Glorious Principles of Thomas Traherne

The day is young that is waking at the first with thoughts as they occur from out of dreams and into the vision of shapes again, familiar with the light. Many another has learned through time to give thanks at waking for the light itself and every existing being and thing that breathing permits them to enjoy, further. Such understanding comes voluntarily to the awakened one, never mind their level of lucidity or vagueness, cheeriness or grumpiness, refreshment or hangover. Waking at first is for many another the hour of least affected thought. The time before breakfast is when thought alone is sorting itself out, observing its mood, sitting quietly with an assembly of early morning ideas, making out some liveable form from which to proceed. It is the hour prior to conversation with the world, the trial and error of social media, the holdfast position in preparation for daily news updates, the hour before opening a book. This book by Thomas Traherne, for example. “He thought it a Vain Thing to see Glorious Principles lie Buried in Books, unless he did remove them into his Understanding; and a vain thing to remov them unless he did revive them, and rais them up by continual exercise.” This is paragraph 2 of Book IV of ‘Centuries of Meditations’. The editor has kept the seventeenth century spelling and capitalisation, which give the sentences all manner of pitches and tones and emphases, as if playing an organ. The author is not saying books are vain, but vain if they are not being used for the purpose intended. For him understanding grows, the conversation goes on regardless, in a day where books will lend to the conversation. He removes the contents of the book, by which he means transfers the thoughts to his own mind, the place where they may live again. The sentences of his book are the beginning of the day of their thought, general statements and fundamental truths and primary assumptions that he calls principles, which is why he finishes this paragraph with these words. “Let this therfore be the first Principle of your soul. That to have no Principles, or to liv beside them, is equaly Miserable. And that Philosophers are not those that Speak, but Do great Things.” Thomas Traherne, in his own book, would have us become alive to our own thoughts and more awake to our own principles. Actively to consider thoughts and consciously to think them through with others will fill the day with gladness and felicity. Not to do so will make for personal misery. A great thing spoken, or found in a book, is but one thing. Thought enlivens the day once it is raised up by continual exercise, he is saying from sometime in the seventeenth century, and for this author that is the purpose of a book. Our principles are resurrected, if in a book, and removed to where they can live.

 This is the twenty-first in a series of essays about the book in poetry, written by Philip Harvey and first published on this site.

Reveries of libraries, the fortieth: George Crabbe’s Divinity Section in ‘The Library’

 

One of the most humorously wise extended works of English literature devoted entirely to the subject of libraries is a long poem written in accomplished rhyming couplets by George Crabbe (1754-1832). Completed sometime in the 1780s, ‘The Library’ describes in loving detail the kind of book collections, whether public, university or private, that had emerged during the Enlightenment in England. The poem is equally attentive to the human desires that make libraries possible, whether those of the writer, the collector, or the reader. Halfway through the poem, we are taken on a guided tour of the sections.

Amid these works, on which the eager eye
Delights to fix, or glides reluctant by,
When all combined, their decent pomp display,
Where shall we first our early offering pay?
To thee, DIVINITY! to thee, the light
And guide of mortals, through their mental night;
By whom we learn our hopes and fears to guide;
To bear with pain, and to contend with pride;
When grieved, to pray; when injured, to forgive;
And with the world in charity to live.

Having established some of the main purposes of Gospel living, Crabbe was himself a clergyman, he then turns to study some of the authors of theology.
Not truths like these inspired that numerous race,
Whose pious labours fill this ample space;
But questions nice, where doubt on doubt arose,
Awaked to war the long-contending foes.
For dubious meanings, learned polemics strove,
And wars on faith prevented works of love;
The brands of discord far around were hurl'd,
And holy wrath inflamed a sinful world:-
Dull though impatient, peevish though devout,
With wit disgusting, and despised without;
Saints in design, in execution men,
Peace in their looks, and vengeance in their pen.
Methinks I see, and sicken at the sight,
Spirits of spleen from yonder pile alight;
Spirits who prompted every damning page,
With pontiff pride and still-increasing rage:
Lo! how they stretch their gloomy wings around,
And lash with furious strokes the trembling ground!
They pray, they fight, they murder, and they weep,-
Wolves in their vengeance, in their manners sheep;
Too well they act the prophet's fatal part,
Denouncing evil with a zealous heart;
And each, like Jonah, is displeased if God
Repent his anger, or withhold his rod.

