Leonardo's Legacy

Every evil leaves a sorrow in the memory except the supreme evil, death, and this destroys memory itself together with life.”

Leonardo Da Vinci

Do we really need another book about Leonardo Da Vinci?

Here’s a guy we cannot categorize. Was he an artist? Painter or sketcher? Was he a designer of machines, of flying contraptions that bear a passing resemblance to a helicopter or hang-glider? If so, did he ever actually build a working model of any of his designs? Was he an anatomist, and more importantly, did he break medicine’s strict code of ethical behavior by stealing bodies upon which to do postmortem experiments in hidden laboratories late at night? Is he the ultimate Renaissance man, or someone with an epic case of Attention Deficit Disorder? How do we evaluate Leonardo Da Vinci?

It is because of these questions and the endlessly fascinating person of Leonardo that we, in fact, do need another book about him. German science writer Stefan Klein does a good job in his latest book, Leonardo’s Legacy: How Da Vinci Reimagined the World (Da Capo Press, 2010) of not giving us just the warmed-over bits from urban legend and myth; he gives us the truth and cites some new information and analysis about Da Vinci’s life and work.

As translated by Shelley Frisch, Klein focuses on Da Vinci’s notebooks and sketches. He portrays him as an experimental artist, a scientific and engineering genius whose best and most forward-thinking work was done in voluminous notebooks and on what we might call today, “scratch paper.” He ingeniously groups his chapters not in a strict chronological order, but by Da Vinci’s focus. “The Gaze” develops an analysis on the beguiling and ever-popular Mona Lisa. “Water” brings us numerous sketches on how water flows and moves with notes written in mirror reversal to accompany the drawings. Da Vinci’s less explored affinity for weapons of war and his contradictory belief in peace are examined in the chapter, “War.” Of course, Klein also gives ample attention to Da Vinci’s “The Dream of Flying,” his construction of automatons in “Robots,” and his intense study of anatomy in “Under The Skin.” Da Vinci’s apocalyptic visions are saved for the chapter, “Final Questions,” before Klein delves into his title, “The Legacy” of Leonardo.

What makes Klein’s work here unique is that we get some of his research experiences along with the results of his study. We learn that the House of Windsor owns a treasure trove of Da Vinci’s manuscripts, and that Bill Gates possesses the Codex Leicester for which he paid thirty million dollars at an auction, the highest price ever paid for a book. In fact, one of the more interesting parts of Klein’s journey is his opening explanation for how the world came to possess the sketches, paintings, and notebooks we have all seen either in person or on the pages of books and the internet. Da Vinci’s student, Francesco Melzi was entrusted with a trunk filled with his teacher’s work. The luggage was so heavy, Klein tells us, that two men were required to lift it. Melzi took it back to Italy after Da Vinci’s death in France, and guarded it with his life. He began work cataloguing and organizing the disparate notebooks, sketches, random pieces of paper, and works-in-progress, but realized he would not finish in his lifetime. He employed secretaries to whom he dictated Da Vinci’s ideas, but still, time was running out. “When Leonardo’s star pupil dies of old age in 1570,” Klein writes, “his son Orazio proved indifferent to his father’s passion. He let the plunderers have at the collection.” Household help stole manuscripts and books. Pages were torn out and pasted back together out of sequence. In the end, Da Vinci’s works were spread all over the world missing vital connections and coherence. It has been left up to Da Vinci scholars to piece the puzzles back together and restore at least some of his work to its original condition.

