There’s an increasing trend in denser neighborhoods of people putting up “little lending libraries”. In my neighborhood, there are two old newspaper dispensers – the kind where you’d put in some change and the handle would release, you’d open it up, and grab a paper from a stack inside – which have been unlocked and made available for book swapping. In my son’s neighborhood, which is a little more upscale, a number of people have built miniature houses with glass front doors and a couple of shelves inside. Some of them are marked “children’s books only”, and my son loves rifling through them and bringing a couple of books home when we take the dog for a walk. Some are all-purpose, and on a recent walk with my dog, I found a copy of Thomas More’s Utopia in one of them. I hadn’t read it since college, so I thought what the heck, I’m vaguely underemployed these days, let’s have a go.
A few days later I opened it up and out dropped a small star made of orange construction paper. On one side there was an odd doodle, and on the other, the opening stanza of Byron’s “When We Two Parted”:
In secret we met, In silence I grieve, That thy heart could forget, Thy spirit deceive. If I should meet thee After long years, How should I greet thee! - With silence and tears.
This sort of thing – stumbling upon odd bits of poetry or strangely apropos found writing – happens to me quite a bit. It’s actually a bit annoying. I feel the need to interpret the find, or at least to listen quietly for awhile to understand why the universe dropped the particular bit of prose or poetry on me at a particular moment.
Last week in my neighborhood, I was walking my dog when I saw a page of text, weathered a bit so not too recent, stapled to the telephone pole at the end of my street. It was a very simple description of bicycling. Someone had written about how as a kid, he put his bike away every fall before the snow came, and in the spring, he’d take the bike back out, grease the chain and the gears, and go for the first ride of the year. Then he moved to Seattle, where it doesn’t really snow, and he biked all through the winter. But one day in the spring, after years of not having a winter routine, he took a day, tuned up his bike as if it were the first ride of the year, and went for a test ride down the street. It was sunny but cool, and as he rode down the hill and back up to his house, he felt the same sense of the world starting over, of spring renewing his relationship with his bike and his sense of movement, that he had had when he was a child. It reminded him of home, brought him back a sense of being young, let him see the world through the lens of springtime.
Back when I lived in London, I used to take my dog for walks on the fields around Blackheath, a lovely area in the southeast of the city. Not long before I started an affair and ended my marriage, I came across a series of postings on streetlight poles around the heath, in which someone named Rob who had met a woman and had struck up a conversation pleaded with the woman – named Suzy – to meet him at a park bench on the heath and continue the conversation. It was a bit desperate, a bit forlorn, and it ended with the emphatic statement “NOT A NUTTER – just really liked talking to you”, the writer recognizing that he was probably out on a limb.
Given my mental and emotional state at the time – having reached the end of my marriage but not quite knowing how to move forward, not yet having met the person who would catalyse that change, and yet feeling like the world probably would think of me as a nutter as well – it felt like the message was sent for me (not literally, of course, as it was really meant for Suzy). It felt like it was being sent to remind me to just be open, to find the conversation that would change me, to wake up.
That was easy. Picking up a pretty miserable verse from Byron in Utopia seemed a bit more, well, incomprehensible. When I first read it, I thought of my recent girlfriend who split up with me a couple of months ago – but that was obvious and uninteresting, as pretty much everything makes me think of her, from grocery shopping to recently filing an amended Form 1040X tax return for 2016. I dismissed that. Plus I don’t want to greet her in the future with silence and tears. I don’t know how I want to greet her, but tears and silence would be pretty pathetic, and that’s not me. Then I thought about the fact that it was wedged in the pages of Utopia. Maybe some meaning there? Utopia, of course, doesn’t exist, and greeting someone you know while visiting Utopia would probably run the gamut of emotions. Maybe I was being told to expect a visit from someone, and it would be an uncomfortable reunion.
Or maybe it’s just random.
Finding religious tracts on the ground brings me a similar sense of serendipity. I don’t pick up the discarded pamphlets that you can find in most cities not far from the Lyndon LaRouche stands or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The ones I enjoy are the pieces found on park benches in the middle of forest parks, or by a pond, or on a commuter train. Someone kept that pamphlet and read it when they could be alone, but then discarded it. Maybe it struck too close to home and they had to get rid of it, or maybe they read it the way I do – as a kind of evidence of the universe’s capacity for strangeness. Or else the wind had picked the pamphlet up and let it come and settle just where I could find it. Sometimes the pamphlet will threaten me with hell if I become a homosexual. Sometime it condemns all of society for materialism and sensuality, and demands I not only accept Jesus as my saviour, but throw away my life in the world and return to a life of virtue. Often there are cartoons, presumably to make the message even more direct although the quality of the cartoons doesn’t usually help the cause. One pamphlet which seered itself into my brain had a cartoon version of Sodom and Gomorrah, with the evil men of the town – rapists all – looking at a woman and attractive boy walking by and grunting “Ugh, nice” as they leered at them. It made Sodom and Gomorrah seem pretty bad, I can tell you, but it failed to convince me of anything else.
The people who write such tracts and hand them out, and paste their notices on streetlamps and phone poles, are no different from me at all, in the sense that they need to talk to someone – the world, Suzy, evil doers – and they have run out of the means of talking personally, and they turn to the anonymous in an effort to be heard. Anyone who starts a website purely to post essays, or daily updates, or recipes – anyone who launches a Facebook account and describes their day – has arrived at a point where talking to their organic audience in organic settings – phone calls, meeting over coffee, letters – isn’t enough. Maybe they’ve alienated their organic audience by preaching too hard, or in Rob’s case, annoyed the local pubgoers and Starbucks customers with questions about “do you know a Suzy who lives around here”. Or maybe they’ve decided that they want their words to hit more people, and they’ve reached a point where who reads isn’t as important as trying to find anyone to read. Or maybe they are just nutters.
The Byron poem in my new copy of Utopia, however, represents something different. Someone had a bad breakup, or else was simply feeling melancholy about a friendship faded away, cut out a little star to herself (the handwriting was definitely that of a woman, I’d guess 30 or younger), and jotted down one of those iconic lines that Byron tossed off like candy. She read a bit of Thomas More and then put the book in the little lending library in Wallingford, her melancholy alleviated most likely by the act of writing down the poem. She didn’t need the reminder or the comfort any longer; maybe she thought someone else did. More likely she forgot about the poem as her own emotions faded. Still, in this day and age, Byron was an interesting choice. Few people read poetry any more, let alone take comfort from it.
In any event, I enjoy taking the time to read found texts. It never takes more than a minute or two. Thanks for reading this, by the way. I’m pretty sure I’m not a nutter.