The Bookish May

 

JUNE
Indeed I feel as I came too soon
To round your young May moon
And set the world a-gasping at my noon.
Yet some I must. So here are strawberries
Sun-flushed and sweet, as many as you please;
And here are full-blown roses by the score.
More roses, and yet more.
(May, eating strawberries, withdraws among the flower beds.)
(Christina Rossetti)

I mean, every month is bookish, so let this be the sum of the bookish month of May. It's hard to believe it's already time to wrap up the month of May. May sits in the "in between" space before summer officially kicks in, but it's certainly not spring anymore. The weather seems a bit uncertain, like it can't make up it's mind. Part of the month was lost in a blue sky daze, dry and hot. Then suddenly it took a dramatic turn to the stormy afternoons, whereby now I have to pay attention as I leave work - will I be able to run an errand or will I get caught in a deluge? 

A quick day trip down to the coast, a little visit to my hometown, and then a bit of frolicking in Sarasota, of course my main goal was to visit the bookstore in the Selby Library, a favourite spot of mine since high school. It's always good to get back there. 

I also had the privilege of attending the Chesterton Academy Gala, which was an inspiring evening celebrating the classical academy with discission on virtues missing from schools today. G.K. Chesterton wrote a lot about the Christian virtues, and is a good guide to us all as we think through living and learning (for the next generation, and for ourselves, no matter how old we are!).

And I took my niece book shopping as we had an afternoon hanging out, which was a joy. Then we came home and read. It makes me happy to browse books and see anyone excited to read. I grab those chances whenever I can.

Amongst many other books, I've been reading through this massive collection of the poems of Christina Rossetti. Every morning I read a handful of pages of her poems. I had no idea she had written so many. This book is 880 pages of her poems, and I am loving them. I've always liked Christina Rossetti, but I think now that I am visiting with her more, she's at the top of my poet favourites. She was a faithful Christian and a creative spirit. He writings play with different rhymes and musicality and it's just beautiful. Some poems are lyrical and emotional, some are a response to a reading in Scripture, some are children's poems, some like the extract above play with personifying nature (or the months of the year and it's simply delightful, and some are in praise of nature as God's creation.

Our heaven must be within ourselves,
Our home and heaven the work of faith
All thro' this race of life with shelves
Downward to death.

So faith shall build the boundary wall,
And hope shall plant the secret bower,
That both may show magnifical
With gem and flower.

Needless to say it's been a wonderfully bookish May, and I am very glad about it. June has a lot to live up to.

Embracing the Analog

 

A couple weeks ago I read a book about the masters of art and how to view them through a Christian lens (called Rembrandt is in the Wind by Russ Ramsey). It was such an enjoyable introduction to several of the masters. One of my goals is to learn more about the masters of art from history, who the artist was, why their work is important, and what it can say about truth, beauty, and goodness. So I am on a journey of art discovery. The epilogue of the book was titled "We are short on masters" and it was very compelling to me. The truth of it. We lack true masters of things today which evoke the transcendentals - truth, beauty, and goodness. Today, we are distracted by celebrities and musicians (not really masters) who do not set good examples or evoke the goodness we would want to pass down to the next generation. The culture focuses on hedonistic lifestyles and influencers who lead and show how it can be done (with seemingly no consequences). Their lives are on display, not a creative mastery of something, it's all about them, often standing for the opposite of goodness and truth.

We don't value the things of old and the gifts they give us of learning from them (discovering along the way how amazing they are in true talent and wisdom). As a virtual reality grows more and more, the analog creative skills diminish, even basic things like knowing how to write in cursive or reading an analog clock face. I've heard that these things are no longer taught to children in school, so what else are they not learning? Sure, the new certainly has its place I don't dispute it, but I write from a literary and creative perspective to defend the analog. Books, pens, paper, and time. 

High schoolers getting ready to graduate go through their school years never reading an entire book. They look it up online for summaries and plots. Old books and thinkers are not part of the curriculum. Developing young minds to read and think deeply, learning to think for themselves and defend their ideas is a thing long forgotten in the public world. We will have even fewer masters in the next generation.

