Airline travel is not designed for this sort of bibliophilic extravagance.
In the end, aside from a hefty assortment of French language resources, all I brought was my Chinese-English Bible, my beginner's Mandarin phrasebook, and 4 thin paperback volumes of poetry: Kipling, Wilde, WWI British Poets, and a concise anthology of best-loved poems- books I've been thumbing through tirelessly since high school. (Tragically, Christina Rossetti, Browning, John Donne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins didn't quite make the cut.)
My idea was that 1. Unlike a novel, poems can be read over and over again. They're efficient and accessible. 2. There's no way I can get by re-reading these already half-memorized volumes of poetry for five months. Eventually I'll be starved into reading almost exclusively in French out of sheer desperation. (this has already begun)
But one other force was at work. The little huddle of English books on my shelf are filled with lines that have shaped and defined me as a person. Between their increasingly limp covers, I saw my own emotions- loves, hatreds, fears, joys, ideals spring to life, hardened into words I could return to again and again. When I encountered them for the first time, it was an almost physical shock; raw feeling taking form and clothing itself in language. And I knew in each of those moments that I wanted more than anything to tame words like that, to whirl them, and woo them, and capture them on the page so that reality became doubly real, preserved in neat lines of magical printed symbols. Because in the poetry I love most, I didn't find something new. I found something I'd known all along, and never known how to express. It was the familiar, the recognizable, that haunted me, called to me. Sometimes, things leapt out at me which I didn't fully understand until years later. Kipling's 'The Vampire' was like that. I memorized stanzas of it, and then, several years afterward, in a quiet flash of clarity, it slipped into place as neatly as the missing piece of a puzzle.
"And it isn't the shame and it isn't the blame
That stings like a white hot brand,
It's coming to know that she never knew why
(Seeing at last she could never know why)
And never could understand."
Or Alice Meynell's 'Summer in England, 1914'
"And while this rose made round her cup,
The armies died convulsed; and when
This chaste young silver sun went up
Softly, a thousand shattered men,
One wet corruption, heaped the plain,
After a league-long throb of pain."
I always remember Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, my high school sweethearts as well. There was something in the grim, heart-haunted music of a forgotten war that shouted to the fiercely earnest and hopelessly confused sixteen year old girl I was.
"But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning."
"By choice they made themselves immune
To pity and whatever mourns in man
Before the last sea and the hapless stars;
Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;
Whatever shares
The eternal reciprocity of tears."
Wilde's 'Ballad of Reading Gaol' is full of new things at every reading, quick flashing turns of beauty and rage and bitterness.
"Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word...."
"I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every wandering cloud that trailed
Its ravelled fleeces by."
I've always imagined that all over the world there are things which in some way uniquely belong to certain people. For one man it might be the clean lines of a little cathedral in Germany, for another, a certain row of willow trees leaning over a blue-sky lake on a daffodil-fluttering March day. And you might wait five years, or forty, or a lifetime to meet the things that are yours- the climax of a little-known symphony, a line in a book that springs at you like a crouching tiger, and never know what you're waiting for. But sooner or later, sight by sight, sound by sound, word and smell and feeling, they come to you one at a time. And when they come, you know, you recognize them and catch your breath, and halt for a moment of flame and desire and serenity that crystallizes into joy. It is the familiarity that is strange- blood of your blood and flesh of your flesh crying to you from the unknown, like seeing your face in a mirror for the first time, like seeing the prints of your own feet etched deeply into a path you've never walked before.
Sometimes, they are only a glimpse, then gone. At others, they remain to be cherished and pondered. For this reason I carted this thin stack of English poetry to the other side of the world with me, and, perhaps, at core, it is the same thing that drew me here in the first place, the same thing that drove me to study French so relentlessly and illogically for almost three years.
Coming from the New World to the Old World, which is new to me, I am in a constant state of discovery. Because history is the most eternally new thing in the world, never ceasing to grow, never losing its freshness. I'm here, in part, to learn what I already know, to remember what I've never forgotten. Adventure begins like this. Education begins with adventure.
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