To thine own self be true

(arguably Orson’s greatest turn as an actor: the WW II racketeer Harry Lime in the Vienna sewers on the lam from the law in Graham Greene’s The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed with Welles’  improvised speech about Swiss cuckoo clocks on the Great Wheel).

“Good evening, ladies and gentleman. My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear onstage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?”
…………………………..
“I am large, I contain multitudes.”–Whitman
“Too many lives to lead and not enough time”–Randy Bachman, “Undun”

(the exterior of the hardback)

(page 1)

(the limitations page, signed and numbered)

Today I received my expensive, very rare, fine-conditioned, slipcased 1930 book of Virginia Woolf’s A Street Haunting, the only book which she had published in the States as a limited signed edition of 500. There are only 8 more of these out there for sale in the world online in various conditions. Woolf signed the book in purple ink. It is very interesting to handle the book and limitations page, intuiting her presence and tactile contact with both.

I’ve been ‘living with’ Woolf the past year, going through her diaries and reading and listening to other works so this comes as a meaningful conclusion to my research and relationship with her works. As said before here, I continue to be a very lucky man.

putting non-English speakers on the front lines of computers, reception and answering desks, and online assistance. This is strictly Tower of Babel stuff goin’ down today/everyday/everywhere in Canada. Defies common sense, the basic concept of service, and is an insult or major frustration to customers.

(two big thumbs up–the thoughtfulness, artfulness and pacing of this strong production is better than 90% of the crap out there on movie and tv screens today–BBC/Warner)

Certainly one of his best along with Great Expectations and Bleak House. The BBC productions of GE & OMF are outstanding, in particular. OMF is centered around money, class, and relationships–a theme he explores in the books mentioned above. Nobody ever did this better to the extent that these Dickens’ books remain key reference points for people living in our time. His themes, conflicts, and characters do not date.
As Boffins puts it, “Money, money, money…” A theme picked up on by many famous writers later including dreiser (Sister Carrie), Wharton (The Age of Innocence) and Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby). There is no question, incidentally, that Fitzgerald read OMF–the Valley of Ashes owes much to the dust heaps of OMF.
‘It’s all there’ in OMF–friendship, betrayal, irrational and violent impulses, exploitation, relationships, generosity, hate, love, etc. Dickens always scored well on patterns, themes, and symbols in English classrooms of high school and university in days of yore. In OMF, beyond the money/class central subject, the two main symbols are the river and the ash heaps inland. Both are symbols of life, materialism, death, even love and hate. Dickens had a fantastic imagination and saw steadily and whole into human nature and a wide, representative range of human characters and possibilities. For my money, because of his artful canon, he remains the most significant novelist writing in English ever, and easily deserves a place alongside Shakespeare and the other great writers.

The necessary and comforting routines.
The connection to Nature.
The things to be/get done.
Maintaining or moving ahead on various processes and projects.
Making plans for the day, week, month, year–‘setting things in motion’
Exercising/movement.
Some solitude and leisure.
Personal growth and learning. Whatever personal and creative expression.
Occasional selected connecting or reconnecting. Family contact usually. Friends weekly.
The day’s consciousness, thinking, and periodic blog sharings of my life story, process, momentous understandings and insights preserved on this site.

Grade 7, spring dance. I asked Jim Boyce who was wheelchair-bound if he wanted to go to the dance and, if so, I’d pick him up and take him. Fortunately, it was a nice Friday evening and I rolled Jim several blocks to the dance. When we got to the dance, we parted, but later I looked for him to go home. He was already waiting inside the front entrance ready to leave. He had phone for a ride and I helped him out to the car. he was an interesting, funny guy, Jim and I always wondered what happened to him since he didn’t show up in the senior high school a block away three years later.

Grade 11, Key Club trip to Ottawa on spring break. Went to the opening dance and met a pretty girl Linda Lashley. Walked her home and thought that was the end of it. A few days later, the wife-mother of the Japanese family I was staying with unexpectedly came up to my bedroom. (The nicest house I had ever stayed in; Her husband was in Kiwanis–the Key Club affiliate; I was billeted with them–beautiful people, beautiful house.) She said “There’s a call for you from Linda.” She and I had a great talk and traded addresses, promising to write.

The trip finished with a last evening Stones concert at the Ottawa arena. I still remember Mick prancing around the stage, pointing at the teenyboppers crying  “And I need you-you. I need you-you-you.” I left the show early with two other guys I was with to go to one friend’s place to get our bags. The friend called for a taxi early before he was even finished packing. Within minutes, the cab was downstairs; we could see it out the high-rise window. We then panicked (not being familiar with meters and taxis) and finished the packing and got downstairs relieved to find the meter was not already running. The cab got us to the station for the train leaving at midnight for Winnipeg with about 30 other guys from our school and another in a sleeper at the end of the train.

