Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

The impulse is never far from the surface with me, no matter what the season.  I recognize that I have a generally tidy disposition.  To wit, this month I've been cleaning out my painting studio, airing everything out, looking at old work, and preparing for new work.  What a lot of stuff I seem to have made in the past 25 years, and beyond (I even have a portfolio full of childhood drawings and books I made, which my mother gave to me some years back when she was cleaning out).  Stuff.  Made by me.  Drawings, paintings, collages, handmade books, diaries.  Blog entries.  What's it all for?  All this making?  Best not to examine that question too closely, and simply forge ahead.  (Although: Because I love it, might be a fine answer, for now.)  The same goes for reading.  I enjoy it; I would rather read than watch tv or noodle around on the internet or go out.  At about seven p.m. every evening I stop whatever it is I'm doing because I realize I could be reading a book instead.  And then I do just that.  Books, books!  Shall we have a long book chat, since it's quite been some time since my last writing?  Okay, then.  My winter reading project is winding down, and I still haven't made it through the introduction of the History of Herodotus.  Other ancient authors wait too, but a few weeks ago I veered off on a tangent and have yet to return from it.  I read The Hill of Kronos (Dutton 1980) by Peter Levi.  Synopsis:  young Jesuit-in-training goes abroad in search of ancient Greece.  Fascinating book and gosh does it contain some beautiful sentences.  Here are two (p.19):

"We passed Calabria, painted green and hung out to dry for a thousand years.  The sun sank exactly behind us, and the ship sailed under stars that sparkled like sea-salt in the dark."

After a too-brief first sojourn in Greece, he returns to England, where, unsurprisingly (p.114):

"It was a difficult winter.  The snow fell as it always does."

Man, I hear you.  Levi yearns to live among classical ruins, and visits and re-visits Greece over two decades.  His book makes me long for sun and dust.

Next I spent two weeks slowly reading Rose Macaulay's odd dense thicket of a book, Pleasure of Ruins (Thames and Hudson reprint of the 1953 first edition).  It shouldn't have taken me two weeks, but Ryan and I were simultaneously watching archaeology shows online dealing with many of the sites I was reading about.  Despite my bias about tv I must say it was dreamy to see in color some of the ancient landscapes Macaulay spends 450+ pages rhapsodizing about.  Rome, Persepolis, Carthage...but I'm getting ahead of myself.  Before I started Pleasure of Ruins proper I read another book, entitled Roloff Beny Interprets in Photographs Rose Macaulay's Pleasure of Ruins (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1977), which I picked up in a local bookshop for four dollars last month, because I wanted to look at more photographs of the sites I'd been reading about in all the classics.  Well, in the brief preface by Roloff Beny (and I must say, what a terrific name) he hooked me, line and sinker, by saying (p.25):

"My copy of Pleasure of Ruins, now battered and travel-stained, had been my constant companion for nine years.  I had been dedicating a good part of my waking dreams to an almost predestined pursuit of the itineraries explored by Rose Macaulay..."

After investigating his photographs and reading the brief selections excerpted from the original Pleasure of Ruins, and acknowledging their general exellence, I decided I'd better read the whole thing.  Luckily I have a copy.  One of the great joys of having a home library - you often have on hand exactly what you wish you had on hand.  In this case, a softcover unabridged reprint, picked up some years back for four dollars.  The only other book I've ever read by Macaulay is her novel The Towers of Trebizond (which I read back in 2008 and wrote about here).  Also about travel, archaeology, religion, ancient sites, and melancholy, but in fictional form, versus this difficult-to-describe colossus of a book, which combines all of the above with her overarching theme of Ruin-lust, the feeling of delicious romantic desolation that overcomes one when one contemplates the crumbling remains of civilizations (delectatio morosa, she says, p.249).  The book really is an extended meditation on this feeling - gazing at the remains of the past, and the attendant emotions that inevitably must arise in the viewer in response to all that gazing.  She spends time contemplating (p.40):

"...Troy...Crete, Mycenae, Tyre, Nineveh, Babylon, Thebes, Rome, Byzantium, Carthage, and every temple, theatre and broken column of classical Greece..."

Fearsomely intelligent and learned, she uses about eight other languages (most untranslated) when quoting, and she quotes at length across many centuries, from authors who loved ruins as much as she, and also travelled to see them.  Parts of her book read like a who's who of travel narratives and I found myself taking notes, to see if I could find reprints of some of her sources.

Like this:

Dreams, waking thoughts and incidents by William Beckford (1785);

and

Rare Adventures and Painfull Perigrinations by William Lithgow (1632);

or

the travel guide to ancient Greek sites by Pausanias, which Rose Macaulay and Peter Levi both go on and on about at great length;

and

Chateaubriand's travel memoirs which sound wonderfully high-flown and romantic;

along with

a hundred other sources, from ancient times up to some familiar names like the beloved Byrons (Lord and Robert) and Henry James, well into the twentieth century.

So much to read next it's an embarrassment of riches!  Speaking of which, Pleasure of Ruins is so very quotable I must indulge in a few, before we set aside Macaulay for now.  In the unpaginated introduction, she writes:

"... this broken beauty is all we have of that ancient magnificence; we cherish it like the extant fragments of some lost and noble poem."

She continues to revel in (p.9):

"... that blend of pleasure and the romantic gloom which has always been the basic element in ruin-sensibility..."

All this ruin-talk echoes so strongly in me.  Have I ever mentioned that my first home was built atop a ruin?  Before I was born my parents moved to Maine and built a house on the foundation of an old demolished summer house.  The remains were very much like a kind of archaeological site.  It was fascinating then, when I was a child, and it remains so today, even though (and especially since) that home is long gone, lost to me in every way except memory.  It's on my mind because I've been trying to write about it, rather unsuccessfully.  More about that later, perhaps, as well as my ongoing spring cleaning efforts, which also continue to occupy my mind.  I mean, I could go on and on right now, but it's well after seven p.m. and, as I mentioned earlier, instead of sitting here at this computer, I could be reading a book.