Ex Libris Epitaphs
Plus Emily Dickinson's Chariot, Mr. Faulkner's furtive widow and Leo Tolstoy's head...
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.
~ Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems
No flâneuring this week, dear reader. We’ve been holed up, Dickinson style, in our Buenos Aires pied-à-terre, struck down with a case of the sniffles.
From our fourth-floor bedroom we reconstruct the scenes on the street below, the sounds and smells our morning guides... at Boûlan, the little French pâtisserie serving hot coffee and croissants, we imagine a half dozen school moms in queue, chatting, gossiping... at Nina’s florería, down on the corner, the portly proprietor is arranging her displays and haggling with the delivery man... opposite, the Ukrainian woman from the frame shop is pulling up the shutters; her daughter works with her now... and over it all, the ubiquitous honking of wildly gesticulating taxi drivers, forever hustling and bustling, hither and thither, rushing off to the next intersection...
It is during times like these we are grateful for our Frigates, our Coursers, our frugal Chariots. Books – lining the walls, filling the shelves, piled high on the dining table, the nightstand, the writing desks – afford us an escape, a thousand and one portals to the outside world, past, present and future.
We think of Miss Dickinson, shut in her room, conjuring Wild nights - Wild nights all on her own... or Mr. Faulkner, fiercely private in his Rowan Oak mansion, conceiving the furtive widow in his classic 1930 short story, A Rose for Emily... or M. Proust, fourteen long years in his bed, asthma his primary warden, penning his endless past...
During the pandemic, we imagined an apocalyptic scene... What if we could never leave home again? What if we could never stroll these broad boulevards, flit from café to café, surveying the scene so casually, never meander the city’s verdant parques, storing away little snapshots, discrete images, later to thread together, on these or other pages?
Scouring the second hand book stores, we ordered everything we could get our hands on, like a madman hoarding cans or ammo before the end of days. Then, every morning, in nightgown and slippers, we would sneak downstairs to check the buzón, thrilled at the prospect of what new, old treasure might await us, what imperishable, life-sustaining morsel...
Stranger Friends
The great George Steiner called books “the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.” Said Cicero, “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” (Does a window box count?) Umberto Eco was pithier still. “We live for books,” said he.
So we wander through our library and, to our unceasing delight, discover not only authors famous and forgotten, but generations of ardent book lovers too, who tended their own literary gardens over the years, their messages and marginalia strewn like clues through the growing archives. But who are these people, these visitors (ghosts?) in our house?
Like Federico Schweizer, neatly printed on the inside cover of Schopenhauer’s The Wisdom of Life...
Or Vivian Tabbush... stamped, top right, in the front matter of Balzac’s Droll Stories...
Or James G. Grimes, M.D.... whose impressive ex libris emblazons the inside cover of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, an old Random House edition (before the title was retranslated to In Search of Lost Time.)
Who were these people, these stranger friends from bygone eras, who chose so carefully these books, which they pass along to us across time and space?
Did Mr. Schweizer find in Schopenhauer’s practical prose the wisdom he was seeking?
Was Mrs. Tabbush impressed by the great French realist as he followed, caffeine-steeped, in the footsteps of Boccaccio and Rabelais, infusing the Middle Ages with a touch of the indecorous?
And what of our busy physician, Dr. Grimes? Where did he find the time, between practice and patients, to pursue Proust into the deep and bewildering Bergsonian past?
Like so many epitaphs, their humble inscriptions call out to us through the mist, inviting us to read on, one page at a time, until the day comes to add our own name to the list.
Until next week...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
Buenos Aires ~ October 19, 2022
P.S. Speaking of postcards from the past, we also came across this old Russian stamp, bearing the great Leo Tolstoy, courtesy of Dear Wife’s grandmother, Laila Nilsen Ames. Any budding philatelist sleuths among our readers?
