Medicine for Moody Times

Sometimes even mornings seem dark and brooding.

 

God forbid that I should say a word against a public library, but nothing will take the place or a rack of a shelf full of books by one’s own chair, close to a well-adjusted light, whether it be a lamp or a window. Everyone’s shelf will contain different books, and the books which give joy to youth may not delight age, but the pleasure of reading continues. I see to-day greater anxiety written on the faces of my millionaire friends than I do on the faces of the poor men who resort day after day to our public libraries, there to solace themselves with a book. In an established love of reading there is a policy of insurance guaranteeing certain happiness till death. 

 

-      A. Edward Newton, End Papers: Literary Recreations (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1933)

 

Newton was writing during the years of the Great Depression (“What was so great about it?” a young person might ask, and that would be a good question), when no doubt his “millionaire friends” had plenty of anxiety. But anxiety is not limited to millionaires, nor to periods of economic depression, so it is all the better insurance to those of us further down in the world’s financial hierarchy that public libraries still thrive in our United States and that personal, private collections of books can be had for very little -- though an occasional splurge, like the occasional cheesecake wedge for dessert, is not always to be resisted.

Newton, an American, was a serious high-end book collector, and his specialty was English literature – that is to say, he preferred books from “across the pond,” as he put it. For others he recommended Americana, specifically Walt Whitman; for himself, however, a book lacking any mention of Dr. Johnson rarely attracted him. Moreover, urban to the core, he had no interest in the world of nature. 

A noted exception to his Johnson/no nature rule was the fiction of Mary Webb, and he lauded her books so highly that I rushed to my bookshop shelves to find Precious Bane, smuggled it home that very night, and began reading Webb's masterpiece as soon as I closed the cover on End Papers.  

 

 

…It was a wonderful thing to see our meadows at Sarn when the cowslip was in blow. Gold-over they were, so that you would think not even an angel’s feet were good enough to walk there. … Every way you looked, there was nought but gold, saving towards Sarn, where the woods began, and the great stretch of grey water, gleaming and wincing in the sun. Neither woods nor water looked darksome in that fine spring weather, with the leaves coming new, and buds the color of corn in the birch-tops. Only in our oak wood there was always a look of the back-end of the year, their young leaves being so brown. So there was always a breath of October in our May. 

 

-      Mary Webb, Precious Bane (NY: Dutton, 1926)

 

 

Blooming cowslips (Michigan’s marsh marigolds) were known as paigle, or keys of heaven, to the natives of Mary Webb’s Shropshire meres. A much-neglected classic, I was ready to agree, after only two chapters of the novel. 

It is October now in Leelanau, always a quixotic month and this year alternating summer and autumn from one day to the next. By Sunday, had it settled down? Full, peak color and cold rain seemed to say yes, and while the colors gleamed in the rain, my mood was sad, or at least bittersweet. Although the Artist always used to say he loved the leafless trees in November and the time when the “bones of the earth” are laid bare, my memory calls back so many slow county cruises in October (following a getaway to the U.P. or Lake Huron in September) that seeing the beauty of the dying leaves by myself feels almost unbearable. 

Luckily, for whatever grip on sanity I possess, there is Sunny Juliet. Like October, Sunny has a variety of moods. Here is an introduction to a few of them, as demonstrated this past mid-October weekend.  

Looking goofy

Caught a mole!

Pretending it's time to get up.

Homework!

To my way of thinking, there is nothing like books and dogs to chase away the blues of politics and the approach of winter. 

Dark is coming earlier and earlier.

But can you see the tiny sliver of moon? Look closely!