I grew up surrounded by books—in the back hallway along which our bedrooms lay, in the living room and the family room, in my bedroom and my brother’s bedroom and my parents’ bedroom, almost all in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined up one beside the next. At my grandparents’ houses, the shelves lined most every available wall surface, running low along the corridors below paintings and portraits, covering the walls of studies, filling the empty spaces at the end of every bed. These books appealed to all ages, including children’s stories my parents or I once read as well as the fiction that youngsters and adults alike can enjoy (Agatha Christie, Dickens, Carson McCullers—you could take your pick) and novelists and nonfiction authors as disparate as Isak Dineson, Hemingway, McPhee, Theroux and Theoreau, and the Russian masters.
When I was little and couldn’t sleep, I sometimes snuck out of my bedroom, tiptoeing not because I was breaking any rules but because I enjoyed having quiet time in the house to myself. There was a particular book on a particular shelf that I always went for, stretching to get it down from its high perch. Sometimes I would sit with it in a rocking chair, turning on just one light beside me; other times, I would lie in my bed with only the desk lamp on, and I would finger the gold leaf of the page edges; run a hand down the soft, smooth leather cover; trace my finger tip over the gold embossed titling. When I flipped the book open, I was gentle with the razor-thin pages that rustled and slipped like the translucent pages of a Bible, turning them slowly, precisely, and reading a few poems as I went. I’m sure that it was the fanciness of the book’s binding, not the contents of its pages, that first drew me to it; but what I found inside was equally magical—the poetry of the greats.
For years I knew no other poets than those highlighted in the verses of this anthology, knew no other compilations of their works. But when I was 14, on a day I remember vividly and have written about before, while seated atop the soft cushion of my brother’s shag-carpet floor, I pulled from a stack of books so deep and wide it took up more space than I did a yellow hard-backed book that I read at once, from cover to cover, and that I continued to read regularly for years to come. It was
The Sea And the Bells by Pablo Neruda, and it won me over to poetry for good. I still remember the heft of the book in my hands, the crinkling of the library’s laminate around the cover; I remember, too, the beautiful new copy my brother bought me as a gift, with its thin body and crisp pages that soon softened from my persistent touch.
As a senior in high school I wrote an analysis of that book, having come to know what Neruda believed to be the crisp, clear truth of a bell, having understood all along his love of the sea. (What I wrote in opening the paper to explain all that was this:
When Pablo Neruda wrote the poems which are compiled into The Sea and the Bells,
he was aware of his approaching death. The book became his effort at establishing that he had lived and establishing nature as the force that had sustained him until it came time for him to return back to the earth in his death. The sea, along with other aspects of nature, was his driving force; it provided for him spiritual renewal. In this book he wished to express his thanks for this renewal by praising nature and all its glory, which is most resonantly seen in this untitled poem which is an aubade of sorts:
I am grateful, violins, for this day
of four chords. Pure
is the sound of the sky,
the blue voice of air.
For Neruda, the bell was a symbol of truth as he envisaged it: the sound of a bell is clear and resonant, a sound that is known by all who hear it. When heard, it is known to be beckoning home a ship or a loved one or to be reminding someone of something of the past. It is a calling or a recalling, and it is known by all. And what makes this sound, releases this clarity, is but a small metal object enclosing nothing, emptiness. The crux of Neruda's belief about bells was that these truths for which he yearned were released from emptiness, the interminable silence which he sought out in those final days of his life.
Is the sea there? Tell it to come in.
Bring me
the great bell, one of the green race,
Not that one, the other one, the one that has
a crack in its mouth,
and now, nothing more, I want to be alone
with my essential sea and the bell.
I don't want to speak for a long time,
silence! I still want to learn,
I want to know if I exist.
This yearning to establish himself, to show himself that he had existed, was driven by his passion for nature and his belief that it was nature that could renew him and give him the vigor to go on until the day when he would return through "the door of earth" to the sea and the ground and the silence. . . .)
By that time, I owned at least 10 volumes of his poetry (within a few more years the count would reach 17, including his autobiography), all bilingual editions from which I learned the Spanish words for everything to do with nature, love, and passion. In college, my brother—knower of all important things—took me to the Harvard Poetry Bookstore, introduced me to the one-room shop from which I would buy all my poetry over the next four years. The store had a single owner and seller, a quiet older woman with a serious expression and a tendency to hand me books without speaking more than a few words (
I think you’ll like this one. / Try it. / Let me know what you think.). The store brought new meaning to bookshelves everywhere, with books filling every inch of space from the floor to the ceiling, covering every tabletop, standing propped for display in each window. She had to climb a ladder to find some of the rarities, but she had everything, it seems to me now (having failed, recently, to find a particular book I wanted to give to a friend in any of the mainstream bookstores in the vicinity), and more importantly, she knew every one of them. And she knew me.
The first time we went there, my brother told her my passion for Neruda and she handed me Octavio Paz, assuring me that I would enjoy him, and she was right. Later I told her the poems I was liking in English class or had stumbled across in high school—Adrienne Rich’s “Solstice,” Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” or A.R. Ammons’ “Easter Morning”—and she would find me books by these poets or by others with similar tendencies; she would educate me, enliven me—this quiet woman with the serious face. I’ll never forget her expression when one day after four years like this I showed up with a friend in tow—a smart guy built like an athlete, dressed perpetually in exercise wear, and though she may have sized him up one way she did not smirk when I explained that he wanted to learn poetry “from the beginning,” as he had put it to me; she did not frown; did not even hesitate. Instead she pulled from a shelf one of the fattest books of poetry I have ever seen, a Norton anthology that started with Blake and Byron, and as she handed it to him and he began to—like she would—study it quietly, she stepped back from us and took a seat at her desk and then smiled at me, just that one time, a radiant vision of satisfaction. She thought I had found a new kind of love and so did I, but what matters for this story is not him or that feeling I had but rather her pleasure in being the provider of all these wondrously arranged words about such feelings and many, many others.
It is she who, without ever speaking it, taught me that there is a poem to encapsulate every experience, a poet who has felt something like anything I’ve ever felt. Like the books in my houses, these poems have surrounded me in my life, have quietly, restfully always been there for me, reflecting back at me whatever I am thinking; expanding or reframing or perfectly capturing my understanding of the world around me. For years these poems and distant poets have kept me company. To them and to her I am grateful; of the clarity of the emptiness from which each one forms the crisp ring of a bell I am constantly in awe.