Klein also explains some of the behind-the-scenes information beyond what Da Vinci left on his pages. He says the great man always had a notebook with him, and he believes that he actually carried one on his belt at all times. He noted everything he saw and observed, even something as simple as how water flowed down a river, swirling in eddies around rocks. When Da Vinci was dissecting human cadavers, a practice that was not necessarily legal both under civil and religious law, he made deals with hospitals to take the bodies at night to basement rooms to cut, parse apart and examine nerves, tissues, and organs. Some body parts simply would not cooperate. Da Vinci boiled human eye balls in egg whites so that the gelatinous mass would hold together to be transected for examination. Those prophetic flying devices resembling modern helicopters, hang-gliders, and even the wings of jumbo jets were not just sketches and theoretical models. Klein believes that at least some of them might have been built and tested, possibly with disastrous results. His research on Da Vinci takes him to Bedfordshire, England where on an abandoned farm, “seven men who enjoy tinkering with aviation devices are spending their days assembling historical flying machines using original parts.” Original in this case means native to the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Using Da Vinci’s sketches, they have built a giant crossbow, a weapon of war, as well as a 30 foot wide wing that world champion hang-glider Judy Leden sailed down a hill, landing on her feet in an exhilarating if brief trip.

Leonardo Da Vinci is, in the best sense of the term, a classic idea man. He is the embodiment of the Renaissance individual, a student educated in a broad range of subjects. Born illegitimate, Da Vinci went on to revolutionize art and observation, science and technology. He anticipated later discoveries often by centuries, not just a few years. He is a unique character in history, a complex human being unlike any who came before, or have come after. Da Vinci thoroughly explored his world leaving no subject unexamined. Stefan Klein brings us the man and his incredible mind without delving too deeply into the more gossipy facets of his life. He does clarify who he thinks was the model for the Mona Lisa, and touches briefly on Da Vinci’s sexuality, but he saves the majority of his pages for an examination of the artist’s ideas. He includes an annotated timeline, bibliography, end notes, gray scale drawings and renderings of paintings, and an index as well, although it would have been better if the plates were in color. Still, we get a good discussion of what Da Vinci thought about and discovered.

As sure as the voyages of Columbus and Magellan opened doors to the greater world, Leonardo Da Vinci crossed the frontiers of science, technology, and the breadth of the human mind. He brought an artist’s sensibility to a scientific study. In all this talk of boosting science and math education, we would do well to follow Leonardo Da Vinci’s example and open our eyes to the subtle connections among ideas, disciplines and life forms, while keeping our sense of awe and wonder at the precise and intricate beauty of our ever-changing world.

Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered

I have spent some time in this early summer thinking about evil. The days are gently warm, the air is pure, and the landscape lush. It seems like Satan and the nature of evil would be better suited to late summer when the heat is a furnace blast, the mountains around Los Angeles are dried to a crisp and a raging inferno seems imminent, making us believe that the end of times is near.

I checked out a number of books from the library to do some background reading on the subject. Of particular interest was John Demos’ book, The Enemy Within: 2000 Years of Witch-hunting in the Western World (2008). Demos has made a study out of the history of early America, and considers witchcraft an integral part of that history. In this book, he traces the rise of witchery in Europe and its journey to America with the Puritans. He also discusses some modern witch-hunts. The book covers quite a broad scope, a swath of human evil and devious behavior all in four sections: Europe, Early America, Salem, and Modern America. His work is exhaustively researched and rendered with a clear and vibrant eye.

Demos is at his best when presenting the stories of witchcraft and then analyzing them for their factual content and truth. He dispels the rumors and clarifies the legends. In this way he presents us with a clearer idea of what went on in those Puritan courtrooms and halls of inquiry.

In the first section, Demos deals with the prosecution of witchcraft in Europe. I found the chapter that explained the Malleus Maleficarum to be utterly fascinating. This is the book written by a Dominican priest named Heinrich Kramer, also known as Institoris. He composed the book in Latin around 1486. In it, Kramer details his investigation into charges of witchery in the German town of Ravensburg near the Swiss border. Although Demos assures us that Kramer’s was not the first book on witchcraft, it is the definitive text that religious officials used during the late 1600s, a period of intense witchcraft allegations, trials, and executions.

