Tuesday, December 18, 2007

The Books

Regulars might recall a post of mine, A Teacher Remembered - date 25 September (for some reason I can't link to it) - about the death of my old friend and teacher at a near-biblical age. Here's the coda. The other day, I went to his flat to have a rummage among his books and pick out a selection to remember him by. This was, of course, sad - the last visit I shall ever make to a place I had been regularly visiting for so many years - and yet it was no longer his home, his habitat (stage set, I should perhaps say, carefully and elegantly constructed). All that had made it his was gone or going, and only the shell remained - which in months will be another home altogether, framing another life. But the books - or a substantial remnant of them - were still there, and my rummage among them seemed the perfect legacy and the perfect tribute.
Some of his library seemed destined to end up among the sad unwanted - multi-volume Dumas, ditto De Quincey, minor Georgians, volumes of letters and diaries by obscure 18th-century figures (French and English), Pierre Loti, James Elroy Flecker (though I took a very handsome Hassan)... But there was much that, for me, was treasure - volumes by Edward Thomas, Saki, Sir Thomas Browne, a beautiful Emily Dickinson, Katherine Mansfield, Beddoes, Thomas Traherne. These were books that would carry his spirit down to me.
What will remain of us is books? Hardly - but with a person like him, they are a large part of what is left - of the shaping intellectual music that lingers in the minds of those who knew him, and no doubt will die with them. But it is something.

4 comments:

  1. An excellent post and very possibly true... I wonder what anyone would make of my stash of old copies of 'Penthouse'... not a life well-lived I think.

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  2. i used to buy my poetry from Daisy Lane Books in Holmfirth - they had a huge range of old hardback 19th Century editions for about £3 each, a clergyman's library, perhaps. i liked to feel i was reading some unknown dead man's collection, as if the very frail but oddly enduring magic of ink on paper held us together in the act of reading.

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  3. Sir Thomas Browne! There's a name to conjure with, and a Norfolk man I believe. Apart from the pleasure of his writing, he's a lesson in what makes a good doctor in any age. We pass him on to the next generation as a companion, not a book, imho.

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