The fearsome battles of rival theologians are recalled to mind, together with the actual physical battles between nation states tied to these disputes. Crabbe has learnt his church history well, spelling out in verse the common arguments of the Age of Reason in its visceral reaction to the previous Age of the (so-called) Wars of Religion. The role of the library in all of this total recall is another matter.
But here the dormant fury rests unsought,
And Zeal sleeps soundly by the foes she fought;
Here all the rage of controversy ends,
And rival zealots rest like bosom-friends:
An Athanasian here, in deep repose,
Sleeps with the fiercest of his Arian foes;
Socinians here with Calvinists abide,
And thin partitions angry chiefs divide;
Here wily Jesuits simple Quakers meet,
And Bellarmine has rest at Luther's feet.
Great authors, for the church's glory fired,
Are for the church's peace to rest retired;
And close beside, a mystic, maudlin race,
Lie 'Crumbs of Comfort for the Babes of Grace.'
Against her foes Religion well defends
Her sacred truths, but often fears her friends:
If learn'd, their pride, if weak, their zeal she dreads,
And their hearts' weakness, who have soundest heads.

George Crabbe’s image of slumbering polemicists is justly famous in certain religious circles. He compresses the different parties into order, precisely as a library does in making a seeming uniformity of all the generations of Christian apologetic and counterclaims. Indeed, libraries at this time awakened in visitors the perception that clashing viewpoints could be reduced to wars with words, an awareness that informs post-modern thinking about everything in discourse being no more than language games. However, while a visitor to the library may observe how the shelves represent all the differences of church history, this doesn’t mean that rest is now eternal. Crabbe’s own Age would seem to be typical of all the others in its need to argue and create division.
But most she fears the controversial pen,
The holy strife of disputatious men;
Who the blest Gospel's peaceful page explore,
Only to fight against its precepts more.
Near to these seats behold yon slender frames,
All closely fill'd and mark'd with modern names;
Where no fair science ever shows her face,
Few sparks of genius, and no spark of grace;
There sceptics rest, a still-increasing throng,
And stretch their widening wings ten thousand strong;
Some in close fight their dubious claims maintain;
Some skirmish lightly, fly, and fight again;
Coldly profane, and impiously gay,
Their end the same, though various in their way.

The poet refrains from naming these modern Athanasius’s and Bellarmines, but more than hints at the familiar attitudes that have earned their books a place in Divinity. The subject itself remains constant, only the areas of dispute change. The new religion of Reason is trending in the decade of the French Revolution, something that Crabbe is intensely aware of, and that prompts a philosophical question in light of his own expressed vision of words through time.    
When first Religion came to bless the land,
Her friends were then a firm believing band;
To doubt was then to plunge in guilt extreme,
And all was gospel that a monk could dream;
Insulted Reason fled the grov'lling soul,
For Fear to guide, and visions to control:
But now, when Reason has assumed her throne,
She, in her turn, demands to reign alone;
Rejecting all that lies beyond her view,
And, being judge, will be a witness too:
Insulted Faith then leaves the doubtful mind,
To seek for truth, without a power to find:
Ah! when will both in friendly beams unite,
And pour on erring man resistless light?

Rare

[Rare]

 

Silk, leather, redrafted psalmists’ epistles, calved fully somehow.

Conference time again in the college of a capital,

Rare books cataloguing, the session warming with

Dates Latin counting backwards to Christ [square brackets].

Count the signatures stitched into spine lines:

A time when these words would clear a room,

Or set in uproar, have them hanging by a thread.

If no author authority, then do with what’s there.

An impression is not an edition, is never finished.

A print run may’ve diminished to an example of one.

The item in hand has long not soaked the sun.