Of course, to anyone who has taught or read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the section on Salem, Massachusetts is gripping. Demos sketches out the history of poor, saintly Rebecca Nurse, a woman who against all evidence to the contrary was found guilty of witchcraft and executed. He also profiles Cotton Mather. In the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692-93, Mather was a controversial figure who claimed success in curing people accused of witchery, usually teenage girls whom he took into his home for intense prayer and meditation. This of course led to rumors and gossip about his methods, but he claimed he had to study the victims up close to gain an understanding of their afflictions. We discover in this section that other characters from Miller’s play also were true to life: Giles Corey was actually crushed to death in an ancient procedure known as peine fort et dure. “He was laid flat while large stones were piled on his chest.” Reverend Hale, Ann Putnam, Goody Proctor and John Proctor all had familiar roles and met similar ends in real life as they did in the play, although John was not a farmer but a tavern-keeper.

Demos dispels many of the urban legends and attempts to explain witchcraft as a phenomenon. He tells us that a theory in the 1970s that the behavior was caused by ergot fungus poisoning is not plausible when compared to the facts in the historical record. He also explains how the Enlightenment thinking of Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and Isaac Newton helped to negate some of the hysteria by advancing scientific knowledge and introducing a healthy skepticism into the culture. “The momentum for prosecution did not collapse all at once,” Demos writes. “Rather, it disintegrated piece by piece, day by day, person by person.”

Demos takes pains to tell us that the idea of a witch-hunt continues today. He discusses the anti-Freemason movement of the nineteenth century, the red scare and rise of McCarthyism in the twentieth century, and the more recent McMartin preschool case as examples. He presents and picks apart in detail the Fells Acres Day School abuse case in Malden, Massachusetts, ironically the site of early witchcraft prosecutions. The hallmarks of these modern cases are leading questions of child victims, the fantastic stories spun by those victims many of which defy logic or coherence, and rabid hysteria in the face of factual evidence. The story of witchcraft and a history of Satan usually includes a deviant sexual component, so the fact that modern witch-hunts involve sex crimes is not all that different from the witchcraft prosecutions in history.

I would highly recommend Demos’ book for those reading or teaching the Arthur Miller play. Students who have a nose for the macabre will appreciate the information that Demos presents, which is of a kind not fully explored in most history books. Demos does occasionally bog down the flow of the story with a little too much dogmatic research, but he presents a thorough and complete picture of witchcraft and its history. In the end, the witchery is far less hair-raising and more tragic in its impact on the innocent victims accused of the crime. The story makes for a clear window into the psyche of human beings detailing their ability to buy into the supernatural over the rational, and revealing the normal human predilections for jealousy, greed, and power of which our history is so rife to be the true cause of this most heinous miscarriage of justice in our history.

Illustration: Gustave Dore’s The Harpies’ Wood, from Dante’s Inferno

If Disney Designed A Villa

Unlike the Getty Center in the Sepulveda pass, the Getty Villa in Malibu requires some pre-planning for admission. Parking reservations are required, and can be made online. This was easy enough, even the day before the time we wished to visit. However, there were other issues. One must arrive at the villa while traveling northbound on Pacific Coast Highway. No turns permitted from southbound lanes. And don’t be more than ten minutes late or the reservations expire.

So there we were with our internet tickets making the turn into the driveway across from Malibu beach. I noticed two workmen in orange vests, but as they seemed to be adjusting traffic cones, I decided to continue on to the guard shack further up the hill. One of the cone guys yelled at me, so I quickly braked. “You need to stop here, buddy,” he said. I stared at him a beat while he continued to fumble with the cone. “Okay, go on up to the guard booth.” I was not sure why he required me to stop.

The museum is technically free, but parking is fifteen dollars. So my car must pay an entrance fee, but we humans go free. We parked and began the steep climb into the villa proper. Everything had been remodeled since my last visit. There were endless stairways, elevators, and paths leading up, up, up. Originally designed by the architect Stephen Garrett, the museum is a replication of a real Italian villa buried in the volcanic eruption near Vesuvius in 79 A.D. According to the video on the website, Garrett and oil baron J. Paul Getty copied the original villa’s Bay of Naples architecture when they began construction in the 1970s. Getty, however, never saw the finished product; when the museum opened, he was living in England and died there in 1976.

