Part 1, in which I recollect how I got to this point and fixate upon my prize copy of the Rubaiyat
The first week of August, I quit my job in a faraway state, drank sparkling, white, and red wine at my going away party, pocketed the going-away cards, and set off for the northeast. Upon arrival, embarrassed by the giant moving truck parked in front of my humble new dwelling, I immediately threw away copious amounts of belongings. This included, with a surprising lack of self-pity, box upon box of my books. So disgusted I was with my overflowing material baggage, I did not even bother to sell or donate the books, but instead chucked them into a long, tall dumpster. I did not even say a prayer or good-bye.
Returning to the calm of a clean, freshly-painted apartment, I settled into my condensed book collection and without much conscious design arranged them on what remained of my bookshelves. They, too, had not been spared the sunny bin. Shortly thereafter, I snapped a few photos of this handiwork, a casual visual documentation that has now erupted into a series of essays on the matter.
Admittedly, no bibliophile can work in true mindlessness when arranging a bookshelf with his own books. A certain degree of necessity plays a role; I only naturally put together books of a common series, keep some especially old volumes away from sunlight, and move delicate hardbacks to high shelves away from the clutches of a book-greedy toddler. The biblio-archaeologist might also find some thin thread of my past arrangements residing in this current state, but otherwise I have made no efforts towards order.
The recent and significant reduction has dashed the traditional categories in which I had my collection set up: cinema and filmmaking, poetry, language primers and linguistic texts, history, anthropology, books in German and French, novels, drama. Originally, I possessed an entire bookshelf just of philosophic readers, critical analysis, and mainstream reviews of movies. The self-contained library was seeded by a gift from my grandmother—supposed to be her last opportunity to give her grandchildren any significant amount of money. If I remember, the check was for $1000, and I believe that I spent $300-400 on books about movies. That was ten years ago, and my grandmother has just celebrated her 100th birthday—the books, on the other hand, until recently many still unopened or at least not by me, are now gone.
All of this is a rather insignificant prelude to what was to me an astounding discovery. On the top shelf of my oldest bookshelves, and without any intended design, I had slid seven books beside one another, from each of which I have something memorized.
I find this a remarkable coincidence. Standing on the left, and the tallest and grandest of the seven, is a hardcover, 1947 book club edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Every page of the book has a border, extending an inch or more from the edges towards the center, on which is depicted animals and things of nature in pale green ink, flowing and repeating like grotesque paisleys or a woven Persian rug. Many pages feature soft paintings, perhaps watercolors, facing the text.
I always pick up unique copies of Omar Khayyam when I pass them. This particular one descends from a Friends of Fondren Library Book Sale, one of those frenzies of pulp opiates in which treasures like this sell for one or two dollars. I once found a handful of Penguin classic editions, each for some trivial price at Half-Price Books in Houston, and bought every one of them. I have just one left—my reading copy—while the rest have been given to friends and family. A habit I learned from my professor Douglas.
Douglas assures me that Edward FitzGerald’s translation is more beautiful than the Persian, a statement that I cannot back up and which was strange coming from a man who insists on reading everything in the original. But a translation is a separate entity, not an alternate version. The King James Bible makes the whole thing mellifluous, making you think that you might even enjoy reading the whole thing from Genesis to Revelation. But the Greek New Testament reveals something about the story that no translation can. Both worthy books, but different.
One day Douglas was, for no apparent reason, carrying around the Persian version of Omar Khayyam, swept across and through with Arabic letters that can easily hide thousand-year-old poetry from an American boy. I find it rude to ask someone to speak in a strange language, but I could not resist. It was the only time I have ever asked Douglas to say something in another language that I would not be able to understand. But he resisted, blowing out his lips and waving his hand and saying, “It wouldn’t make any sense.” It seemed like he wasn’t just talking about me, but about everyone in the room and himself and anyone in the world who might try to read it. Incomprehensible.
So thank you, Mr. FitzGerald, for comprehending number 23:
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!
I find the poems weary at ceremonies, where exotic recitations have become something of a requirement. They are so personal, universal, transformative—everything that a poem should be—that it seems impossible to fruitfully share them with a crowd of intellectual heathens such as are on display at a graduation ceremony. It would be better to throw them their diplomas from behind some large shield and then scurry off to the nearest beneath-ground tavern for shelter.
Which is perhaps why I love to give away my copies of the book, but rarely speak of it.
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