The Book Binder's Daughter

The last time I saw him was in 1996. We were students in the Classics department at SUNY Buffalo and our year-long, incandescent love affair was ending; I was staying in Buffalo and he was going off to Rome or Canada—geography and decisions of youth were separating us—I was 22 and he was 28. A tearful, bittersweet goodbye, but a promise to be friends and stay in touch.

I distinctly remember when we connected as first year grad students. We were sitting in the seminar room waiting for our Odyssey class to begin; we were both overwhelmed and frustrated being in a Ph.D. program for Classics and in the harsh, unforgiving winter of Buffalo. We instantly became a source of support for each other and our senses of humor, our goofiness, and just being around him sustained me and made me so much happier throughout that year.

In addition to his sense of humor, his blue eyes—the way that they looked at me so intensely—, his strong hands and the way he called me his “honeybee” just melted me. My best memories of us are mundane yet blissfully happy ones: shopping on Elm Street, drinking the lattes he made me that would knock my socks off, watching our favorite TV shows, cramming for class, laughing too loud in his library carrel and drifting off to sleep in his arms. We spent so much time together that year and I fell madly in love with him, my first real, true, adult love.

We did stay in touch for a little while, but our lives took us in different directions. He was in Rome, had started a new life, was with someone else. I remember lots of tears and heartache over that summer and my mother consoling me but also being firm—“You need to move on.”

And so I did. A nearly twenty-year marriage, a beautiful daughter, a teaching career, a wonderful home. In 2010 he popped up on Facebook and I could see that he had done well for himself, too. I sent him a private message which he never got, but I was glad to see from his profile that he had a wife, two beautiful children, a successful career, a happy home.

In February of this year I had a very intense, vivid dream about him. We were together again and I felt that pure happiness I had experienced with him all those years ago. But why? Why, all of a sudden, did I dream about him? I hadn’t thought about him in a while. And about a week later I saw a post he made  on Facebook which was very rare for him. He never used his account but just so happened to be moving and was using Marketplace to sell some things. What a coincidence since I had just had that dream. The synchronicity was just too great—I had to message him.

As we reconnected and talked for hours it was apparent that the last few years had been painful and trying for both of us. I was a widow, had raised my daughter on my own, started a new career. He had gone through a divorce and a health scare. When he called me his Honeybee all those wonderful memories and all that love came flooding back. I had to work up the courage to ask him if he was dating at all and his response was, “I haven’t had any interest in dating, until I reconnected with you…”

On April 11th I got on a plane to Edmonton where he lives now and for the first time in twenty-nine years I was in his arms again. The scene at the airport felt surreal, like we were in a clip from a Hallmark movie. We spent a magical five days together, and then he followed me back to New England where we spent Easter at my home.

Those intense blue eyes, those strong hands, and that handsome smile are all the same. His sense of humor, his gentleness, and his kindness are still there too. His resilience, his wisdom and his deep love for me are all new.

Alice Walker’s poem “Even So” resonates:

Love, if it is love, never goes away.
It is embedded in us,
like seams of gold in the Earth,
waiting for light,
waiting to be struck.

I’ve been reading enormous books again—the doorstopper variety that Henry James famously labelled as “loose, baggy monsters.” It’s not that I had developed an aversion to large books or to reading in general but I seem to have lost interest in longer tomes in the past 3 years. I remember reading Neil Peart’s book Ghost Rider many years ago in which he recounts the tragedies of suddenly losing his teenage daughter and wife in the span of a year. A talented drummer, songwriter and author, he isn’t sure if he will ever do any of the things he loved in his previous life again; he has to figure out how music and writing fit into his “new” life.

I always thought it was strange that someone who was a talented drummer could suddenly put aside the skill and joy that was so intricately a part of who he was. But, three years ago, having suffered my own, unexpected loss, I, unfortunately, understood all-too-well what Peart was going through. How could I read or write or do anything I formerly enjoyed with such a deep pain in my heart and soul? What did anything matter when my life had been completely shattered? Peart takes his “little baby soul” on a long journey of healing and comes to terms with his new reality, and, luckily for us, he comes back to drumming and music and writing in a reinvigorated way.

In January I had the sudden urge to read enormous books again—the kind that I can get lost in, that completely engross me. In my “previous” life I couldn’t get enough of authors like Proust and Tolstoy and Musil. Similar to what Peart experienced on his healing journey, I have discovered that there are interests like reading and writing that have come back around in my life in refreshing and stimulating new ways. But there are also some things that have gone by the wayside that I will never do again (more on that in a different post). When I asked on Twitter for recommendations of large, absorbing books, The Doll by Boleslaw Prus was a suggestion I immediately jumped at because of who recommended it and who had published it. A classic of 19th century Polish literature, The Doll has been reissued by NYRB classics with a translation by David Welsh that is revised by Dariusz Tolczyk and Anna Zaranko.

