Pages and Coffee - Bookish Notes

 

Reason has moons, but moons not hers
Lie mirror'd on her sea,
Confounding her astronomers,
But O! Delighting me.

- Evelyn Underhill

Have you been reading anything wonderful lately?

I am working my way through my lovely stack of books I purchased whilst in Oxford. It's one of the best ways to fondly recall a trip -  through books. Where I bought that book and why it caught my eye. The place I bought it. The day and all the goodness that was had. The memories of England bookshops. It is a great, pure delight to me.

In an Oxfam bookshop I picked up a distinctly blue Oxford University Press book on Wordsworth, the poet, printed in 1950. A short intro on his life and how he developed his well known masterpieces, such as "Lyrical Ballads", "Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey",  and "The Prelude". I usually pay more attention to his friend and fellow poet (with whom he wrote "Lyrical Ballads") Samuel Taylor Coleridge, so it was lovely to focus on William Wordsworth to gain more insights and analysis on his poems. He was, along with Coleridge, the genesis of the Romantic Poetry movement that gained momentum after them. They looked to nature when society was suddenly shifting dramatically to the reductionist thinking of scientism.  

I am becoming such an admirer of Evelyn Underhill. I have one book and keep coming across her in various ways, through other writers, but I don't often see her books around. Thankfully, in an Oxfam charity shop I did find this lovely slim volume of her collected papers printed in 1946. Mostly lectures from the 1920s-1930s. Evelyn was a poet, writer, and spiritual leader. In 1922 she was the first woman lecturer to have her name on the Oxford University list. She answers questions about what is mysticism, and what it isn't. She gives lectures about prayer, worship, contemplation, and to teachers, encouraging them in their roles as leading the next generation through life's challenges. 

To do great things for souls, you must become the agent and channel of a more than human love.

The inspiration of the painter, the musician and the poet, and often that of the scientist and explorer too, contains a genuine element of worship. All that is best in these great human activities is not done for our own sake; it points right away from us, to something we humbly seek and half-ignorantly adore. It is offered at the shrine of a beauty or a wisdom that lies beyond the world. 

- Evelyn Underhill

Mixed into every few books, one must solve a murder. It's just a requirement to solve a puzzle by gathering the clues before one can move forward into another book. This time, it was The Murder in the Bookshop by Carolyn Wells. I picked this up in Waterstones, a large chain bookshop in the UK that is always good for browsing, a charming vintage looking mystery from the 1920s. Oh these golden age mysteries, they are just so fun. All the old fashioned methods of solving a murder are unknown to us today with all our technology, but the deductions and clues collected take time and a lot of looking for the right thing to lead one to the murderer. As I read these older mysteries I think about how quickly a murder like this one that takes place in the bookshop would have been solved today with camera footage. Kind of wipes out the ability to write a modern murder mystery in this similar capacity. I love going back to these old methods of deduction and thinking about motives and clues, reasons for behavior that is often puzzling, and figuring out in the end how it was all done.

I am also reading through a (not purchased in Oxford) chunky book Augustine In His Own Words, a collection of Saint Augustine's great writings from many of his books - not the lightest of reading, certainly philosophical and historical; I am learning so much and loving it. I was only really familiar with his Confessions, but he wrote so much more than that (he was a bishop as well as a great orator and had all his sermons in his head) and it was time for me to dive in.