My experience researching and reading in Oxford is hopeful. All the analog activities of finding books, reading books, touching original manuscripts, letters, and papers of those past authors of such brilliance. These are all valued at Oxford. These things are not arbitrary, they are in fact the greatest technology invented - books and letters, paper and pens. This is how we have shared ideas and creative avenues for centuries. They involve a writer who takes a tangible object creating something using the ideas in their minds. They propel discovery and deep thinking. These things cannot be lost, yet our culture more and more seeks to reduce and diminish their importance.

It all just gets me thinking and wondering about the simple objects of paper, pens, and books. My younger self was hugely influenced by the act of using these objects to fight boredom, be creative, generate my own ideas and stories, and share words with others. These formative years of my life held a love for these analog ways of thinking and expressing ideas. I know that I am a more thoughtful and deep thinker in my adult years partly because of this.

I was pulling books off the shelves in the Bodleian Library that were from the late 1800s up to a decade ago, finding them in the various locations was part of the tangible enjoyment. I would carry them up to the upper Radcliffe Camera to read. Then, one day I was pulling Lewis Carroll books to read and research which I opened to the front pages, as I usually would, to see the Bodleian stamp of acquisition (which is in every book) as March 20, 1930. I was sitting in the Radcliffe Camera that morning, it was March 20, 2025. Exactly 95 years from when that book was stamped into the Bodleian Library. It was a serendipitous moment that could not have happened except with hard copy books. It made me smile the rest of the day.

I say all this as I type it out on my laptop, and yet I made all these notes in my little jots notebook with a pen as it hit me one day. I always have a little notebook on me or close by me wherever I am. I love thinking on paper. There is something about gripping the pen and the movement across the page that gives you enough time (almost) between words to keep the flow of thought in sync with your pen. I have to eventually type it out, but it's not as satisfying. Do you write with pen and paper anymore? Do you read physical books?

Oxford Has Changed Me

 

How has Oxford changed me?

It's not dramatic as a movie would portray, in fact, I am probably the most boring creature ever with no drama, seeking the quiet lifestyle. Yet sometimes it is the subtle, small bits over many years that grow to become an underlying aspect that you at some point realize affects almost all areas of life. However, on this recent particular stay, I can say there are some bigger impacts that excite me to continue to ponder and study:

- Oxford has helped me navigate independent research and lifestyle. I have never been in the UK for so long at one time before. The experience has helped me enjoy the discovery of how to live in a foreign country, to study and find things in libraries, where to go for lunch, food shopping and cooking, where to spend some exploring time. It has caused me to be more friendly to random people in the daily routine and conversation.

- Oxford has helped me learn to use my time wisely. Being so focused in my research, I had to make sure I dedicated time to that, reading, and writing, whilst I also continued to keep up with my real world work and other daily things that needed to be done. Even with the longer stay, time was limited, so I was very careful with planning out all the books and manuscripts I wanted to spend time with.

- Oxford has propelled me to recognize how content I am with my (seemingly boring) life, how blessed I am. In both places, home and whilst in Oxford. I am happiest when surrounded by books and have a lot to read, study, research, and think about. Add a little bit of good food, coffee and tea, and a few artistic adventures (art museums, history museums, orchestra concerts, lectures) and I am content. It is a quiet, but thoughtful lifestyle. Enjoying the daily routine is key, and setting myself up with the things that bring such enjoyment in the pursuit of creating something good through my writing.

- Oxford helped me appreciate the cosy, familiar home I have full of books and comforts, compared to a more spare stay in Oxford. Living very minimal in the UK came easy for me, but it also made me eager to go home to my little place with my friendly shelves loaded with books. It just made me see how I can live with less. At home, of course, I have a closet full of clothes and shoes, dishes I selected, and shelves of books. I can do both - they each give me a different sense of day-to-day and appreciation, and there are benefits to each.

Lasting Potential of Poetry

 

Cafe Nero inside Blackwell's Bookshop on Broad Street, Oxford

Path along the Cherwell, Christ Church Meadow

When true appreciation is developed, does the love of poetry ever die? Or does it hold into its long-term potential to reach you differently next time you read it? It kind of comes naturally to insert a poem as a revealing or mysterious sounding collection of words, usually set in shorter phrases and lines that don't reach the end of the page. 

The poem is usually trying to communicate some deep insight into something significant to the story being told through the neighboring lines. Something is needed to develop the progress to a proper conclusion. Nothing can quite sum up an overall feeling or transition to something meaning-drenched like a poem. It comes along in my own creative spirit or from another poet. We all have a sense of poetry in us - we just tend to ignore it because it often speaks of something we don't yet understand and can't grasp. We like to let those kinds of things go, rather than explore them. Poems invite us to explore. 

