Favour the Dust Thereof

The reality of a book opens somewhat like a fan and somewhat like a sandwich. But within is found the near miracle of written language, a kind of DNA of cultures. Books are in some respects ourselves; they are not machines-cum-hawkers’ peepholes.

How many people on Earth are called ‘People of the Book’ because of an ultimate fact that God revealed Himself and in His revealing made invitation to us? This belief and a desire to belong ignited a thirst for literacy. The Good Book, our books, ourselves, our humanity, the humanities — our story never as necessary as now. Books should always be in our minds, in our hearts, and on our lips.

Following God into nature gave rise to examinations of all things. The mind seized upon the great possibility that all creation had something to reveal, revelation of the mystery of the interconnectedness of all that God had proclaimed good. The poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet of refined attention, with the classical learning of an old world Jesuit,  provides a summary statement of nature’s yield:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The Holy Ghost, depicted as a dove whispering into the ear of Pope St. Gregory the Great. Legend says that Gregory dictated his books to a scribe. On a particular day, Gregory was dictating the prayers that would become the prayers of the Mass: it was then that the scribe spied the whispering dove. It was this great pope who wrote Dialogues in which he recounts the life of the founder of western monasticism, St. Benedict. Benedict’s spiritual sons and daughters would become a blessing to all civilization, to seekers of the City of God.

Monks and nuns of old are to be praised for copying books by hand, holy writ and other sciences, refreshing readers with the freshness of things, the belonging to the mystery of things, mystical communion. How many hinds’ hides became books before we found yet another grace and fruit of the tree? The merger of trees and knowledge still yields books, a true collaboration and sacrifice. Books, at their best, hand on to us the fruits of contemplation. How consoled readers of the philosopher Josef Pieper have been when encountering the title: Leisure, the Basis of Culture. Yet couldn’t we also think: reading, the basis of culture? Reading cultivates love of God and neighbor.

We should pause to remember that books were meant to be an aid to memory, not a substitute for it. As an aid they promised to keep close what we could risk losing within ourselves. But with the Bible, psalter, and sacramentary the goal was that in our hearing and reading we would be marinated in and transformed into the Word.

The illiterate, unread but read-to Irish of olden days might ask the educated village priest to copy out the prologue of the gospel according to St. John to be placed in a sack and worn around the neck. A kind of relic of the Word made flesh, made word, to be worn close to the flesh. The Irish also fashioned beautiful shrine reliquaries for their sacred books.

For without culture or holiness, which are always the gift of a very few, a man may renounce wealth or any other external thing, but he cannot renounce hatred, envy, jealousy, revenge. Culture is the sanctity of the intellect. [William Butler Yeats, journal, 7 March, 1909]

Culture ultimately means life, love, and worship. The book is an object; felt as a weight, fragrant pages, protected for the mysteries held therein in the writing. It is opened and closed, carried, stored. It requires a culture and aids a culture. Not as true of these glowing screens which become masters and overlords, envious of any contemplative distances, always crying for an upgrade leaving us wandering in the desert of NEVER ENOUGH. CAVEAT EMPTOR! Let us never buy that all of that is the same as a book.

We can find many people and places which gave form, care, celebration, and shelter to books. Books by which we are formed, in which we celebrate, and in which we often find shelter. In my youth my grandmother told stories of terrible thunder and lightning storms in the farm fields of Pennsylvania where she was raised. At these times of terror her mother would take down the family Bible, that necessary book, and read “till the storms of destruction” passed by.

Andrew Carnegie built libraries all over the United States; John Pierpont Morgan built his own collection of rare and fine books in New York City; John Singer Sargent painted murals for the Boston Public Library. These few examples should give us pause to be grateful in this season of Thanksgiving, All Souls, and even haunted houses.

Books can haunt us, often they abide in mind, heart, imagination. Part of their charm. Where are the places we found our first reads? For many Americans the local library was a treasure palace that could not be afforded privately at home. The library, an entire building in which to house books. Still the story passes down: there was a great library that burned, before the time of Christ, at Alexandria, Egypt. Archimedes is said to have studied there. What was lost is the burning? Books had to be cared for, fire could take them quickly.

There arose too almost mythological beings called librarians, enforcers of silence before patrimony, tradition, and delight among the stacks and within the pages. Readers were busy communing with worlds beyond themselves — so be quiet! It is no surprise that the library took on aspects that had echoes in the imagination of church.

The fantasy author Gregory McGuire described his experience of the neighborhood library thus:

To pull open the heavy oak door of the library! — then to encounter, first, the silence; and slowly to note the creak of floorboards and the squeak of rubber soles on grey linoleum tacked down in heavily trafficked areas. Then to hear the clank of antique radiators and to smell the radiator heat. Then to notice the pleasant odor of old lady clothes, and of those replacement library bindings, which seemed to be made of plastic chitin and gave off a noxious smell that provided a good buzz. Then, at the same moment, both to smell and to see the wood varnish on the golden lintels and rood screens and turned bannisters of the magnificent staircase… It was a kind of heaven.