Prus depicts Polish life in Warsaw in the late 19th century, the scope of which is reminiscent of a Dickens novel that encompasses all classes of society. Our hero, Stanislaw Wokulski, is a merchant who, for the love of an upper-class woman, has taken risks to enhance his fortune and bestow his generosity on the poor souls he meets in the slums of Warsaw. He has a midlife crisis of sorts and wants to be a better man and leave his mark on the world; he convinces himself that the best way to do this is to win Izabela’s hand in marriage.

Wokulski is a generous, kind-hearted, hard-working, heroic man who is benevolent even to the Jews who are terribly persecuted in Warsaw like they are around Europe. Part of the narrative is told from the perspective of his store clerk and friend, an old man named Rzecki, who deeply admires and reveres his employer. It doesn’t even occur to Rzecki at first that his dear friend could have fallen in love with an insipid, highborn woman like Izabela. She won’t consider Wokulski as a potential husband simply because he is a merchant and beneath her, but she does continue to lead Wokulski on and use him to her financial benefit. Rzecki is hoping that Wokulski will fall in love with a woman named Helena, a humble and kind-hearted widow who is much more deserving of a man like his boss than the shallow and cruel Izabela. (Needless to say, I, too, was rooting for the widow.)

In one of his moments of lucidity and reason, Wokulski wonders if Izabela is capable of loving anyone:

“There are women with moral defects who are incapable of loving anyone or anything except their own fleeting caprices, just as there are such men; it is a defect like deafness, blindness or paralysis, only less obvious.”

Even weeks after I’ve read the book I keep thinking about these lines. I felt like I had a personal epiphany of sorts; it had never really dawned on me that there are those who are simply incapable of love of any kind —romantic, platonic, filial or otherwise. Whether it be from upbringing—as is likely the case with Izabela—or negative past experiences or genetics or a variety of other reasons, there are those who cannot look past themselves and extend love to another. I have a deeper understanding of what the Ancient Greeks were trying to tell us through the myth of Narcissus. Reading Prus also called to mind this stunning poem by Louise Gluck entitled “Seated Figure” which has a similar message about the inability to love:

It was as though you were a man in a wheelchair,

your legs cut off at the knee.

But I wanted you to walk. I wanted us to walk like lovers,

arm in arm in the summer evening,

and believed so powerfully in that projection

that I had to speak, I had to press you to stand.

Why did you let me speak?

I took your silence as I took the anguish in your face,

as part of the effort to move—

It seemed I stood forever,

holding out my hand.

And all that time, you could no more heal yourself 

than I could accept what I saw.

Wokulski’s downfall is due to the fact that he cannot or will not accept the reality of what he knows to be a selfish woman who is lacking the ability to love not just him but anyone.

I’m not sure what brought me back to reading this type of literature but I suspect it has something to do with what Paul Valery says on the subject in Cahiers 2: “Literature! You are nothing if you fail to give me a sense of discovery.” It’s that sense of discovery I was after and even in writing this I have a feeling of euphoria which feels so right in my “new” life.

Up next will be my thoughts on Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Dickens’s Bleak House. My voracious appetite for epic novels has, indeed, come back with a vengeance. What big books do you like to read?

I was first intrigued by Robert Bly’s poetry when I came across a description of his life and work in Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets. While browsing a used bookshop in New England a few weekends ago, I bought a slim, hardcover volume of his poetry entitled, “Loving a Woman in Two Worlds.” My copy is not only in fine condition, but it is signed and inscribed by the author with a little drawing.

Love poems can so quickly become oversaturated with sappy cliches about lovesickness and heartache. But Bly uses images of mature, sensual, deep, long-lasting love as his inspiration for his collection. His poems are brief and are usually set in nature:

At Midocean

All day I loved you in a fever, holding on to the tail
               of the horse.
I overflowed whenever I reached out to touch you.
My hand moved over your body, covered
with its dress,
burning, rough, an animals foot or hand moving 
              over leaves.
The rainstorm retires, clouds open, sunlight
sliding over ocean water a thousand miles from land. 

The sense of contentment and sheer, unadulterated joy comes through in his poem “A Third Body.” A relationship is more than two people, it is how they are together—their history, their jokes, their private moments—that Bly personifies as a third body in this poem.

A Third Body

A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do 
                not long
at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born
in any other nation, or time, or place.
They are content to  be where they are, talking or
             not-talking.
Their breaths together feed someone whom we do
            not know.
The man sees the way his fingers move;
he sees her hands close around a book she hands 
              to him.
They obey a third body that they share in common.
They have made a promise to love that body.
Age many come, parting may come, death will come.
A man and a woman sit near each other;
as they breathe they feed someone we do not know, 
someone we know of, whom we have never seen.

The final one I will share from this collection describes love as a secret. Not a secret as in an illicit love affair, but instead a love that is quiet and calm and very private which makes it stronger and “unworried.”

Secrets

I walk below the over-bending birches,
birches that arch together in the air.
It is an omen of an open door,
a fear no longer found in the wind.
Are there unions only the earth sees?
The birches live where no on else comes
deep in the unworried woods...
These sandgrains looked at by deer bellies.

In addition to being a talented poet, Bly was also an essayist and translator. I intend to explore more of his work in the coming year.