Attend to publisher At The Sign Of The Head

Backwards from the churchdoor quick and dead.

Check for existence in the best register, titled ‘Early and Often’.

 

Sonnet written by Philip Harvey during the ANZTLA Conference in Sydney this week.

Three poems about books by Philip Harvey

Winter Reading

Air freighted from Gloucester, a new
Medbh McGuckian: American-style margins,
Smelling of light binder’s glue and young birch.
In one poem she writes of an island
"where prayer books are left open in church."

Gold, old, and uncut after Page 41,
It is actually nice to finish the job
Which another reader in 1884
And the makers of the vellum volume began,
Surgically extracting the book inside the author.

Bedtime, just abouts, the little girl and I
Read Eloise, Madeline, some Alison Lester,
Scribbled on, retaped, unreplaced,
Every word sounded out at perfect pace.
By weekend she’ll draw books full of heroines.

Come icy Sunday, maybe the monolithic
Silver album of Antarctic explorers. They sit in kit
Reading Herodotus while the camera develops.
They had no book then, none in existence,
To describe the exposure they experienced.

And here’s my favourite Penguin Chekhov.
O that lonely buffoon Ranevskaya’s brother
With nothing better to do in his life
Than give a speech to his bookcase –
What a clot! But, what were the titles?

The Last Words of Everybody

‘You have not been invited to hear
The last words of everybody.’
Thomas Merton, Elegy for James Thurber

For every tyrant born before interviews
Rows of galleys await the bad news.
The little generals still receive late reviews,
        the last words of everybody.

Each star-turn transmutes to an archetype:
Athletes, actors, atheists with a gripe.
This week’s brain food is next week’s tripe,
        The past words of everybody.

Now not all that is silicon glitters.
The slog of blog, the litter of twitter,
Permanent feeds lead to verbal squitters,
        The blasted absurds of everybody.

Every book is a new brick in babel,
Download the sequel to the fable,
Check the alphabets as they cross the table,
        The vast words of anybody.

It’s the trust in your own voice gets your vote,
A quiet caption fits like a coat.
Don’t miss the boat, best turn the remote
        On the last words of everybody.

Full Text

The book that possesses me still rests
Where it went, the cover ordinary in the light
And the day could be whatever we want.

Then this other book I found nearby
Says so much about the first chapters
That it is like starting over, the time

It takes to remember first entrances.
In the footnotes of this borrowed book
Are all the thoughts of an older man

Who had never in his life gone further
Than the townships of his own region
But talked in the translations of ancients.

Picture books are so much more expensive
And I wonder who can spend their time
So scrupulously perfecting the print colours

To add evidence to the shelves of rooms
Of commentaries that prove conclusively
We move from darkness into light.

The reviewer missed the point completely
Of the book that now I can’t put down
And when I raise my view from the page

There is a train carriage full of passengers,
Many of whom are homesick for a country

The other passengers have never visited.