The children’s room was at the top of this great set of steps. One climbed with gusto much as a salmon returns, undaunted, to home. Nowadays no one would put a children’s room up so many steps, but back then it seemed a happy enough penance, like that felt upon mounting the steps of an altar.

Nowadays, as children of the world, we find it hard to climb, to endure. Some of those old libraries — in which fire was as feared as in an old movie house — were hot as a blast furnace, and with the heat came dust. We are dust. Fire and heat, bless the Lord!

The pilgrim Irish would gather the dust of the Holy Land to carry home and mingle it with their own graves because:

He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the dunghill; That he may set him with princes, even with the princes of his people. (Psalm 113: 7-8)

The prince of a people, The Prince of Peace. What comes from our dust?

Eleanor Farjeon, lover of the Word and words, author of children’s stories and the hymns “Morning Has Broken” and the Advent standard “People, Look East,” recalled the blessed and mystical dust of her own childhood bookroom:

“If some of my frequent sore throats were due to the dust in the Little Bookroom, I cannot regret them. No servant ever came with duster and broom to polish the dim panes through which the sunlight danced, or sweep from the floor the dust of long-ago. The room would not have been the same without its dust: star-dust, gold-dust, fern-dust, the dust that returns to dust under the earth, and comes up from her lap in the shape of a hyacinth. 'This quiet dust,' says Emily Dickinson, an American poet—

This quiet dust was Gentlemen and Ladies,
   And Lads and Girls:
Was laughter and ability and sighing,   
   And frocks and curls.

And an English poet, Viola Meynell, clearing her ledges of the dust that 'came secretly by day' to dull her shining things, pauses to reflect—

But O this dust that I shall drive away
   Is flowers and kings,
Is Solomon’s temple, poets, Nineveh...

When I crept out of the Little Bookroom with smarting eyes, no wonder that its mottled gold-dust still danced in my brain, its silver cobwebs still clung to the corners of my mind. No wonder that many years later, when I came to write books myself, they were a muddle of fiction and fact and fantasy and truth. I have never quite succeeded in distinguishing one from the other, as the tales in this book that were born of that dust will show. Seven maids with seven brooms, sweeping for half-a-hundred years, have never managed to clear my mind of its dust of vanished temples and flowers and kings, the curls of ladies, the sighing of poets, the laughter of lads and girls: those golden ones who, like chimney-sweepers, must all come to dust in some little bookroom or other — and sometimes, by luck, come again for a moment to light.”

Reverence for the dust of Jerusalem or Nineveh, of all that settles upon our books. Now many may see books only, like an award plaque, as dustable. The sometime sought out used bookstore, The Strand in New York City, now sells books by the foot, according to color. Our cosmetics, ourselves. A whole rainbow of colors is available; the dove of Peace is a deeper matter.

Books serve to engage us in the handing down of culture, the work of tradition, in connecting us to our saints, scholars, poets, storytellers, family and God. Here again I mean an understanding of culture that means life, love, and worship. Culture in this sense cannot admit of death, it is always of life, otherwise it would not truly be culture. People-of-the-Book-and-books must remember the generosity of the handing on of books, the sacred character of the action and the physicality of the weighty tome or ephemeral booklet.

What are your book stories? When did you receive the gift of a book and couldn’t wait to hide away and read it? What was read to you? What became your favorite section of the library? The author Rumer Godden visited Eleanor Farjeon when Eleanor was old. Farjeon knew how to pass on a story. She told Godden a story of generosity received by her father Benjamin from when he was 13 years old:

“One day, when he was going to work, he saw a book open in a window and stopped to read the pages; he was so fascinated that he came back, day after day, hoping to read more and each day found the page turned by the bookseller, so that he could read on.”

So that he could read on. The Church, in the liturgy and liturgical seasons, turns the pages so we can read; and as through the kindly bookseller’s window, we can see ourselves as in a mirror as we read. Keep on keeping on, reading on, the Good Book and all good books.

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Gerald Coleman writes from Maryland.

Excelsior Library, Guthrie, Oklahoma, 2024 - Photograph by Lydwine

NOTES. The title comes from a verse of the King James translation of the Holy Bible “For thy servants take pleasure in her stones, and favour the dust thereof.” (Psalm 102:14) - The poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J. is “God’s Grandeur”, found in Mortal Beauty, God's Grace: Major Poems and Spiritual Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Vintage Spiritual Classics, 2003) - An example of a relic parchment of St. John’s Gospel Prologue in Irish culture is found in Graveyard Clay: Cré na Cille by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, first published in the Irish language 1949, translated by Tim Robinson (Yale University Press, 2017) - St Gregory the Great: Dialogues, translated by Odo John Zimmerman (Fathers of the Church Series, Catholic University of America Press, 2002) - Yeats’ quote from W.B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III: Autobiographies (Touchstone, 1999) - Gregory McGuire, author of Wicked, writes of his neighborhood library in Albany, N.Y., quoted online at www.uppermadison.org/history/library and in The History of Here: A House, the Pine Hills Neighborhood, and the City of Albany by Akum Norder (SUNY Press, 2018) - Eleanor Farjeon’s delightful short stories with an afterword by Rumer Godden are found in The Little Bookroom (New York Review Children's Collection, 2020)