It's possible that I may be one of the world's great stumblers. I suppose that is the lot (or the little) of an autodidact, that is someone who is essentially self-taught.
Self-taught, of course, is not entirely accurate. I have all the university degrees you can shake a stick at. And, in fact, I still attend classes--online or wherever I can find them. Also, events like The New Yorker Festival, where I've heard Robert Caro and Jill Lepore and David Remnick speak, and One Day University, when it was still operating, where you could hear lectures by notable college professors.
The other day--about two months ago, that is--I attended a zoom lecture on typography via Cooper Union, by David Quay. HERE. Because I can, I reached out to Mr. Quay and had a nice 90-minute talk with him. It's amazing what's within pixel's distance if you have a brain wired for curiosity and the frenetic front paws of a bunny digging down rabbit holes.
As Mark Twain is said to have said, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Twain, like Yogi Berra could probably also have said, "I never really said all the things I said." But the less said on that matter, the better.
Last week I read an obituary in The Times on a guy called Allan Ludwig, with the epithet, "The Founding Father of Gravestone Studies." You can, and should read it here.
I came upon this section of the obituary, and quickly made my long-eared passage to abebooks.com.
I soon found a near-mint edition of this book for less than a week's-worth of extortionate chain-store coffee. It arrived by post post-haste in less than a week.
I read somewhere that the great writer Umberto Eco had amassed a library, over the course of his long life of over 30,000 books. To read that many books, you'd have to read a book a day for 80 years and you'd still have 80 left un-read. No matter, there's a wisdom to be gained by just flipping through things, just being nearby things that fill your soul, even if you can't dive into their deep end. I'm no Umberto Eco--I probably have 10,000 books. But adding 20,000 is not a bad or unreasonable goal to see me through my remaining dotage.
Sometimes I pick up a book like the one above. I imagine after I'm dead it sitting in a card-board box in my driveway as some estate-sale operator is getting rid of my crap. The box will be labelled 50¢ or 'free.' I think my daughters will net about $12 from those objects that have sustained my life for so long.
It's the week between Christmas and New Year. I'm not only not working, I'm still sick. My kidney stones have been followed by a case of diverticulitis, which is painful in a kidney stone-like manner. In all, the pain prevents me from resting, reading, speaking or viewing. And of course, writing is near impossible, though I pecked out this post, along the way, spelling "the" "te" and "though" "thoh". And "apologies" "abologies."
I realized how blessed I am in my misery. How amid all the corruption and societal crumbling all around us, amid all the marjorietaylorgreening of amerkin-life, I have been given a mind and a curiosity and a drive to stumble upon the next thing and the next. What's more, I have the will and the money to buy the book and sit with it and learn from it and rabbit-hole thanks to it to get to the next rabbit-hole.
Maybe it's the stumbling and the rabbit-holing that keeps me whole, or at least whole in part. Where a song, or a joke or a 90-year-old Laurel and Hardy clip will lodge in my head and make life bearable for another twenty minutes until the next acute pain episodes forward.
In Graven Images I took an iphone snap shot of a epitaph Ludwig found on a particular New England gravestone from about 250 years ago. Feeling as I feel, it seem written for me and will serve to end my post.
As always, thank you for reading.
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