Liner Notes to ‘Incunabular’ by Les Murray

 Philip Harvey

 The poem is available online but cannot be copied, so this is a scan. The scan is of a recognisable font, that used for The New Yorker, where the poem first appeared. Did Les Murray read incunabula in the Fisher Library in Sydney? It seems unlikely, but who knows, maybe the librarians permitted students to read the fifteenth century imprints in Rare Books. Later in the poem Murray talks about open shelves, suggesting his main occupation was working through books from the General Collection. The poem describes the poet’s life at university, many years ago. It contains some of the classic traits of a Murray poem: minute descriptions of surfaces and sounds, compaction of surprise words into short spaces, self-reference coupled with definitive statements. It is a subject he returns to frequently in his life: the re-creation of buildings in words, with all that they may mean at the private and public level. We encounter early his defiant assertion of being ‘bush folk’ who are somehow judged to lack the culture that libraries contain. How Murray arrives at these uncomfortable conclusions is best left to our imaginations, but from the start we sense that the poem itself is written to right some perceived wrong: the poet is out to prove something to the world. The word ‘point’ is active, so that his life was pointing towards books and libraries from an early age, then when he’s there he comes before the points made by power, only to notice in books the points power did not make. Murray carries his own stuff that he’s not going let on about too early. He neatly uses bush images to evoke the library and its contents: the roof was like a “steep tent” and sometimes the book contents brought little return, “few grapes for many rows.” He might be a bit of an outsider, but here he instantly feels like an insider: the Library is home away from home. The male-female dichotomy is on show, where by contrast with the mysterious feminine of the library, its “stiletto heels clacking” and “lipsticked gargoyle”, the university owns the “phallic they were going to be marked by.” Although we can afford to be amused by this pronounced contrast, it also betrays an anxious identification with these places. University students have some growing up to do. The gorgeous triad “vogue, value, theory” offers the librarians a new classification scheme, though exactly where a cataloguer determines to put each book, whether in Vogue, Value, or Theory, is never elucidated by the poet.  It’s why we have cataloguers. We imagine young Murray being most drawn to the Value section of the Fisher Library. Verse Seven is the overt dream verse of this Murray poem, he loves dream in a poem, where the dreamscape quality of any large library comes into play. The concept of there being “floors below reality” clearly appeals, as does the prospect of “philologies with pages still uncut”. Any lover of words stares drooling, or at least in awe, at the idea of words and their meanings still to be unlocked, words forgotten waiting to be rediscovered: Les Murray is the kid in the lolly shop. The puns on the word ‘rut’ are irrefutable. While the student is digging deep into new knowledge (rut) and even getting off with the thought of so much great material to enjoy (rutting), he also intimates that such a place could become somewhere where he gets stuck and cannot escape, if he’s not careful (in a rut). Libraries can be like that, but they are not unique, by any means. The conclusion describes wittily the concerns of older library users when faced with the digital revolution and its discontents, even its lack of content. His nostalgia is premature, we could argue, while libraries continue to make the books and their access a main priority. The poet would be heartened to know that today (2015) surveys in America show that it is people under 35 who want book libraries and search them out, one reason being they already have the digital stuff in their hand, like an old hat. A Silicon Valley baseball cap, perhaps. The final line is a piece of Murray cross-referencing. When interviewed by Clive James on TV years ago, Murray proclaimed that sitting in libraries reading was his “surf”. This is a clean joke that possibly only an Australian could fully appreciate, living in a country where surfing is one pastime many of us do because it brings the greatest free pleasure for the longest time. Surfers ride the waves all day, free of care, while the poet in his library does the same with his reading. The poet knows he doesn’t own the Fisher Library either, it is “endowed” by the Fisher King, free for his perpetual use, just as surfers know they don’t own the ocean. That’s the joke, man!

The Bibliophile, by Max Jacob

Philip Harvey

Le Bibliophile

La reliure du livre est un grillage doré qui retient prisonniers des cacatoès aux mille couleurs, des bateux dont les voiles sont des timbres-poste, des sultanes qui ont des paradis sur la tête pour montrer qu’elles sont très riches. Le livre retient prisonnières des heroines qui sont trés pauvres, des bateaux à vapeur qui sont trés noirs et de pauvres moineaux gris. L’auteur est une tête prisonnière d’un grand mur blanc (je fais allusion au plastron de sa chemise.)

This enigmatic prose poem was written by Max Jacob sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. It is an entertainment, not unlike the writings of Dame Edith Sitwell living across the Channel in England at the same time. It is an artful diversion for the bohemian salons Jacob visited in the years before it was risky in Paris to be a cubist-surrealist and a Jew. The Francophile poet John Ashbery has made this translation, complete with American spellings.

The binding of the book is gilt wire mesh which imprisons cockatoos of a thousand colors, boats whose sails are postage stamps, sultanas with bird-of-paradise feathers on their heads to show that they are very rich. The book imprisons heroines who are very poor, steamboats which are very black and poor grey sparrows. The author is a head imprisoned by a great white wall (I allude to his shirtfront).

