Over the years I have come across plenty of books that were destined for landfill. Whether through the various work places I had been, the charities which moved individuals from independence to “assisted” living and then the charity shops places themselves which can’t afford the bin fees to dump the excess they receive. Among these books, I have come across notes and journals. Small increments of intimate writing, sketches from a human past long forgotten but for these ink spots on paper, they remain as remnants that once mattered.
I had the intention of writing something cynical or even dreary, instead I found in the handwriting of those now long dead, some thoughts that seemed important enough to type up. From the minds of those who in their lives, a century or decades ago had a future ahead of them, reflected and observed, or even lashed out at a world around them.
Perhaps, this is a follow up to the meandering prose The Inner Light, or maybe inside of these words is an illuminating energy for any who care to read or ruminate upon. As we as a species once did.
In a diary, I found at a woman’s house who had passed away, she was in her late eighties, her family wanted, “everything thrown away,” so accordingly her life’s possessions reduced to landfill and the precious real estate she had lived in, the priority for the living, those who knew her and those who professionally gain from such occurrences. I salvaged what I could, to donate, or even keep. There is a tragic inhumanity to discarding photos, and notebooks like this. Physical media, technology once impressive now reduced to, meh, thrown away. The technology most often to be discarded, the book, especially those handwritten by regular people. A person like Mary and her diary.
Dated 1962, Mary wrote, “the birds have the idea to fly far and wide. They don’t see boundaries or care for language. They fly, high and wide. They visit where they please. It’s for us, mankind, to bury them inside cages. Imagine that, a creature capable of freedom, to clip their wings and cage them so we may watch them, make them sing for us. Imagine that.”
Imagine that. It’s with eerie camaraderie of thought that I reflect upon a piece, I wrote almost a decade ago which carries similar observance. Mary added further down the page, “I clipped my wings, or had them clipped for me. Who knows any more?”
She wrote in lovely handwriting in 1967, “I see they have sent more young men to another country to fight a war. I wonder what the gain would be. To stop communism? That’s what they claim. I wonder if they send warriors to fight the Viet-Namese over there so the politicians and powerful remain safe here. It seems pointless.”
And from 1968, “I have stopped believing in love. I must hear it in every song lyric. I don’t care for it. I will not have it. I have loved twice. Alistair and Nigel. Both loved me, I them. Alistair and I were young. Nigel, he should have known better. He picked a career over our love, now he travels the world and I stay here, lost and heartbroken. It’s what a man must do I am told. And, what a woman must wonder, hope for his safety and remain locked at home in blue tears? I will not have love spoken to me again.”
Many books have in them inscribed on the side of pages in tiny hand writing notes and thoughts to accompany the prose. One such book, a Penguin edition of The Essential James Joyce, Devesh had written his name in the early pages, along with the date 1995. I am assuming it was around that time when he wrote his notes.
“Why must he select words so ugly? He for a moment can write with elegance and superior texture and now he must be ever so dreadful.”
A few pages later, he wrote, “I wept.”
Among a pile of family bibles dating back to the late nineteenth century, I found a note book dated 1933 with glorious penship. The author, I am assuming a woman by the name of Bea. Much of the writing is on Christ and the human relationship with God. It is a selection of biblical quotes and additional thoughts relating to them. Beyond, I found a gentle sentence, “if I could find it in my heart to love my brother as much as I do God, then I would be a better sister.”
The following page she had written, “the measure of a man is in his character. Not his words. The measure of mankind is in the wisdom it finds from words.”
Another lady whose home had been reduced to a house for sale, had a library full of mystery and crime fiction. Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Ruth Rendell and vintage Dorothy L Sayers books. Alongside a row of books, she had a pile of notebooks filled in her handwritting, picking through clues and her own thoughts. Adding dates and page numbers, accordingly. Attempting to solve the crimes along with the author, page by page and sentence by sentence. At the end of one page full of notes she had written, “it’s never the most obvious lie, only the most ambitious truth told over and over again.”
Other journals and notebooks were less profound, slight monuments to the mundane of life. Bills to be paid, shopping lists, items to be bought. Others are notes on income, accounting for a household. What may seem ever modest in today’s inflated world, was dear and went far in a time before easy credit and debt dependency. In one note book payments and incoming money written light, along with slashing sentence written by a heavy hand, “You are a failure!”
And near the end of one such notebook, “Kill yourself, no one will miss you.” Many of the books, were from suicides. I am uncertain as to whether this one was. They all remain clumped together, thrown and discarded. Unimportant pages according to the living. Landfill.
When Bradbury imagined his fireman who burned books. The symbolism was dystopian and obvious. We live in a world now of proud illiteracy, it’s not just that books are seen as a hindrance in their physical form. Even online, they are things not to be read, unless they are trending, and forgive me, light escapism. In the many piles, I was unable to rescue, re-home. Were countless thoughts and whispers written in ink along with the printed words telling stories, revealing knowledge and recording history. All to be buried beneath dirt and rubbish.
Other books I have saved from landfill, to be pulped into cat litter. Feline toilets. An excess of books with no readership is one thing, a disdainful public above reading is an all together fascinating state of humanity. As the online content creators produce digital slop, artificial bots generating streams for the feed to be forgotten and many books what may reduced to memes and vapid quotes. There lies countless millions of words, wrapped in wisdom and experiences. Glimmers of alien and familiar viewpoints. many now lost to the edge of time.
In a page from a water soaked journal written by John, dated 1978, “I hope what comes in the next decade is a better world. A smarter age. To think soon it will be a new century, to call it the 21st century. The time will be a bright future and wise, smart people every one well read and enlightened. Healthy in mind and body. No more wars and slavery when the people are secure with knowledge. The 21st century.”
John also wrote, later on that year, “I love my wife. More than ever now that she is gone. Burying the woman you love is the hardest thing a man can do. I wish it was me and not her. I wish I took the cancer from her body. I hope in the coming years we learn to beat cancer and other diseases. I wish I had the answer and was a smarter man and a better one. I love you Carole with all of my soul. I wish I was a better man and husband for you. I am sorry. You deserved the promises I made. I failed you. I love you.”
Lost inside of pages, are human moments that are not fabricated for the frenzy of diminished attention spans. There are intimate moments, and triumphant ambitions. Language allows us to frame and understand things beyond the material, the present. The abstract, to spiritual and the elements beyond us.
I will end on one final entry, Jane, from perhaps 2005 wrote, “I was blessed with another grandchild. Five now. Tabitha is healthy and like her mother a little shit. I don’t have favourites, no mother should. If Tabitha grows to be a shit like her mother, I will have grey hairs. Too late, they are already grey!”
