My Lady, Bountiful

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

—Thomas Carlyle

It all started innocently enough, about a year ago. I was walking through the Student Centre, on my way back to my office and, as they say in the hardboiled novels, I was carrying. Yes, I was armed, heavily armed – with a handsome dark brown wooden plaque made up of printer's letters spelling out BELIEVE. My ultra-talented designer colleague Melina had seen it at Starbucks and bought it for me as a "workspace-warming present," as I was that very day in the process of moving from an office to, yes, a "workspace." A cubicle; I was being cubed. Or maybe rhomboided. Whatever my new shape, I was determined not to read too much into it. But my new plaque, my new watchword – well, I was going to read as much into that as would comfortably fit.

Stanza's watchword, as we know, is BELIEVE – believe in HER, of  course, but as we also know, she is extraordinarily well-connected, so one thing leads to another, and before you know it, you find yourself believing in, or at least entertaining, all sorts of notions that had never before entered your head.

For instance, it had never entered my head that there could be piles of wonderful books lying around campus, free for the taking. But as I approached the stairs leading back up to the ground floor, there was a dishevelled pile just lying on a bench. Students were selling back their used textbooks to the Student Union's buyback program, and simply discarding the books that weren't eligible for buyback!

People were already picking through it for goodies, but there was plenty left for me. And I mean, just for me. Oddly, what caught my eye first was a fairly forlorn, dingy paperback by Brian Moore entitled The Magician's Wife. Hmm, says I, if Stanza really has her heart set on turning Cosmo into a magician, could I dare hope that she also had her heart set on becoming... the magician's wife? Whatever the novel might be about, I had to scoop it up.

My tenuous nuptial intuitions were confirmed when I spotted a thicker, much spiffier volume beside it – a softcover volume of the Norton Anthology of Literature: the Sixteenth Century and Early Seventeenth Century!! Yes, my heart was thumping and my hands trembling as I riffled through the table of contents looking for it...damn Norton Anthology tables of contents go on forever...finally... there! Henry Vaughan! And, yes, "Corruption" was included! And therein, now staring back at me from page 1621 – the very year of Vaughan's birth! –  yes, therein, at the beginning, the very stanza that has bestowed on Stanza her name, her beginning:

Sure, it was so. Man in those early days
                          Was not all stone, and Earth,

                  He shin’d a little, and by those weak Rays
                           Had some glimpse of his birth.

                  He saw Heaven o’r his head, and knew from whence
                           He came (condemned,) hither,

                  And, as first love draws strongest, so from hence
                           His mind sure progress’d thither.

Some glimpse of his birth. That magic page number reminded me that Henry's twin brother Thomas was of course born that same year, 1621. A poet and a magician. Henry the poet, Thomas the magician. Twins. Stanza the poet, Cosmo the magician. Twins? There was another book on the pile, about group work, called Joining Together – badly marked up, but I liked the title: would such twins, progressing backward, heavenward, being granted some glimpse of their birth(s), not experience themselves joining together? Now there was a certified Neoplatonic notion. So I took that book, too, along with a hardcover promotional volume from the late 1980s called The University of Calgary: A Place of Vision. Vision, indeed. How such an oddity got in there I don't know, but it had a photo of the Swann Mall gargoyles that oversaw my introducing myself in 1987 to Kari, who in turn introduced me to Stanza in 1994 – so it came along too, along with a mint condition Riverside Edition of The Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold. 

Anybody who can write a poem like "Dover Beach" in his twenties is okay in my books. So to speak.

Yes, they all came along with the BELIEVE plaque as cubicle-warming presents on that final day of March. Soon they were joined by others, many others, too many to count, until now, a year and a half later, I have roughly 300 of them stacked and piled every which way, every subject imaginable, and a few unimaginable (a sparkling, large-format bound volume of Popeye comics from 1932/33) – all at little or no cost, thanks to discards and various sales.

The aptness of many of the titles and the timing of their appearance enough for another book in itself....

And finally, the week before last, a reprise of sorts. Among a pile of books on the free table at the SU consignment store, a dingy, yellowing  paperback entitled Night Thoughts – a Penguin anthology of night-themed poetry. Highlighted on its back cover, what else but another famous stanza by Henry Vaughan, from "The World":

I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright...

And next to it, hardcover with dust jacket, a library discard in excellent shape. The Magician's Wife.     

Then a few days later, perhaps to drive the point home (certainly did for Cosmo), a nice, spiffy, unmarked updated edition of Joining Together.

Cosmo is trying not to take all this too "literally." Ahem. That is, Cosmo happily wishes you, one and all, a Good Night, but he is not quite ready to go gently (or literally) into THAT good night.

Ω