Read the Hints, Come at Last

[Image: “Book Art,” by Blondinrikard Fröberg. Found on Flickr, naturally, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). The photo’s caption at Flickr says, only, “The window of the Göteborg city museum gift shop.” But the work of art which it captures seems to suggest much more about the nature of books, no?]

From whiskey river:

The Story of Our Lives
(excerpt)

5

If only there were a perfect moment in the book;
if only we could live in that moment,
we could begin the book again
as if we had not written it,
as if we were not in it.
But the dark approaches
to any page are too numerous
and the escapes are too narrow.
We read through the day.
Each page turning is like a candle
moving through the mind.
Each moment is like a hopeless cause.
If only we could stop reading.
He never wanted to read another book
and she kept staring into the street.
The cars were still there,
the deep shade of trees covered them.
The shades were drawn in the new house.
Maybe the man who lived there,
the man she loved, was reading
the story of another life.
She imagine a bare parlor,
a cold fireplace, a man sitting
writing a letter to a woman
who has sacrificed her life for love.
If there were a perfect moment in the book,
it would be the last.
The book never discusses the causes of love.
It claims confusion is a necessary good.
It never explains. It only reveals.

(Mark Strand [source])

…and:

On rare occasions there comes along a profound original, an odd little book that appears out of nowhere, from the pen of some obscure storyteller, and once you have read it, you will never go completely back to where you were before. The kind of book you might hesitate to lend for fear you might miss its company. The kind of book that echoes from the heart of some ancient knowing, and whispers from time’s forgotten cave that life may be more than it seems, and less.

(Edmund James Banfield [source: see the Note at the foot of this post])

Not from whiskey river:

If what writes the world is power,
this book writes a crack in it.

Through the crack, you fall a thousand times.

And every time you wish it would stop and keep going all at once.

As you fall you see and as you fall you hear and as you fall you feel.

A thousand times over without getting anywhere safe.

Understanding was never the point anyway.

(Evgenia Mylonaki [source])

…and (writing about the 1986 Los Angeles Central Library fire, and conducting an experiment to see how easily a book burns):

At the last minute, something glues my hands to my sides, and a sensation close to revulsion rises up in me. Many times, I have stood over a trash can, holding a book with a torn cover and a broken binding, and I have hovered there, dangling the book, and finally, I have let the trash can lid snap shut and I have walked away with the goddamn book—a battered, dog-eared, wounded soldier that has been spared to live another day. The only thing that comes close to this feeling is what I experience when I try to throw out a plant, even if it is the baldest, most aphid-ridden, crooked-stemmed plant in the world. The sensation of dropping a living thing into the trash is what makes me queasy. To have that same feeling about a book might seem strange, but this is why I have come to believe that books have souls—why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away?… A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer’s mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press—a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, time after time after time. Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality. The poet Milton called this quality in books “the potency of life.” I wasn’t sure I had it in me to be a killer.

(Susan Orlean [source])

…and:

18

See, steamers steaming through my poems,

See, in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing,

See, in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter’s hut, the flat-boat, the maize-leaf, the claim, the rude fence, and the backwoods village,

See, on the one side the Western Sea and on the other the Eastern Sea, how they advance and retreat upon my poems as upon their own shores,

See, pastures and forests in my poems—see, animals wild and tame—see, beyond the Kaw, countless herds of buffalo feeding on short curly grass,

See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce,

See, the many-cylinder’d steam printing-press—see, the electric telegraph stretching across the continent,

See, through Atlantica’s depths pulses American Europe reaching, pulses of Europe duly return’d,

See, the strong and quick locomotive as it departs, panting, blowing the steam-whistle,

See, ploughmen ploughing farms—see, miners digging mines—see, the numberless factories,

See, mechanics busy at their benches with tools—see from among them superior judges, philosophs, Presidents, emerge, drest in working dresses,

See, lounging through the shops and fields of the States, me well-belov’d, close-held by day and night,

Hear the loud echoes of my songs there—read the hints come at last.

(Walt Whitman [source])

________________________

Note: About the quotation from Edmund James Banfield…

This appears not to be, as so many sources suggest, a quotation by Banfield; nothing in his books online suggests that he actually included the passage in any books. (Any source which ascribes it to a particular book associates it with his Confessions of a Beachcomber (1902); however, Project Gutenberg has done a complete transcription of that book’s contents, and none of the phrases appear therein. I did check the Google Ngram Viewer to see if any of the phrases turned up elsewhere. Here, for example, is the search for “forgotten cave,” with the time span restricted to 1890-1910.) Banfield was a writer in Australia at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, and wrote (in flowery language characteristic of the time) about various natural-world experiences: birds, plants, the ocean, etc.

No, the earliest online citation of the quote — as opposed to glib offhand assertions of Banfield’s authorship — seems to be the image at right, appearing in a Tumblr post in 2013, by someone self-identifying as “littledallila.”

Now, granted, I don’t know how littledallila got his/her hands on that image. But I’ve looked at it, and looked at it again, and here’s what I’ve concluded: This isn’t a quote from Banfield’s “Beachcomber” book; it’s a blurb for Banfield’s book. Look at it yourself: the image has evidently been scanned from some hardcopy source — it’s crooked, and there’s a hint of wear around the outermost edges. Put that together with the practice in books (especially from that period) of filling the entire back of the book cover or jacket with a single flowery promotional assertion from the publisher about the contents, and, well, that’s what I think, anyhow.

On the other hand, I’ve looked at several scans on Google Books of different editions of Confessions of a Beachcomber… and none of them have a back cover which looks like the image.

So… although I hate to admit defeat, let’s just file this one in the “Mysteries of Provenance” folder!

[return to “Banfield” quote]