Rabbit trails to delight: an ode to my bookshelves
Literary adventures in my home office
I am working on gratitude. It’s a long story, but suffice it to say, my hope is that gratitude is an antidote to creeping resentment and sadness. Maybe it’s the lengthening nights, but I’m trying to stave off a creeping darkness. So I’m working on gratitude.
In that spirit, let me give thanks for my home office, a haven and a sanctuary. It is intimate: just 10’ x 10’. But it is a creative home for body & soul. William Morris wallpaper adorns the walls (here in this Arts & Crafts house on Morris Avenue). In the corner is a cozy Morris Chair. I work from a small Mission desk and a couple of smaller Mission bookshelves supplement several stacks of oak barrister’s shelves. There are pictures of my wife and children pasted all around me, various memento cards from museums, and treasures from our travels, including a “Tree of Life” rug we brought home as a very special souvenir from Tunisia. I love to light candles, surprised, in my old age, to be so easily joyed by olfactory delights.
Here in my home library I keep close at hand the books that are close to my heart: a rotating selection of philosophy related to my current book project, and then shelves and shelves of poetry, criticism, fiction, and literary journals. I am sometimes overwhelmed by all the treasures that are so ready-to-hand (sorry, Heidegger joke).
Today, within the comfy confines of this treasured space, I enjoyed an unexpected journey of the imagination for which I can only say thank you.
It started with reading Garth Greenwell’s wonderful recollection of the poet Louise Glück. When it comes to Garth, I am a hopeless fangirl, so I’ll try to keep this professional. But in his Substack, Garth’s voice is so wonderfully intimate without devolving to some feigned familiarity. He weds this to a critical sensibility that changes how you see the world. (So, while I’m at it, let me also say: I am so grateful for Garth Greenwell.)
In the middle of his recollection, Garth mentions that he interviewed Frank Bidart for the Paris Review, and I was like, “Wait a minute! How did I not know this?!” I turned to see beside me the shelf where Bidart’s Half-Light: Collected Poems currently sits nearby (thanks, as I recall, to Garth’s enthusiastic recommendation).
But then I turned to my other shelf—very eclectic, half a mess, where the Christmas cactus sits on a random stack of literary journals.
Sure enough, there was Paris Review 229 with the Frank Bidart interview. I slipped it out from the stack and was taken back to the summer of 2019. (This was before I had met Garth, so perhaps the connection hadn’t registered at the time.) I opened the Table of Contents. As an exercise in humility (lots of spiritual exercises for me today!), let me show you an embarrassing little habit I have:
Meet studious Jamie. The Jamie who does his homework. The Jamie who is always trying to make up for the lack of a proper education. The working class boy who will always be inside me and has something to prove. Even a literary journal is something to be inhaled, conquered, and comprehended.
But not even that can mitigate the joy I find in these pages. And following this rabbit trail through my office was all worth it just to recall this incredible poem by Campbell McGrath, a poem that braids together some of the things dearest to me: the Pacific Coast Highway and Saint Augustine, the blue of the Pacific and, yes, even bookshelves. McGrath’s poem is a cosmic tour that was the perfect culmination to the unexpected journey of the mind I was able to enjoy here today, for which I am grateful.