The book is commonly regarded as a liberating cultural creation, not so frequently as  a prison. We like to think of the book sharing its riches and find puzzling the idea that here the book holds back its gifts. Even the author lives in some kind of prison, or his head does anyway. While the ‘gilt wire mesh’ contains various exotic and unusual things that we may admire while they are on show, we are left with an unsettling sense that the book as object is here presented as a constricting control mechanism with no known means of escape.

What a curious Parisian poem! Would an inward incarcerated Bastille not require a revolutionary act? Would the ill-gotten gains of a cruel empire not ask to be set free again so they could return home? Would a decadent Paris fallen under foreign occupation not desire liberation, if it were the last thing on earth? Is life inside a golden cage containing every marvel known to world exploration still, after all, life in a golden cage? Rich and poor, old and new, exotic and local exist side-by-side in awkward juxtaposition.

Perhaps the poem is a satire directed at an unnamed author, but time has rendered any such secret meaning obsolete. We treat the author in the poem as a type, a kind of role player who must play out his part in a slightly absurd cultural game. Maybe the author is Max Jacob himself. If so, then the poem may be read as self-mocking. His relationship with his book is one of shared imprisonment: they are trapped together and cannot escape the implications of their shared existence as ‘a great white wall’.

Is the author in the poem the same person as the bibliophile of the title? On face value we assume this to be the case, but if not then the poem takes on other meanings as well. For indeed, the aesthetic and collecting habits of a bibliophile may well be those of capture and imprisonment, where the purposes of the book maker are secondary to the bibliophile’s purposes. The poem gives little away in this respect and all we can do is contemplate the possibilities.

John Ashbery would not have been aware of the meaning of the sporting Australianism ‘shirtfront’ when he worked on this poem, anymore than the Prime Minister of Australia when this year he threatened to shirtfront the President of Russia. Such political farce could well have been working material for a Max Jacob poem. Shirtfront in the translation is a contraction of a much longer phrase in the original, ‘plastron de sa chemise’, which sneaks in at the end but is critical to our understanding of the whole poem. In some ways the poem devolves to the word ‘plastron’ which doesn’t just mean, as in English, shirtfront, but has implications of being a breastplate, even a jacket that keeps everything in check. When an inmate wears a ‘plastron de sa chemise’ we imagine he may even be in fact wearing a straitjacket. Or perhaps we are being told he is stuff-shirt?

We are amused by the idea that the author of a book is imprisoned by ‘a great white wall’. We think of the wall as the white page that may simultaneously be his outward expression, but also the very fact that defines and restricts him. This thought passes through our minds, until we are told (in brackets) that Jacob refers to the shirt worn by the author. We picture Buster Keaton or similar figure of the period, locked absurdly into the very garment that should make him liberated but in fact permanently entraps him.        

Max Jacob leaves his enigmatic book for our amusement, or puzzlement, or frustration. We begin making up stories about the fascinating things imprisoned inside his book, just as we do when spending time over a box by Joseph Cornell. We wonder if the women ever met, where the ships sailed, and whether the birds’ descendants are still picking away to their hearts’ content. And why.

This is the sixteenth in a series of essays about the book in poetry, first released at this site.

Les Murray and 'The Privacy of Typewriters'

Philip Harvey

Les Murray is not a Luddite. He drives a tractor, watches television, and relies on Rolls-Royce engines to take him in jets to conferences in antique lands. From time to time he writes wistfully of outmoded technology or design, a riding implication being his hostility toward the things that have replaced them. I think here especially of his poem about library card catalogues and the cabinets that carry them. When he visited the Carmelite Library earlier this year, Les made several unequivocal statements about computers that some would construe as harsh. A recent example of this kind of Murray poem was sent to me via email, after the sender cut-and-pasted it from a poetry website in the United States. It has been published in paper print, but in a journal (‘Little Star’) that is also a weekly mobile mini-magazine with app, only lending to the irony of the poem’s own existence on your screen:

The Privacy of Typewriters

I am an old book troglodyte
one who composes on paper
and types up the result
as many times as need be.