The 1997 renovation was a way of defining the new Getty Center in the pass while redefining the scope and purpose of the original museum in Malibu. The Getty Trust decided to make the Malibu location the home of the antiquities collection. They added a Greek-styled amphitheatre, a separate bookstore, and a new café, among other things. They set the place up to resemble an archaeological dig, hence all the stairways and scaffold-like design features. The new and improved villa seems too perfect. The frescoes and colors are too bright, resembling a Disney version of a 2000 year old Italian villa. The antiquities are installed indoors thematically, which makes sense, however, something felt like it was missing. The collection seemed sparse. The statues outside are replicas of those found at the excavation site in Italy, and what is most striking about them are their eyes. They penetrate like laser beams from the black sculptures. They are a bit creepy, even in a museum that is itself a lost world of a previous millennium.

The most off-putting aspect of my day at the villa, though, was the crowd.  People in Los Angeles and people who travel to Los Angeles, seem to have no concept of etiquette or manners.  Kids run through the grounds and exhibit halls screaming.  Parents take photographs of their kids splashing in fountains and with arms around the replica sculptures.  One group did a portrait peeking out from behind a pillar.  In a small alcove with a fountain, a mother watched while her son yanked on the water lilies blooming on the water’s surface.  Everyone, everyone, wanted to touch things.  Museums are for viewing things, people.  If your kid wants to swim in the fountains or fondle the statuary, take him to a public pool or Hollywood.  He can splash away and I am sure someone on the boulevard will let him cop a feel.

There was literally nowhere to go in some areas with people crowded around snapping pictures, and doing that most ridiculous of tourist acts:  making a video of a sculpture.  The thing does not move.  Yet several cameramen were crowded around with their iPhones and Sony Handicams filming the stone-faced Greek god.  I pity the friends of those poor shlubs when they get back to wherever they call home with their exciting movies from the big trip to L.A.  “Here’s Aphrodite standing in the gallery.  Ain’t she a looker!”

I am tired of seeing people at cultural landmarks in Los Angeles behaving badly with no idea what the hell they are doing there. “We’ll do Disneyland on Wednesday, the Hollywood Bowl on Thursday, and finish the week at the Getty.” Go, go, go! What does a howling brat in a stroller appreciate in 2000 year old statuary? And why do the parents insist on continuing to look at the art and discuss it over the banshee wailing of their child? And what a discussion: “Look, Irma, that one ain’t got an arm.” Or, “Mommy, that statue of the man is missing his wiener.” Or my favorite: “Hey run up ahead and see if the snack bar has funnel cake.” Do they think they are at the county fair? Are they waiting for the livestock auction, the awarding of the judges’ prize for best squash?

The Getty Villa is a beautiful place, the way people in Los Angeles are beautiful until you get up close. Then, in the harsh southern California sunlight, something does not seem right. Things just do not seem real. They are too perfect. The Getty Villa is a museum that has had one too many facelifts. But hey, what the hell. It’s free, only the car has to pay, and the kids can run around for a few hours, up and down the endless stairways, through the amphitheatre, and over to the snack bar for some nachos. “Whaddya mean you only sell a cheese plate? What kind of hoity-toity place is this?” There are some nice statues and grandma can throw coins in a fountain or two while junior rips up the flora and fauna. If they’re lucky, they can still make Grauman’s Chinese Theatre before sundown.

The Time, The Place, and The Book

On the very first page of Islands of Books (1951), Lawrence Clark Powell sets up his thesis: “There is a power in certain books to evoke the time and the place of their first reading, when by merely giving a glimpse of their backs they take us backwards to that time of discovery which now seems magically inevitable.” He is speaking here of staring at his book shelves and reading the spines of the books therein, and this acts as a fuse to light up his memory.


