In My Life, One Book Often Leads to Another

Neighborhood reflections

One day last week here in the shop, I started reading Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, quite a well-known book but unfamiliar to me except for its dust jacket. Wilson leads off his study with Jules Michelet, the French historian and natural history writer, and I was immediately entranced by details of Michelet’s life, but it was the way Wilson wrote about Michelet’s History of France that made me want to retire immediately and spend the year reading French history as written by Michelet! Though I wonder if even a year would be sufficient, since it is a 19-volume work.... Although, truthfully, I am not interested in the earlier volumes and would be content to begin with the Renaissance. As it happens, in any case, I won’t be starting that reading in the near future, as I cannot afford the editions I want and refuse to be satisfied with cheap modern paperback reprints. Content is most important, but I care about the physical object, as well.

 

Did you know that Jules Michelet is the person responsible for the term ‘Renaissance’? He lived from 1798 to 1874 and looked back on the end of the Middle Ages and subsequent flowering of culture and science as a true rebirth of Europe. People lived through the Renaissance without having a name for it. What will our age be called? Never mind—let's not take that road today!

Winter aconites have had many naps and reawakenings this year.

Taking a deep breath and consigning Michelet to my old-old age reading (along with those volumes of the vitalist philosopher Louis Lavelle that I bought in Paris decades ago) and skipping ahead in Wilson, I saw a chapter on “The Myth of the Dialectic,” and that led me to put down Wilson and pick up Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which so far I am finding much more reader-friendly than a volume by Adorno alone, one I am wading through in odd moments, page by weary page. It is a paperback reprint, as is the Dialectic, but both are quality paperbacks from a reputable publisher.

 

Edmund Wilson must share credit with a novel sent to me by a friend, however, a fictionalized life of Walter Benjamin, for sending me to Adorno. My friend did not care at all for Benjamin, at least in the novel, Benjamin’s Crossing, and I can see where the man would have been a difficult companion, but I do not find him altogether unsympathetic, especially after reading his short memoir vignettes in Berlin Childhood Around 1900. (Those are truly magical!) So the novel my friend rejected led me to several other books and lives.

 

You may recall, if you pay attention to my bookish meanderings, that a novel based on the life of Belle la Costa Greene led me to read her biography, also. Now, in part because of what I learned of her work for J.P. Morgan, I am reading a biography of Duveen (he is usually called only by his surname), the famous art dealer of that particular turn of the century, now over 100 years ago, and altogether I feel very steeped in the late 19^th and early half of the 20^th centuries. 

Current bedtime book

I appreciate the old-time, high-quality cloth binding under the jacket.

Does that happen to you? Does something in a book put you on the trail to other books? 

 

I vowed to stick to books today, after the over-the-top, nonliterary rant of my last post—not that I am apologizing for it, but this is, after all, Books in Northport. But dogs are an okay detour, though, aren’t they?

 

Sunny Juliet and I got to the dog park twice this week, on both Sunday and Tuesday, and she had a chance to play with her friends Daisy and Louie both times, and also with Jackson on Sunday. Sunny knows the word “friends” and perks her ears alertly when I ask her if she wants to see her friends. In that, she is like me. It was good to be with friends Monday evening to remember dear Larry Coppard, and a chance encounter on Tuesday at Samaritan’s Closet with friends I don’t often see had me smiling for the rest of my afternoon off. 

Outdoors at home

At home, I’m getting at the big job of raking my yard after the mess left behind by fall and winter, one bit at a time (with many pauses to launch tennis balls in the air for Sunny), and I’m happy to announce that all the snow is gone from our yard! For the time being, that is. It’s still April, after all.

In my favorite booth

And it’s also still cold, so I wore my puffy winter jacket when I went to meet another dear friend who had invited me to dinner at the Happy Hour. I timed my arrival a few minutes early, so I could sip my "brewski" (as the Artist used to say) while reading the introduction to Walter Benjamin’s  Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, but my friend wasn’t far behind me. Quiet when we arrived, the joint was jumpin’ by the time we left. 

Friendship warms the heart on the coldest of Up North evenings, and happiness is the signature, as well as the eponymous, mood of my neighborhood roadhouse. (Ha! I've been looking for a chance to use that word 'eponymous'!) 

Everyone is happy here.

My friend, a fellow reader --