yours like a nut in your hand.”
* And, remembering my efforts all in vain to comfort an old friend whose wife of long years together had just died, I came across Alfred Tennyson’s sad poem on his bereavement and feel my friend’s loss to my depths:
O That ’Twere Possible
O that ‘twere possible
After long grief and pain
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again!…
A shadow flits before me,
Not thou, but like to thee:
Ah, Christ! That it was possible
For one short hour to see
The souls we loved, that they might tell us
What and where they be!
And then, after traveling far in just a few hours, I am brought back home abruptly. I come across a quotation from Plato’s discourses: “When issues, definitions, sights and other sense-impressions are rubbed together and tested amicably by men employing questions and answers with no malicious rivalry, suddenly there shines forth understanding.” Sadly, in Guyana these days issues are “rubbed together” with so much suspicion, hostility, malice and deep ill-will that there is absolutely no chance of clear understanding shining forth. The only hope seems to be in all the political leaders setting an example in their dialogue and thereby gradually bringing about a return to civil discourse throughout society.
And if that hope fades, what other option will there be to finding some retreat and withdrawing utterly from a world gone unnecessarily mad?