In this cloth-bound, old book, Powell celebrates reading. He talks about his bicycle trips to the library and filling his bag with books he hasn’t read, and then pedaling home to spend the evening in bed with his finds, eating chocolate and satiating his boundless appetite for the written word. Heaven. He also writes of his library writer’s room as an adult, nine feet by nine feet, lined with books, the voices that comfort and inform him on his journey through life. This is a delightful book about books and the power of reading to set fire to a life of the mind. Powell has a library named after him on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Powell takes us through his reading of Rabelais and Chevalier de Seingalt (we know him as Casanova), D.H. Lawrence, Melville and Whitman. Powell writes of books the way M.F.K. Fisher writes of food—the beautiful, the colorful, the tasty, the sensual. He revels and celebrates writers and writing by making a poetic tribute of his own, and his work makes for thrilling reading for those of us who love the smell of binding glue and cottony paper pages.

Powell is a book collector, and the impulse begins at an early age. He remembers being a “starveling book clerk” and happening upon a beautiful book special ordered from England. He sneaks the tome home and types himself a copy of the nine thousand word essay. No digital copiers in those days. It is his special privilege to buy a copy of the book, Glory of Life by Llewelyn Powys, when his ship finally comes in many years later. His favorite author is Robinson Jeffers, and he spends time in his career researching and writing about him. Because of this, Powell’s unique vision focuses on California. It is rare to find a Californian celebrating literature; we are not known for our intellectual pursuits according to the stuffy east coast denizens. We are a film and Hollywood culture mired in the doldrums of escapism and Saturday matinees. This, of course, is an insupportable stereotype. We go to the movies every day of the week, not just on Saturday afternoon! Read books? Only if they’d make a good script.

I love Powell’s use of symbolic objects as literary talismans. He writes in “Ripeness Is All” of a mobile hanging in his study. Made of twigs, bone, shells, and thread, it turns in the thermal air generated by a space heater. He compares the mobile turning in the heat to the works of Yeats, Gide, and Bunin simmering in his fevered brain. Can we all cite books that did that to us, the books we stayed up all night to read in those sweltering summers?

Comfort Found In Good Old Books from 1911 is another gem from the past, one that qualifies itself in reference to the title: this book is now itself a good, old book, one hundred years old. George Hamlin Fitch writes out of the grief and desperation of inescapable tragedy. “These short essays on the best old books in the world were inspired by the sudden death of an only son, without whom I had not thought life worth living.” It is in his “darkest hour of sorrow” that Fitch finds his only comfort “from the habit of reading.” The story is heartbreaking. Fitch and his son Harold were in the habit of meeting for dinner every Friday evening. On that particular Friday, Fitch waited for his son until six o’clock. “I left a note saying I had gone to our usual restaurant,” he writes. “That dinner I ate alone. When I returned in an hour it was to be met with the news that Harold lay cold in death at the very time I wrote the note that his eyes would never see.”

Out of tragedy comes this little book. First came the loss of Fitch’s library in the “great fire,” (San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and subsequent fire?) and then the death of his son. This book is a celebration of literature for the common man. Although he admits to reading six hours a day, Fitch writes for mere mortals who can spare only an hour. His target audience was one without university or even high school degrees. For sure, this book was written in another time for a different audience. Fitch’s tone is simple and clear with brief articles on Shakespeare, St. Augustine, Cervantes, Thomas a Kempis, Dante, Milton and others. His explication of great works is gentle and avoids the pedagogical fog of academia. He never writes down to his audience, and that makes his prose sweet natured and quaint.

The illustrations throughout the book are pasted in place in a process known as “tipped-in.” Evidently, this is consistent in every edition produced by Paul Elder and Company, San Francisco, and lends each copy a hand-crafted appeal more common in art books. Fitch compiled the book from his articles in the San Francisco Chronicle where he worked as a book reviewer for many years. He too, like Powell, is a California writer. Of special note is the annotated bibliography at the back of the book. Fitch gives the history of each work’s publication and the best edition or translation as of 1911.

While browsing in my one remaining Barnes and Noble, I noticed there is no shortage of books about books and reading. However, I like Powell’s and Fitch’s books because they come from a time when kids and adults found escape and adventure in literature and auto-didacticism flourished. In an age of increasing demands for our attention, it is restorative to find comfort in good, old books. In these authors’ works of cardboard, paper and dreams, we can find enlightenment for a new age.

