'Hold Fast, Hold Fast to These'

“I use books to help me remember my life, to give that life fuller sense and broader contour.”

Some years I remember mostly for the books I read. Take 1970. Sure, I graduated from high school, we invaded Cambodia and the Beatles broke up. What I remember most vividly is for the first time having access to a university library. My life pivoted. Sure, some books I found with the aid of the catalog but I loved trolling the shelves, going floor to floor, trusting in bookish serendipity. That is literally how I discovered Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy and Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé. I had never heard of either book or writer before finding them, read both cover to cover, and have reread them in the subsequent half-century.

 

That brings us to Ernest Hilbert’s sonnet “Cover to Cover,” which opens with a line every devoted reader will understand: “I don’t collect them. They just accumulate . . .” The sentence quoted at the top is from a prose passage by Hilbert that accompanies his poem. He writes:

 

“As I grow older, more and more volumes gather about me as well, like barnacles on the hide of an aging gray whale. I feel an intense animal affection for the books I’ve read, but I also experience their incredible weight as if it were on my very back. How many things do we actually hold in our hands, feel in so many ways for so long before relinquishing?”

 

Just the other day I discovered a poet new to me. James Reidel uses as an epigraph to Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees (2003) these lines from Lindley Williams Hubbell’s “Angelology”: “The tragic view of life / Requires a degree of health than seldom persists / After forty.” A little poking around turned up Hubbell’s “Old Books” in the February 1938 issue of Poetry:

 

“Sappho’s dark hyacinth,

Prospero with his rod,

Achilles in his tent,

Saint Francis praising God:

 

“Hold fast, hold fast to these,

The sturdy and the few

That are more lovely than your love,

More actual than you.”

 

I’m not sure about that final sentiment but I’m sympathetic to “holding fast” to the “sturdy and the few,” including Burton, who writes in The Anatomy of Melancholy:

   

“Heinsius, the keeper of the library at Leyden in Holland, was mewed up in it all year long; and that to which thy thinking should have bred a loathing, caused in him a greater liking. ‘I no sooner’ (saith he) ‘come into the Library, but I bolt the doore to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is idlenesse, the Mother of ignorance, and Melancholy her selfe, and in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine soules, I take my seat, with so lofty a spirit and sweet content that I pitty all our great ones, and rich men that know not this happinesse.’”

 

Burton was born on this day, February 8, in 1577, and died in 1640 at age sixty-two.