'You Must Obtain It By Great Labour'

Two weeks ago I asked the librarian at the circulation desk what she was reading. She held up, finger marking her place, The Light Ages: A Medieval Journey of Discovery (Allen Lane, 2020). When I asked for a capsule review she said the book held her “rapt.” Two observations: 1.) I can’t remember the last time I heard someone correctly use “rapt.” 2.)  I can’t ever remember seeing a librarian at her post intently lost in a book. We might judge the latter “ironic” but librarians are busy people, even during a pandemic, and not all librarians are inveterate readers. 

When I returned to the Fondren on Saturday I found my librarian friend had finished reading The Light Ages and put it on hold for me – further evidence that as a professional class, librarians are among the most thoughtful people in the world.

 

Across from the circulation desk I noticed a library cart with a sign printed with the two most beautiful words in the English language: “Free Books.” For once, these weren’t discards but books the library probably already had in their collection and chose not to keep. A satisfying haul:

 

Gogol’s Wife and Other Stories (New Directions, 1963), Tommaso Landolfi, which I haven’t read in fifty years

 

Collected Poems 1921-1951 (Grove Press, 1953), Edwin Muir

 

Samuel Johnson and the New Science (University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), Richard B. Schwartz

 

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Vintage Books, 2008), Oliver Sacks

 

Children in Exile: Poems 1968-1984 (Vintage Books, 1984), James Fenton, inscribed by Linda Leavell and dated “25 March 85.” Leavell earned her Ph.D. in English from Rice University in 1986. I read her Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore (2013).

 

And best of all, a sturdy hardcover edition of T.S. Eliot’s Selected Essays 1917-1932 (Harcourt, Brace, 1932). He famously writes in “Tradition and Individual Talent”: “Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”