When I am in any great city I search out the bookstores and in them spend what are hours of pure pleasure. Such time should have no ending. The great libraries of the world in which long ago I spent so much reading time have become too soullessly computerized for my liking and I studiously avoid them. A good friend recently described his experiences of a University Library as follows:
“The University Library here is now, so far as the average user is concerned, simply a vast room filled with rows of cubicles and/or tables equipped with hundreds of computers. This excrescence is still referred to as the Library. I want to campaign for the substitution of the word “Computery”…… When one wants to consult the library catalogue first the computer screen will not revert to the neutral position in which it will absorb a request. When that problem is solved, usually by an attendant who is muttering about how this thing is always “playing up,” the next experience is a prolonged wait while nothing happens and one wonders if one has done something wrong. At this point I recall that when there was a card catalogue if one had a prolonged wait one always knew what was wrong because one’s fingers were in action seeking the right card. Next there is a stylized response, “No exact match; try again being less specific”. Eventually one gives up and does without the book.”
But the bookstores still provide rooms of undigitalised wonder in which to browse in leisure and delight. In fact the great bookstores are now better and more reader-friendly than ever. They provide comfortable chairs here and there in case you want to settle down to some serious browsing and one I have grown to love in particular accommodates a coffee shop inside so that you can spend a whole day wandering among the shelves, sitting and reading, sipping coffee and eating a sandwich between times and thus the unpressured hours slip by blessed by books and quiet thought and the simple feeling that life is good – until the time comes at the end of the day to choose out of the thousands a book or two to own.
And every now and then one comes across a special writer completely unknown before who sparks a sudden, joyous flash of understanding that what he says is true and beautiful until the end of time. Here are two poems by Jack Gilbert, hardly known at all.
In Umbria
Once upon a time I was sitting outside the café
watching twilight in Umbria when a girl came
out of the bakery with the bread her mother wanted.
She did not know what to do. Already bewildered
by being thirteen and just that summer a woman,
she now had to walk past the American.
But she did fine. Went by and around the corner
with style, not noticing me. Almost perfect.
At the last instant could not resist darting a look
down at her new breasts. Often I go back
to that dip of her head when people talk
about this one or that one of the great beauties.
The Abnormal Is Not Courage
The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German
Tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers,
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
The bravery. Say it’s not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn’t that. Not at its best.
It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight,
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the mavellous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.
It is too near the whore’s heart: the bounty of impulse,
And the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, not Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
Not the month’s rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
That is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.
It is a great joy which never leaves me though I am very old – the anticipation of the times still I hope to come which will be spent with books – in bookstores, in my study, in the garden my wife has created – never knowing what wonders and astonishments will suddenly be revealed to make the day exceptional.
