On the deck, before the dawn chorus, I rise to write and to imagine all the knowledge stacked and shelved in the minds of scholars now dead—the facts I’d give my life to know, the facts they gave their lifetimes to acquire. The men and women who lived as if books mattered, as if Tolstoy, Goethe, Balzac, the others, gave a special solace not found elsewhere, as if a multitude might go comfortless of nouns without the “thumb” and “fist” and “pastry” of their mother tongue, without the husk of a book from their hazy grand uncles’ libraries.
The uncles have vanished now, their language gone, gone the desire for dialect, patois, the je n’sais quoi that set the aunts at their escritoire in the morning to write their thousand letters, most all of them lost because we who came after didn’t understand the difference between culture and wisdom, between be and do. Or perhaps we lost our belief in the power of language except as twisted to the uses of propaganda. Even as I live past the post-war flush when the nation forgot how to read in the radium light from the blown up desert, forgot how to write because phones talked to us and answered us and TVs took our collective eyesight, live into the time when trunks of books went only to the junk dealers and thrift shop still the people I love best are writers are artists and scientists in love with language and still I rise to the world and to write before the woods stir. I don’t need to believe. I read and write and I only sometimes wonder why.
The uncles have vanished now, their language gone, gone the desire for dialect, patois, the je n’sais quoi that set the aunts at their escritoire in the morning to write their thousand letters, most all of them lost because we who came after didn’t understand the difference between culture and wisdom, between be and do. Or perhaps we lost our belief in the power of language except as twisted to the uses of propaganda. Even as I live past the post-war flush when the nation forgot how to read in the radium light from the blown up desert, forgot how to write because phones talked to us and answered us and TVs took our collective eyesight, live into the time when trunks of books went only to the junk dealers and thrift shop still the people I love best are writers are artists and scientists in love with language and still I rise to the world and to write before the woods stir. I don’t need to believe. I read and write and I only sometimes wonder why.
