At the still point: the crows dance

At the still point, there the dance is—T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton.” From The Four Quartets.

I’m stripping down my library, giving books away, and Sue and I have a little game we play. “If I had dementia and I could have one book to read every day and be surprised by again and again, which book would it be?” 

I can’t pare it down to just one. I can pare down to one bookshelf, but not one book. Arundhati Roy, Sylvia Townsend-Warner, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Ted Kooser, Sembène Ousmane: they have all given me such pleasure, such word-craft. From Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Lear. Mary Oliver and Wislawa Szymborska. Even though I don’t admire T.S. Eliot as a person, I would have to have The Four Quartets. They are so deeply inscribed in my brain that lines float up in my dreams and in my speech, unrelated to any conversation, like music. I have written lines from “Burnt Norton” and “Little Gidding” on rocks, on portals, in notebooks. I have carved them into my brain with repetition. 

I’m compiling my own anthology of poems for when I am older still. I’m calling it A Sustaining Book, with a bow to A.A. Milne. 

Seth is in Chicago with GNR and sent me a stunning photograph he made this afternoon (Extra). Instantly I thought, “The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.”