The computer scares me,
its crashes and codes,
its links with spies and gunshot,
its text that looks pre-published

and perhaps has been.
I don’t know who is reading
what I write on a carriage
that doesn’t move or ding.

I trust the spoor of botch,
whiteouts where thought deepened,
wise freedom from Spell Check,
sheets to sell the National Library.

I fear the lore
of that baleful misstruck key
that fills a whiskered screen
with a writhe of child pornography

and the doors smashing in
and the cops handcuffing me
to a gristlier video culture
coralline in an ever colder sea. 

 

Les Murray knows that poetry is means to escaping the traps of life, of saying words to free us from the bindedness of the world. Yet in that process, poetry often succeeds just precisely in admitting that we are trapped. The poem is expression of the need for freedom, while being an admission that we are bound by dilemma. It’s a bind, wherein the poem still must be written.

Les Murray articulates the state of mind of many modern readers. He is always good at exploiting binary opposites in his writing and here he presents graphically the distinctions between print and digital, typewriter and computer console, book and e-carrier. Though tongue-in-cheek, Murray nevertheless touches on certain aspects of modern media delivery that are cause for concern and not just the paranoid complaints of conservatives: the worrying awareness that anything we do online could be being tracked and recorded; the sense of the text on a computer as just endless words without a human creator; the fear that our society is captive to a media entertainment nightmare. Murray’s belief in writing comes from a lifetime of intrinsic acceptance of the rightful connection between the poet's written (or typed) page and the printed page.   

Sources:

‘The Privacy of Typewriters’ first appeared in Little Star #5, 2014

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/gallery/2013/dec/13/privacy-typewriters/

Emily Dickinson -- There is no Frigate like a Book

Philip Harvey

There is poetry that renders absurd the wordy efforts of readers to explain and analyse its contents. In forty-one words, Emily Dickinson says things about books and reading to make interpretation of the poem look like a drag on the spirit. So allow me to indulge in a laborious labour of love by remarking on the words in her following rapid flow. We see the familiar features come into view, the capitalised words big with meaning and occasional dashes of punctuation that seem like chances to draw breath, and so we begin:

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry -
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll -
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.

The concept of the book as something that takes us places without moving an inch would have been well-known in Emily Dickinson’s time. The concept of that something being a frigate is well-nigh unique to Emily Dickinson. A frigate was a swift water vessel, a boat designed to move quickly and effectively to its destination, which is Dickinson’s thought: the book takes us places in what is an instant. Likewise, a courser is not your average horse but a fleet stallion, a horse for racing and chasing, the strongest and fastest kind of horse for battle. So to say a book is even better than a frigate and a page of poetry better than a courser is to give high praise indeed, if agility and speed are highest values.

Now if that wasn’t enough, the second half of the poem shifts gear up. Reading books and poetry is something anyone can do, including “the poorest” who cannot afford a frigate and would not be able to own a courser. They may be able to travel without any fear of costs when they read. She then introduces a third rapid transit vehicle, the chariot, which is an even more archaic and poetic mode of transport than a frigate or a courser. Furthermore, we are presented with the ironical idea that such an expensive ancient imperial car could be “frugal”. Frugal because books and poetry cost next to nothing and yet may take us where we want to go. And when we reflect on the three modes of transport, we see that they would have been, even in Dickinson’s time, book words, words more likely to be encountered in her library than heard on the streets of Amherst, Massachusetts. Yet the immediacy of the language and thought scarcely gives us time to judge the words as anachronistic. We accept their veracity in real time. We are transported into her world of thought.

The shift in the second half of the poem is not just about the practice of reading, either. Ultimate questions of meaning are subtly introduced into the context. The “Traverse”, a reference to travel and a pun on poetry itself, also holds the deeper meaning of life’s passage, our time alive in this world. That we may make the Traverse without cost, or judgement, would seem an impossibility, and yet it is in our reading that all of this can be done. Dickinson would have us believe that a book is a very cheap way of getting us where we might like to be. A book may even contain the human soul. The human soul? At the end of the poem we are brought up short. What precisely does she mean, it may bear a human soul? We seem a long way from the positive noises about reading made in the opening lines. For while we may read the second half of the poem as being an extension of the list of qualities of a book, the grammar suggests that the subject of the second half is “This Traverse” and not books as such, at all. While the chariot may be a book, it may also be read as the human body. Read in this way, we suddenly see that she could be talking (and who knows whether ironic or not) of the Bible, or perhaps of the book as the means to wisdom. The poem argues for a poverty of spirit familiar to readers of Scripture.