The depth of poems requires more of us than simply reading a straight-forward sentence. Often, a simple sentence, or even a long sentence, cannot convey the proper emotion or idea like a few carefully selected words in a line of poetry can convey. Yes, poems can be long and meandering, too, sometimes that is how the poet works, but often there are short and concise lines like: 

If we should forget you,
foul our shame.

- Dorothy L. Sayers

I love that about poetry. It's a unique way of expression that has existed since the written form of communication has existed, and likely before all that through verbal storytelling. Sometimes poetry is exactly what we need, but we don't know it yet. 

We should endeavor to grasp what the poetry is aiming to be; one might say - though it is long since I have employed such terms with any assurance - endeavoring to grasp its entelechy. 

- T.S. Eliot

Your word of the day is entelechy. It's a philosophy term that means "the realization of potential" (noun). So T.S. Eliot is saying that poetry has potential, but it takes some effort to endeavor to grasp it. So even the great modern poet is saying that the goal or reading poetry is to grasp what it is aiming to be. We can ask ourselves that as we read. We can come back to it another time. That usually means re-reading it, reading it out loud, paying attention to lines for enjambment, and just reading it slowly. Linger over lines. Read them in multiple locations. That's what I did with this book of sixteenth century poets, I picked up the little green clothbound Everyman's Library Edition in the Oxfam shop on one of my first days in Oxford, and read some of the same lines of Sir John Davies and Sir Philip Sidney in various locations - coffee shops, my flat, down by the Cherwell river. Sometimes it takes an atmosphere to help pull you into a poem.

We seek to know the moving of each sphere,
And the strange cause of the ebbs and floods of Nile:
But of that clock within our breasts we bear,
The subtle motions we forget the while.

We that acquaint ourselves with every Zone
And pass both Tropics and behold the Poles,
When we come home are to ourselves unknown,
And unacquainted still with our own Souls.

- Sir John Davies, from "Nosce Teipsum"

Beauty All Around Oxford

 

The ornate, stunning upper Radcliffe Camera. It is hard not to get distracted by this gorgeous ceiling and the carved stonework. It really is so beautiful. I could not believe I got to be in there working and reading every day.

Outside the Radcliffe Camera, the lovely glowing orb lamps are iconic and beautiful.

Inside the Radcliffe Camera. The floating staircase is one of my favourites. At the bottom is the lower Rad Cam. At the top, the upper Rad Cam.

On my way to the library with my latte from Jericho Coffee (in my Bodleian Libraries Keep Cup) on a bright, clear morning.

In the upper Rad Cam, the little spiral staircase that brings me up to the mezzanine level of the upper Rad Cam.

Outside St. Mary's with the spires rising from the church and Brasenose College on the right, with lovely blooms that opened as I was there.

Exeter College Chapel. I went to an organ concert at lunchtime. It's one of the most stunning chapels I think.

St. Phillip's Books is a small Catholic Bookshop that stocks beautiful old books, holding many first editions of C.S. Lewis and all the Inklings, G.K. Chesterton, and other poetry, classics, theology, church history. It is a treasure trove.

Still at the library after sunset. View of the other half of the Old Bodleian as I leave for the night. I love the warm glow of the windows and looking across to the other reading rooms and seeing all the shelves of books. The Rad Cam peaking from behind.

Inside St. Mary's at lunchtime. The slant of light on the stone is stunning, the stained glass is lovely. The wooden pulpit ahead has a lot of history - it's where C.S. Lewis, John Wesley, John Henry Newman, and many other important figures preached.

A favourite, much frequented corner - Turl Street and Ship Street. Exeter College ahead. Jesus College to my right behind the wall. I often would get an iced latte from Pret at the other end of Ship Street and walk this way with my drink before heading back into the Bodleian.

The best place for flowers - The Garden shop in the Covered Market. I must visit to gaze at all the lovely array of tulips, daffodils, ranunculus, hyacinth, etc.

A walk along the Cherwell, flowing through Oxford toward Magdalen College.

The sun looks like a star (well, it is) in the sky above Magdalen College Tower.

After service in the chapel at Oriel College. The glow and the deep, velvety night sky was stunning to behold.