Take Heart

The last days, the light murky, the old sun and its ancient light so very fragile. And of course, taking a step aside, you realize that it's only us who have distanced ourselves; the sun burns on, brilliantly constant, absolute almost, as near to a perfect circle that could actually exist...

Much of the spiky grass is frozen in its dream and there's fine drizzle of steel mist. Reading Yellow Birds by the gas fire since there's nothing else to do. You stand up to read by the window since there's been no electricity since morning and so the day can never get started.

What powers the heart have and what the mind. Of course, it is hard to have any sympathy..the politics keeps on getting in the way. But, gradually, that begins to wear off and it's always the same: universal sadness.

There are some nice lines in it; it sounds real-and that's all that counts...more or less. When he comes home, and that isn't real either. It's like we're all ghosts, all dead already.

I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt I was looking at a lie. But I didn't mind. The world makes liars of us all.

I like the plainspoken words, the unselfconscious short sentences (unlike Salter) that give it the right pace. Not some outreaching hand, groping for lyricism. I think a diary would have worked even better...cut out a lot of the artifice. But, no, not always...

People have always done this, I thought. They looked for a curved road around the plain truth of it: an undetermined future, no destiny, no veined hand reaching into our lives, just what happened and our watching it.  

~~~

Already your mind turns to Dear Life. Read one short story ('Runaway') and, yes, there's something here. Meanwhile, must lumber on with Great Jones, and perhaps even finish off Cheever's Journals. No pressure.

~~~

In the biting cold, close to 'Mian Mir' bridge, the books were literally thrown all over the wooden, rickety stalls, under the open skies. A sudden cold front had moved in one hour earlier, bringing with it clumps of dense fog. No-one around. A few hijabis. The religious looking for a kind of confirmation. A brash woman with lipstick all over her face, screeches: I'm allergic to books. A few kids warming their hands next to an open coal fire. The books, one of the most random you've come across. Lots of books on retirement; The Jews of Boston; some of the most obscure books one could imagine: Bok, capital tax, gardening, four copies of Bourdieu, books on gays, morality for Jewish Girls...and most of the hardbound books had a 1970's feel to them: brown covers, yellowing pages, probably never destined to see daylight again, just lumped from one cardboard box to the next like some great international traveler:  today Lahore, tomorrow Singapore...

Out of the blue you picked up Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. 1957 and all that. But also, quite remarkably, the book was from Leyton library!So close to home. How on earth did it make it here, to this godforsaken corner of the universe? I felt like I was meeting an old friend. More incredibly, the last date of issue was 2010. This was a book that had been issued five times and so was no dud. And the question therefore arises: how did it get from there to here in two years? One imagine there's a less dramatic descent...you start off on the South Bank in the second-hand market; after a few months someone picks you up and discards you...500-odd pages after all! It makes its way down to the local second-hand store and then it's on the international circuit, makes it to the D-list of books that are hoarded together under the category of 'weight'.

But how did it all begin? Some odd soul must have stolen the book, furtively looked around and slipped it into his bag when no-one was looking, loping out of the library with a cool urgency...maybe he even brushed past me or sat next to me on the bus.

So, here it is, and I now feel I'm under an oath to get it back home. More importantly, to gather myself, my things, take heart, and get myself back home...