this is what he wants of me. The courtyard here is filled with flowers. If I were to say to them “in this painful activity of mind” they wouldn’t look up, the flowers, which is why I watch them, which is why I talk to them, which is why … but then I pull back and go inside.
And Boethius was mute when the Goddess of Consolation found him. She wanted him to be able to speak again of what he’d seen, to talk of all he’d learned and thought and felt, to remember who she was and that he’d known her.
Boethius is dead. Executed without witness. I see his empty cell. Stone slab of bed. Barred window. The Goddess of Consolation promised she would accompany him to the Land of the Dead but I don’t believe it—I think he’s alone wherever he is. Bones. Emptiness. I can’t help what I see. A name carved somewhere on stone. Even though she wiped his eyes with her robe, even though she spoke to him with kindness.
I think of Allegra’s face all the time now, though Mary says it’s better not to speak of it. Of how I can’t see her, can’t look into her face XXX this blindness I feel XXX and Gloucester was blinded but a strange tenderness came afterXXX then sometimes her hand suddenly flies into my mind—
XXXX can’t concentrate XXX must concentrate, must
Of Archilochos we have not one single work entire and most of the context’s fallen away
Sometimes what’s left is just one word: Recompense. Plums. Or a few brief, broken lines:
]so[
I then, alone]
I would trace these fragments like a hurt and beautiful face. Her face.
Did Boethius read the Greek poets, did he translate these lines as I do now?
Her face far from me. (so close) Fragment 243: “Lips covered with foam.”
Can’t concentrate. Must. Must concentrate—
The book. Must look at the book. MustXXXXXX
Archilochos’s mother was a slave so they say. He, a native of Paros, so they say. First half of the 7th century B.C. Killed by a man named Crow in a battle or a fight.
“Wandering hungry,
Wild of mind,”
“Here the papyrus is torn,” says my Greek book. “Here it is too tattered to read.” And the Goddess’s robe was tattered, ripped by violent men, and still she came or did she? Did she stand in Boethius’s cell, or in the coldness of his mind?
Allegra’s face, her warm breath in my breath. The inexplicable feeling that I will never see her again—
I watch her reading as if she’s on an icebound ship, though she’s in a white room in Pisa with Mary and Shelley. She turns pages as if words could, could what? She in such danger … and so quietly … What does she find in those pages? Does her mind feel less endangered, less alone?
On the second Grinnell expedition, the surgeon Isaac Hayes carried three books in his clothes bag as he trudged for an entire winter over the ice. “Never had I valued books as I did then, three small books that I came to love well during that long winter.”
For his Arctic voyage of 1818, Captain John Ross arranged for a shipboard library of twenty-five books, and in 1850, Captain William Penny stocked his ship, Sophia, with eighty.
When I first came here, I thought I wanted to get away from the human world. Yet I seek Claire’s shoulder, her hand, still wonder if I’ll see her face, turn page after page wherever I can find them. Pages of human thinking, human want. So what does that make of this solitude in which I live?
Some ships carried their own printing presses. There were pages printed on red silk, and thousands of tiny “balloon papers,” “cylinder papers,” “bottle papers,” held for a while then cast off into the sea. There were pages imprinted with delicate lyres, and others embossed with a Tuscan ornamental face. Ink froze on the rollers. When paper grew scarce they still wanted to see words, printed them on handkerchiefs and their own shirts. On linen and wash leather. On whatever they could find.
They read by lamplight through the merciless winters.
Wednesday: Read Schiller. Thursday: Read Adonais. Went with Countess Tolomei to buy linen for Mary. Read a Canto of Purgatorio. Translated from Phaedrus. Dreamt this night that S. had been to Bagnacavallo and had returned bringing Allegra to me. When he came I was watching ants on the pedestal of the statue of Ceres. The Chinese proverb says “the wise man fears calm.” Saturday: