Archives for November 16, 2004

I’ve suspected for the past couple of days that I was on the mend, but one important thing was missing: a good night’s sleep. Though I slept for twelve hours on Saturday, it was the kind of shallow, disordered sleep that fails to refresh an ailing mind and body, and I hardly slept at all the next night, a dead giveaway that I hadn’t quite turned the corner.

Yesterday was different. I was double-booked–a movie in the afternoon, a play in the evening–and by the time I finally got home I was so exhausted that I threw my coat on the floor, curled up in a ball on the couch, and turned on the TV to unwind. I quickly found myself nodding off, so instead of following my usual end-of-day blogging routine, I went straight to bed to read. The book fell out of my hands after a few minutes and landed on my face, and I stayed conscious just long enough to turn out the light. There followed nearly ten hours of deep, restorative sleep, the kind in which you dream so intensely and continuously that you’re aware of it while it’s happening. At one point I actually dreamed that I was hanging out with a bass-playing friend of mine in the carport of a ranch house in Smalltown, U.S.A., telling her about how deeply I’d slept the night before. I remember verbatim one thing I said to her: “It felt as though I had an electric plug sticking in one ear.” That’s exactly how it felt–like I was recharging an empty battery.

I felt stunned when I woke up a half-hour ago, but in a good way. Gradually my wits returned to me. I remembered that I had a Wall Street Journal review to write this morning, plus a bit of blog-tending. I remembered that I’d cancelled my lunch with Maud so that I’d be fresh for tonight’s appearance at Barnes & Noble. Under other circumstances I might have gone screaming into action immediately, but today I know better. My next move will be to sit down at the kitchen table with a bagel and some fruit, clear my head of the lingering fumes of deep sleep, and permit myself to revel in the sensation of starting to feel better. The world can wait.

If you don’t have anything better to do, come see me hold forth this evening. (For details, click on the link.) I may look a little pale around the edges, but I’m pretty much myself again. That’s the one worthwhile thing about having been sick: it feels so good to get well.

UPDATE: Look at page 87 of this week’s New Yorker, in the middle of David Denby’s piece about Pedro Almod

“For me there are two salves to apply when I feel spiritually bruised–listening to a Haydn symphony or sonata (his clear common sense always penetrates) and seeking out something in Montaigne’s essays. This morning, in spite of the promise of a bright cloudless day, I woke curmudgeonly and disapproving of the world and most of its inhabitants. Montaigne pulled me up sharply.

Last week I had the pleasure of hearing the poet and Johns Hopkins English professor Allen Grossman read from his work. He is a thoroughly arresting speaker and reader, and appears at the University of Chicago this Thursday, November 18th. Highly recommended to you Chicagoans.

Here’s the poem I liked best in the reading, “Lending Library (Mpls. Xmas, 1943).”

At her Lending Library on Lake Street, Minnepaolis,

mother Beatrice rented out books to ladies.

But she read them first. That way she knew whether

there was not, or (better still) was, anything “disgraceful”

in any of the books. (There were two kinds of ladies.)

The result was mother owned the second and third volume

of many novels (e.g., Scott’s Ivanhoe), but not the first


which was gratefully taken to heart by her customers.

That’s why I know a lot about how things come out

and don’t know very much about how they begin.

But mother Beatrice (“B” for short) never read

the book called GOLDEN MEXICO (because

it was not to be loaned or sold)–until Xmas, 1943,

when a voice, out of the blue, said: “‘B,’ read that one.“


After she read it, “B” said: “How things look in the heart

of Jesus I don’t know and, frankly, don’t want to know.

But I do know that only those Jews who are stirred

by the question of their own existence can

answer the claim he makes…. Allen, my dear, who does

know? To whose sentence can we say, “Yes! That’s true“

–and add to the wonder of it belief.“


“Beatrice,” I asked her, “what do you really want to know?”

“Allen, what was the first book you ever read?”

“Beatrice, before I learned to read I could not read;

but I did know about reading, and it never happened

(thanks to you, for good or ill) that there wasn’t any book.

But I could not read in the heart of Jesus,

so the first book I read was GOLDEN MEXICO.


Now I read because light does not reveal itself

(not even on a bright wash day), but it lies hidden

in a cloud until summoned–like the heart.

It was the gold cover of the book named

GOLDEN MEXICO that drew me in at first. Then,

I added what I could add to that wonder.

No book I read was ever written until I added that.”


Outside the Lending Library, Xmas 1943, a voice–

maddening, relentless, phonographic–began to sing

“Silent Night,” and did not stop at “heavenly peace”

but started over, again, and again, and again.

It was the ladies’ triumph–a best seller,

a virgin birth, the babe who added to the

wonder of it all, belief. Three days of that


drove “B” crazy. Beatrice stood up, gathered her books,

and locked the door of her Lending Library. “Let them buy,”

she said. And her voice was heard, despite the singing,

across the gentile lake by itinerant Thoreau

where he rested on the far shore, high up the cliff

on a rock and caught the cold that killed him.

–There’s no Lending Library on Lake St., Mpls., any more.


How then ever know the way things begin,

remembering as we do nothing! None of our books

will tell, certainly not this one. But take the question

to heart, nonetheless, because I write the wonder of it all

and by the poem called LENDING LIBRARY solicit belief:

There was a road by which we came this way.

There is another by which we shall depart.