Mencken and the End of the World

I could not help thinking about H.L. Mencken this past weekend while listening to the boobs and dunces on cable news proclaiming the end of the world. No doubt that is what he would have called them: boobs and dunces. Mencken was a journalist and cultural critic from Baltimore, and he never tired of finding innovative ways to denigrate the idiocy displayed by Americans. This weekend, I dipped into the middle volume of his three book autobiography, Newspaper Days 1899-1906, and came out the other side adding him to my list of influential writers I feel I know but have never met.

My first encounter with Mencken’s voice was through the character of Hornbeck, the cynical reporter in the play, Inherit The Wind, who was modeled after the distinguished newspaper man. From that moment on, I have been a dedicated reader of his work. However, this was my first foray into his autobiography. I found his writing here infinitely readable, although the times and people of which he writes are long gone. His were the days when America learned of itself solely through news print, and Mencken’s prose could both lacerate and eviscerate America’s sacred cows. Journalism also dictated the story, and Mencken tells us insider tales of rival reporters colluding on the narrative, sometimes resorting to minor fictions over absolute truths to advance the telling.

Journalism must be an objective art, as the academics tell us. A good reporter presents the facts and lets the reader decide. But any journalist worth his salt knows this is dogma and that the reality of the situation may call for a subtle influence on the part of the writer. Facts can be manipulated, especially when a writer chooses which ones to tell his readers, and how to place them in the story. Mencken was a master of this art. His work was not anonymous or interchangeable with other writers. As his reputation grew, he did not undergo as much editorial vetting nor suffer the homogenization of his prose by the rewrite desk. No sir, early 20th century newspaper readers knew Mencken’s prose when they encountered it. His writing was acerbic and sharp, and he was not afraid to call out the miscreants and hold their feet to the fire especially if they were politicians or other blowhards, all of whom were the same horny beast to Mencken.

So I did not have to think too hard to know what he would say about the end of the world charlatans of May 21, 2011. And of course, they were wrong, unless one lived in the path of those tornadoes in Missouri. For those poor souls, some of whom lost their lives and others their homes, it was the end of the world, but the world is always ending for someone somewhere, which renders those predictions meaningless.

In all the punditry and flailing on cable news, I hear no voices like Mencken’s. Newspapers have lost the war for relevancy as hard copies or first drafts of history. What news these former paper giants publish now is digitized and one might argue, superficial at best. Few aspire to say anything of depth or insight. Statements of the obvious are the rule, and we face a wall of sound hurled at us by those boobs and dunces pretending to offer analysis for the consumption by other boobs and dunces lounging in their recliners screaming their amens. We need someone like Mencken to cut through the crap. Yes, he had his prejudices and blemishes, but they were his own and not bought and paid for by corporate rapists and spin-meisters. He was smarter than that, and so were his readers. He could irritate and annoy, but his work challenged readers to consider their beliefs. These days we are beset with people who tell us what to think and then the message is repeated over and over again. We suffer from our own misidentified cleverness which in reality, is superficiality bordering on stupidity. Some of us have even crossed that border.

What I mourn for here are the days when good journalism challenged us to be better citizens, not offer us targets to blame for our own inadequacies. Writers like Mencken used to come along and report world events and help us make sense of the world where those events occurred. They were professionals, voices that came with a body of knowledge. Journalists were smart people who had a broad range of knowledge and experience. They lived their stories, and functioned as voices of reason in the wilderness of daily life. Nowadays, with all the noise and compromised pabulum disguised as reporting, it is difficult to hear the true voice over the cacophony of celebrity news readers, aka the pretty people who scream simple words devoid of substance on our televisions twenty-four hours a day. The only good thing about the end of the world is that hopefully, it will bring some much needed peace and quiet.

Joy*

The quiet, old, musty-smelling, echoes of history. The library has survived fires, earthquakes, floods. This makes it biblical, mythological, the field of Elysium for the mind life.

