History and the Book

Archival Quality Communication

AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .

Poetry is that encounter of the reader with
the book, the discovery of the book.
Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights, p. 80.

With this I must disagree. Borges is such an interesting writer it is a great shame that so many people have discovered him. (Do they really understand him? Perhaps too well.) It is always good to have special books in your collection that no one else knows about, such as Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica, or Alice Hegan Rice's Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (I mean the book), C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, or the mysterious Etidorhpa, published in 1895 by one of our local authors, or . . . but I will not give them all away, or everyone will be reading them. It is the discovery of such that may truly be called the encounter with the book, and so I must (respectfully) disagree with the idea expressed by Borges in this quotation.

Poetry is expression, language at its best, and so it is not just an encounter with a book, or even something written on paper. The essence of poetry is the frisson we experience in the encounter with a mind expressing itself with much greater ability than we are able. That is, expressing thoughts and feelings we have known only in a fugitive way. (If we had never experienced them at all we would not appreciate the achievement when we encountered it.) It is, as Owen Barfield says in Poetic Diction, a movement of the mind into strangeness. By this he does not mean weirdness (at least not the weird as such), but a journey into a realm or vista which allows us to look at things, especially common things and ideas, in a way that is new to us.

There is an encounter of the mind with the book, however, and it is primarily in the realm of history. It is much more true — I do not say Borges's statement is false, after all, in the coffin we call a book, poetic skeletons do (sometimes) reside — it is much more true to say that history is the encounter with the book. History is not only a science, and I would argue that it is the primary science, without which all the others are impossible, but a species of literature. As literature it is language, or art, and as such it must be judged on its literary merits. History, even more than poetry, or other species of literature, (which can always be told as a tale or ballad), depends upon books, both as documentary evidence and as a medium of publication. Books are the way history preserves its traditions of scholarship and interpretation. We can easily conceive of a novel that does not depend upon other novels (though the good ones all depend upon the novelistic tradition more than most people suspect), but it is hardly possible to even imagine serious history without access to other books.

History is a very strange book, certainly a palimpsest, such as Lanier sang of in "The Symphony":

Life! Life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west,
Love, Love alone can pore
On thy dissolving score
Of harsh half-phrasings,
Blotted ere writ,
And double erasings
Of chords most fit.
Yea, Love, sole music-master blest,
May read thy weltering palimpsest.
To follow Time's dying melodies through,
And never to lose
the old in the new,
And ever to solve the discords true —
Love alone can do.

Borges may have had something similar in mind in describing an encounter with the Book of Sand. As Heraclitus found it impossible to step twice into the same river, for there come waters, and then other waters, so it is impossible to read twice the identical page of history; it is, as in the epigraph by Donne, with with Borges begins his story, a rope of sand.

This is an Archival Quality Communication

James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone, Kentucky

Note: Online access for the entire text of Sidney Lanier's beautiful poem "The Symphony".