of class schedules, advisor meetings, and black coffee, I no longer felt the need to be gentle with my persistent dreams.
“You sound like my mother,” I said.
“Hardly. I don’t care about your getting hurt. As Catullus proved early on, wretchedness is rather good for poetry. Very few, in fact, are capable of writing well while happy in love—or indeed content with life in general. It takes a special kind of greatness to write about happiness, and, just between us, Horace himself smacks too much of a self-satisfied philistine. One might even argue that the poet’s primary function is to make the misery of the human condition more bearable by converting raw pain into the orderly music of verse . . . But no matter. I mean something else altogether.”
Nimbly he leapt off the desk and stood looking down at me.
“In the beginning was the Word, remember? Now, generally speaking, I’m not fond of those simpletons, but old John did know a thing or two. Listen. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ” His voice rose, gaining in strength, cutting through the hush of the well-lit windowless night, multiplying in echoes, until a chorus of mighty voices seemed to be booming from everywhere around me. “The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
He fell silent, and for some moments the silence continued to widen like circles upon waters closing over a crashing boulder.
“Walk with me, my dear,” he then said mildly.
I rose, obeying the unspooling of the dream, and together we made our way into the harshly illuminated stacks, straight and orderly as hospital corridors. He walked a step or two ahead, not glancing back at me, talking all the while.
“Everyone is born as a light, a naked spirit, a pure longing toknow the world. Some lights are dimmer, and some brighter; the brightest ones have the godlike capacity not only to know the world but to create it anew, time and time again. The light shines at its purest in your childhood, but as you move farther into life, it begins to fade. It doesn’t diminish, exactly, but it becomes harder to reach: every year you live through calcifies around your soul like a new ring on a tree trunk until the divine word can barely make itself heard under the buildup of earthly flesh. None of this is anything new, of course—just read some Gnostics while you go about your browsing.”
As we walked, the stacks became darker, the static humming of lamps more remote. Here and there deeper patches of twilight lay on the shelves, the book spines growing less distinct, melting into one another, escaping the alphabet’s confines.
“Unfortunately for you, my dear, a woman’s flesh tends to be . . . oh, shall we say, more insistent than a man’s—and thus her choices may be harder. For every human being, no matter how brilliant, has only a predetermined capacity for creation, and a child, you see, is no less a creation than a book, albeit of an entirely different order and often less lasting. Well, naturally, that depends on the book and on the child . . . Back in the days of Queen Elizabeth, I used to visit her namesake, one Elizabeth Heywood. You’ve never heard of her, of course, but who is to say that today you wouldn’t speak of her in the same breath with Shakespeare had she not chosen to birth, raise, and bury a child for nearly every one of his great tragedies? On the other hand, one of those children was John Donne—so one never knows how this sort of thing will turn out. There are different kinds of immortality, after all. Choosing the spirit or choosing the flesh is ever a private matter.”
We should have reached the far end of the stacks long ago, but the shelves went on stretching before us into what was now a
“You sound like my mother,” I said.
“Hardly. I don’t care about your getting hurt. As Catullus proved early on, wretchedness is rather good for poetry. Very few, in fact, are capable of writing well while happy in love—or indeed content with life in general. It takes a special kind of greatness to write about happiness, and, just between us, Horace himself smacks too much of a self-satisfied philistine. One might even argue that the poet’s primary function is to make the misery of the human condition more bearable by converting raw pain into the orderly music of verse . . . But no matter. I mean something else altogether.”
Nimbly he leapt off the desk and stood looking down at me.
“In the beginning was the Word, remember? Now, generally speaking, I’m not fond of those simpletons, but old John did know a thing or two. Listen. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ” His voice rose, gaining in strength, cutting through the hush of the well-lit windowless night, multiplying in echoes, until a chorus of mighty voices seemed to be booming from everywhere around me. “The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
He fell silent, and for some moments the silence continued to widen like circles upon waters closing over a crashing boulder.
“Walk with me, my dear,” he then said mildly.
I rose, obeying the unspooling of the dream, and together we made our way into the harshly illuminated stacks, straight and orderly as hospital corridors. He walked a step or two ahead, not glancing back at me, talking all the while.
“Everyone is born as a light, a naked spirit, a pure longing toknow the world. Some lights are dimmer, and some brighter; the brightest ones have the godlike capacity not only to know the world but to create it anew, time and time again. The light shines at its purest in your childhood, but as you move farther into life, it begins to fade. It doesn’t diminish, exactly, but it becomes harder to reach: every year you live through calcifies around your soul like a new ring on a tree trunk until the divine word can barely make itself heard under the buildup of earthly flesh. None of this is anything new, of course—just read some Gnostics while you go about your browsing.”
As we walked, the stacks became darker, the static humming of lamps more remote. Here and there deeper patches of twilight lay on the shelves, the book spines growing less distinct, melting into one another, escaping the alphabet’s confines.
“Unfortunately for you, my dear, a woman’s flesh tends to be . . . oh, shall we say, more insistent than a man’s—and thus her choices may be harder. For every human being, no matter how brilliant, has only a predetermined capacity for creation, and a child, you see, is no less a creation than a book, albeit of an entirely different order and often less lasting. Well, naturally, that depends on the book and on the child . . . Back in the days of Queen Elizabeth, I used to visit her namesake, one Elizabeth Heywood. You’ve never heard of her, of course, but who is to say that today you wouldn’t speak of her in the same breath with Shakespeare had she not chosen to birth, raise, and bury a child for nearly every one of his great tragedies? On the other hand, one of those children was John Donne—so one never knows how this sort of thing will turn out. There are different kinds of immortality, after all. Choosing the spirit or choosing the flesh is ever a private matter.”
We should have reached the far end of the stacks long ago, but the shelves went on stretching before us into what was now a
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