I have come to this library in late spring to read, to write, to consider where my life is going. All the students have left, and I am alone with my thoughts, and the thoughts of those lining the shelves. Mute testimonies from another age. I hear the voices calling me. I walk between the stacks, selecting random volumes: 1909, 1921, 1894, 1910. The spines are creased and lined, the type worn away. I open the books and find some have not been checked out since the 1950s. There they sit, waiting patiently for someone to come along and bring them to life again by reading.

The library is a four-story affair built on the side of a hill. You enter on the third floor. Spanish colonial architecture, all arches and vaulted ceilings. This is the reading area, now filled with computer stations. Above is a sort of balcony fourth floor—open-air, lofty, overlooking the main floor. I take the elevator down. The second floor houses the audio-visual department and more computers as well as a warren of offices and work rooms. The first floor is my destination. The stacks. Far side, a long narrow room of tables, shelves of art books, and windows with a view of the Pacific Ocean only a few miles away. This is where I belong, my home. Outside the window, a twisted pine stands sentinel. I am the monk at my wooden table dedicated to a life of study and reflection, staring out the window at the world. Here I can think, reconsider, revise. Here, there are no cell phones or computers. Here, paper and leather binding rule the world. I am Charlemagne in my purple robe of thought. I am lost and I am found. I am a paradox. I contain multitudes.

I have been told over these last months that we must imagine the lives we want in order to create them. Somewhere, all our dreams exist. In the minutiae of the universe, every possibility occurs, fracturing space like cracked glass, radiating out in every direction. This is the life I want: solitary, monastic, a place for the written word, but not the spoken one. I long to take a vow of silence. I will remain on this perch at the library table until all my thoughts return, until everything makes sense again.

From here, I can see forever, on and on, until the earth curves and the sky ends in the sea. I can sense the rising columns of warm air, the coming of summer, all of history both forward and back. I can speak with Magellan and argue with Galileo. I can climb the steps of Montmartre, and dip into the Aegean Sea with Odysseus. I can laugh with Whitman and cry with Mary Magdalene. My soul splits like an atom with the force of megatons.

This is the house of questions with a million answers.

I will stay here forever, even after I am gone. This is the paradox—I am alive in the midst of dead trees that record millennia of human thought. I am joy in melancholia, summer in winter, dreaming when awake. The paradox is inexplicable, the angel at my table. This is the crystal moment in the plasma-pause of time. In the library on the hill, light is primordial, elemental, eternal. Ideas echo and double back, swirl and gather in the afternoon shadows. I listen to the whispers. I feel the acceleration of time, past, present, future. Every thought that ever existed, lives here and now. I am poised on the precipice of the universe, listening.


*Check out Vicky the Archivist's discussion of my post and the library here. Vicky writes a wonderful blog about the life of an archivist in this digital age.  For those of us in love with books, printed matter and photography, her work makes for interesting reading.

Mark The Grave

Remember when we lamented the demise of the independent bookstore? We swore the chains were conspiring to push them under. Barnes and Noble and Borders were the evil empires, crushing the poor mom and pop stores into oblivion.

Now we all gather to mourn the passing of the chains. In my neighborhood, almost all the Barnes and Nobles and the Borders locations are gone. I went from having the independents like Dutton’s—four locations in Los Angeles—and the chains—one Borders and two Barnes and Nobles within a five mile radius—to just one Barnes and Noble. Bookstores in Los Angeles are disappearing faster than spring flowers in Death Valley.

To add insult to injury, I drove by the most recently closed Borders location only to see it had already been etched with graffiti. Worse, one tagger’s pen name is “Thinnk.” That’s right: with two letter Ns.

Inside the shuttered bookstore with the shelves standing empty and forlorn, all the lights were on. In broad daylight!! I guess for the ghost readers who haunt the place?

Sure Amazon will deliver your books to your doorstep, but I am a dedicated book browser. I enjoyed wandering through the shop, discovering some gem on a shelf. Amazon works well if you know what you are looking for, but I love surprises. Now it seems the best used bookstore in town is Goodwill. Sad days, indeed.