That trip was the first time that many of us had been out of province and travelling without adult supervision. (On the train coincidentally, in the club car was my Jamaican grade 10 teacher  heading to T.O. He was surprised to see me pulling a Holden Caulfield, smoking like a pro, “Rick, I didn’t know you smoked!”  It was all very wild and a lot of fun. Coming back, a friend and I asked the engineer if we could ride with him in the engine, which we did for about an hour at night. That train, I’ll swear, looked like it was running off the tracks whenever it went around curves!

Anyway, the punchline. I’d given up ever hearing from Linda again as summer rolled around. I had checked for mail after supper one evening while home alone in the apartment listening to top 40 radio. The announcer said “Now here is the next big hit of The Rolling Stones” and “No Satisfaction” came on; it was the first time I had heard it with its memorable fuzz riff. I looked at the envelope and it was a letter from Linda Lashley. She had a lot to say, but it felt like we would never meet again and we never did. Interesting the synchronicity of the Stones music. This from a band I did not like , preferring The Beatles, instead.

Jim Boyce and Linda Lashley, where art thou today?

More or less what Arthur Miller said to a young man who was feeling depressed and unimportant at the time.

Unabashedly, I will state that I’ve long been a proud and relatively happy individual and individualist. “To thine own self be true” going back to studying Hamlet in grade 12 and all that.

I was talking to the most beautiful knockout East Indian bank associate by chance yesterday at length yesterday. She has been in this country for 6 years, and moved up in the bank echelons within 4 short years. Remarkable young lady.

Anyway she asked about what I did and I said I wrote some 60 odd books and that she might have studied some of them depending on when and where she was educated. She said she never read and in a flash I saw her completely differently. My own trajectory and journey has been heavily reading-based. And yesterday I bought the most expensive book I will ever own. A rather expensive signed limited ed. of a Virginia Woolf rare ed. signed in purple ink by Woolf.

Now how many people do you know who still read? How many people do you know who have a library or collect books? How many people do you know who collect signed ephemera and books by great writers? How many people do you know who’ve spent thousands on book collecting? How many people do you know who read Virginia Woolf? Who do you know who has a signed book by her? How many people do you know who have a book of hers signed in purple ink? Who do you know who would write about this experience on a blog? How people do you know who have completed a unique blog on Canadian literature? How many people do you know who have a blog called Tothineownselfbetrue? How many people do you know who are writing in Woolf-Montaigne manner online today? How many people do you know who vaguely resemble any of the above?

As Miller said, we are each of us unique and there is only one of us ever. Elsewhere, in this blog is a Dave Brubeck signed letter to a young fan who wrote to the jazz great for advice. His reply was I can’t tell you how to live or how to do things, or give you advice. His point, similarly, is that there are no 2 ‘snowflakes’ out there. Joseph Campbell said much the same thing about knights of old entering the dark forest on life’s journey. Each one had a different path in and a different experience.

Let me just say that I am glad that my life experience has been so wonderfully different and fulfilling as I reach this climactic moment in book collecting, and completely and happily different from the woman in the bank. Every day, I am glad I can read, think, and have wide and fuller consciousness about my life experience so far. Woolf’s book is an affirmation and high achievement in a number of my processes. I have been reading her heavily the past year, including her diary. I have gotten very close to her. And this book will, no doubt, add another powerful intimate dimension and presence to my inner life and spiritual satisfaction.

And I would dare to add that you will not find me elsewhere out there in any other individual and that I feel very lucky to have developed into the person and individual I am. I would not change or have changed a jot or iota.

As reported July 9, I finished Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost which I had a strange intuition and compulsion to re-read. Within 2 days of this, a Calgary white woman was found dead, killed by a black friend.
Now one might say ironic coincidence, but I’m not 100% sure. I believe there are mysterious ‘vibrations’ and ‘energies’ which other people can and do pick up on. Of all the thousands of books in my library, why did I pick that one with such a strong intuitive feeling of rightness and relevance?
I will just add that everyone’s responses to tragedies like this week’s is affected by their various contexts. How I responded to this event was definitely influenced by my reading. Initially, my response was “How relevant Callaghan’s book still is over 70 years later” and “Plus ca change…” in terms of both the truths of literature and life experience.

I’ve often said “Timing is everything”, a statement I would put beside Updike’s “Context is all.” Sometimes one is struck by the unfortunateness and tragicness of timing (as much as the serendipitous) in whatever coincidence and synchronicity.

Following a white van with white tape completely covering the large broken back window. Some of the tape was peeling away which gave the effect of cerements loosening from a corpse. Anyway rather Poeish moment in my morning.

Mandel or Iveson?