We are not surprised to know this poem was written by someone who did not leave her house. It is an apologia for staying put and reading, a justification for the book as of equal if not greater value than the lived experiences presented inside the book itself. For these reasons the poem must be read with a caution. The thrill of reading is lauded while the implication that that need be all there is to life, is also implicit in the poem’s worldview.

A reading of 'In the Library' by Charles Simic

Philip Harvey

For the first time in many years the Library is having a light cull of books, completely unusable books, that is. The jargon word is taken from museum practice, a deaccession. This cull has been approved by Committee and prompted mainly by space considerations, not because of their replacement with e-versions, or any other IT-induced reduction of the standing collection. In fact, you couldn’t find e-versions of most of these culled books, or even want them if you did. The titles come elsewhere in better versions, better typefaces and better everything. They are superseded textbooks, theology manuals in Latin from the 1950s that only someone in Rome could read today, reference works that due to time and advances in knowledge contain dangerous and misleading information. There are ratty copies of existentialist novels and pamphlets on obscure byways of doctrinaire Catholicism that haven’t been looked at for fifty years. Some of them put me in mind of the book identified in this poem by the Serbian-American Charles Simic, ‘In the Library’ (dedicated to Octavio Paz) though the book in the poem would remain firmly on the shelf of the Carmelite Library.

There's a book called

"A Dictionary of Angels."

No one has opened it in fifty years,

I know, because when I did,

The covers creaked, the pages

Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful

As species of flies.

The sky at dusk

Used to be thick with them.

You had to wave both arms

Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining

Through the tall windows.

The library is a quiet place.

Angels and gods huddled

In dark unopened books.

The great secret lies

On some shelf Miss Jones

Passes every day on her rounds.

She's very tall, so she keeps

Her head tipped as if listening.

The books are whispering.

I hear nothing, but she does.

Once we have forgiven Charles Simic for his stereotyping of librarians we consider some of the better implications of his poem. We have all come across books that we gaze at with puzzled wonder. What kind of book is this? Who would have read this book? Why was it written? Who would take the time to write it? The very existence of the book in hand tells us that a whole range of real people worked carefully to prepare the text, set the type, produce the item, distribute and promote it. A librarian with sensitivities will occasionally have pangs of guilt or second thoughts about culling such books. Their rarity stops us in our tracks, the purpose of their very existence is not to be denied. “A Dictionary of Angels” would stay where it was parked because angelology is a genuine if under-attended subject of theology. Books on angels have a permanent shelf life in this Library. To have records of named angels is essential in getting to know the minds of other generations, whatever our own definition of an angel. Scripture and Talmud would be missing something were angels to be deleted. Students of angels would probably take exception to the second verse of the poem, where Simic wishes to relegate angels to the past: this is not something that makes sense if they are part of the heavenly realm. He also indulges in comic or far-fetched descriptions of angels that bear really no resemblance to their appearances in Scripture and elsewhere in Judaic, Christian and Muslim tradition.  More riskily, in fact it’s heretical methinks, the poet seems to imply that angels only exist today in books. The rabbis would have had something to say about this strange idea, not to mention the shepherds watching over their flocks by night. As it is, we should leave encounters with angels to those who have something to say. The poem’s purpose, however, is not to deny angels, rather to get us to listen to the ‘whispering’ in the books, and even if we cannot hear anything, to pay attention to those who can hear the ‘whispering’. The materiality of the book itself may fall apart yet there are presences everywhere. Their own existence in time is telling us of other existences and other experiences than our own. We must cull with a discerning eye, but also with extra senses of the kind possessed by Miss Jones.