Froissart. Adams. Gobineau. Like checkers, some king the carpet’s squares. Sober books. Bawds. They preoccupy my armchair like an injury. They press in. Ockham. Austen. Von Frisch. Pound. In overcoats. In satins. With illustrations. Aprons. Pindar. Heavy. Worn. Hardy, Hawthorne, Hazlitt, Hemingway, Henty, Hopkins, Housman, Hume. With loose bent torn dry yellow pages and broken glueless backs, some shaken outside of themselves, Webster, Ford, Lombroso, Chapman, Cleland, Chaucer, Berkeley, Boccaccio, Swift, by time, humidity, rough handling, their ferocious contents, Flavius Josephus, Bussy D’Ambois, some scratched, some marred with annotations, underlinings, exclamations, thumbprints, smears, Poe, Thomas, Plautus and Petronius, stained, checked, dented, mottled, eaten. Ibsen. And if anyone I knew—Chekhov, Veblen—were like that, I would flee them. But from Bradley? Burns? Bernanos? Browning? Gilded edges? Gaudy. Slick. They know how to age—each—they fly through time like a stone. King Lear. Colette. Une Vie. Le Corbusier. La Rochefoucauld. I have thrown them. Yes. They have broken me. Slammed them down. Been brought low. “The Good Anna.” Keller. “Boule de suif.” Embossed. In suede. Defoe. Received for birthdays, with a ribbon or a tasseled string and soiled by dedications, nameplates, erasures like rapacious moths, librarians’ pastes and inks. Great Expectations. We speak of their backs, their fronts, their spines . . . their bodies. Funny. Flatulent. Forsaken. Fielding. Frost. Find Planmantee. He’s somewhere—living his life inside a life like Madame Bovary—somewhere where nothing else is as it is, where everything’s as something else is, resembling the resembled to infinity—in metaphysics, mathematics, magic—where all are kith and kin and none are kind. I see Homer. He’s ceased singing, and sirens now warn us away. My lines suffer interruption, and these covers close over me. Hegel. Iamblichus. Pliny. Plato. Where is the Western Front now, you foolish old man? that trench of entrancing shadows, cardboard cutouts, supple fires? Don’t lie to me. The pokey where Socrates swigged his Dramamine was a hole in a hill. And Plotinus is also a cavern. These days the darkness that lies under the mind like the cool shade of a stream bottom yields our only safety, for to rush to the light is to Gloucester-out the eyes; bedazzled by death, to go over the top at someone else’s whistle and war shout, to fume up and fizz fast, die dirty, die young. Chatterton. What is a book but a container of consciousness, a draft of cantos? Through a curtain of concepts I watch blemishless girls, young Kierkegaard in all his disguises, Empedocles as a fish, bird, and girl, Stendhal and Byron like boys about their boasting, Boswell accosting his whores, Cellini, another braggart, honest Casanova, Pepys at table, Henry Miller, Gide committing Chopin and other indiscretions, Cudworth, Claudel, Jeremy Taylor, Mörike and then Baudelaire—the most beautiful name of all. Vico. Verlaine. Michelangelo—the most beautiful—Mallarmé—the most beautiful—Sophocles—the most beautiful name of all. The names of idols, vandals, heroes, lovers, cutthroats and cutpurses, gods . . . of guttersnipes and villains, thugs, poseurs, seducers, patsies . . . drunks . . . ¶Hear me, Hesiod: to sing of what will be, as well as all that was, takes more than the gift of a voice, these days, it takes a stomach stronger than a tomb. ¶The gods speak only of the gods. ¶In those days, then, what are we to do? What have we done? Villon. ¶There’s Demosthenes polishing his teeth with stones. Quintilian. Cicero. ¶O we’ve had speakers of such spectacular speechifying power Gods word is but a cough before a sneeze beside them. Who, if not Hitler, like a wind through wheat, made the heads of the masses dance as though their hats held feet? Isocrates. Calhoun. ¶I am the thimble of History, Mad Meg said. I drive the needle in. ¶What did the Muses want of you when they offered that olive-fruiting stick? compliments in front of every song and flattery following. Ah, they make me sick. Simonides. Theopompus—not the nicest—and the names of fairies, tarts, and sister-suckers, people of paper, paper people, Acton, Lecky, Maitland, Froude, Jewboys, jack-offs, niggerlovers, Thoreau, Twain, men of means and men of parts, Marcus Aurelius, Chesterfield, King James, whom have you Muses so lightly laureled? verbal farts and fiddle-scrapers, every kind of diligent compiler, pipsqueak, nail-biter, fact-fucker, dissolute tutor, bombathlete, hairy bluenose, cheat and bore . . . let me think my way along this wall . . . Clarendon, Longinus . . . cutaways, cutesies, castoffs, creampuffs, chokethroats, alley cats, cowards, turncoats. hounds from hell, boys from Harvard, kids from Yale, and other godsends (as they say they are and pray to be), saints, archangels, showoffs, sycophants, suicides, and some like me: desperate failures, resentful assassins . . . yet here—as nowhere—even one’s enemies are friends, even one’s superiors are unenvied. Dreiser. Dumas. Dilthey. Hart Crane. Rimbaud. Ronsard. Is there a richness anywhere to match this? ¶O yes, O yes, O yes, O yes, I am aware, O how I know, that there are those who write like tenors, stock their books as though each were a fish pond, dry goods, hardware, or a pantry; who jerry-build, compose sentences like tangled spaghetti, piss through their pens and otherwise relieve themselves, play at poetry as if they were still dressing dolls, order history as though it were an endless bill of lading; but there were genuine bookmen once: Burton, Montaigne, Rabelais and other list-makers, Sir Thomas Browne and Hobbes, in the days when a book was not just a signal like a whiff of smoke from a movie Indian or a carton of cold crumb-covered carryout chicken, but a blood-filled body in the world, a mind in motion like a cannonball. Spinoza sent our freedom flying through just such a trajectory. Kant rearranged our thoughts forever. Calvin did us in. ¶How many volumes of Magus Tabor? Ten of Wordsworth bound in blue, gray, and gold. Twenty-five of Parkman. Lermontov: two. When I complained to Tabor that my contemporaries were mostly contraptionists, he grinned. Never mind, my boy; a book is a holy vessel—ah, indeed, yes, it will transmogrify a turd. Nordau. Gentile. Husserl. Hartmann. Bentham. James and John Stuart Mill. And of Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling—how many? Outside I hear the power mowers mow the snow. Of Herder, Heidegger, Heine, Helmholtz, Spengler, Werfel, Weber? Open any. Karl Jaspers. Ernst Jünger. A crack like a chasm. Vega. Natsume. Quevedo. The creaking door in a horror story. Gorki. Heliodorus, Apollinaire: the most beautiful names of all. Every cover lifts as though it lay above a cellar stairway, hid a hold. A hold. There’s the one in Conrad’s Typhoon, full of Chinamen and their money flung about in the darkness by the storm. Our cellar doors are warped and difficult to lift. Rain leaks in, leaves collect, insects prosper, mold forms. Do descend: come in, the witch says, smiling with her slit. Do. D’Annunzio. Chamberlain. Carco. Krafft-Ebing. Huysmans. Sacher-Masoch. De Sade. All the dirty old gentlemen and their Victorian foreskins. I could not in my life remember so many of my friends. Southwell, for example. Shelley. Donne.