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The World Is Not Done Yet. Part One.

The Enthusiastic Scholar

Identities that moor us are not created by self-will alone. But also by others seeing and pulling that possible from us.

I have no memory of my father, the Enthusiastic Scholar, without books around.

I turn now to glance at my wall of books. Hundreds on those selves I suppose, marking the decades of interests, studies,inquiries.But now I think, maybe those books don’t represent me at all, but his will for me to be his Thinking Daughter.

My trail of crumbs.

There's alchemy in relationships, in the relational pattern of being.

I’d visit him at the press, another world he’d thought into being.The smell of oranges.

He’d walk down that long hall to the printshop at the back, review the day’s work with the Linotype men.

I like to think he was the link between editorial and that hands-on world of men in canvas aprons and ink stains.

I trace back this affinity to Nebraskan origins, our family owning lumberyards there.The printshop smelled of oranges at my father's press.

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A TIDBIT FROM MY LIBRARY:

"...Writing created history. What did print do to what writing created?... What does the feeling for closure fostered by print have to do with the plotting of historical writing, the selection of theme that historians use to break into the seamless web of events around them so that a story can be told?......early history, though written, was largely the story of wars and political confrontation. Today we have moved to the history of consciousness.”

Walter J. Ong Orality and Literacy

An aging daughter’s father dies. Together they shared a literate view of life, but now her sense of self is dissolving.

In those snowbound winters the Swede and Czech and German farmers gathered; no work could get done, time heavy on their hands in the pockets of their overalls.

Around the heat of that office stove they'd listen to my father's father read in German the literary masters from the OldCountry.A practice in those lost languages of the familiar.

Dad, a boy, and I suppose already an enthusiastic scholar, must have found comfort in the heat of that avocation.In the heat of those stories shared aloud.

Back to: Once I Owned a Bookstore Fwd to: Picking Up The Phone

The Enthusiastic Scholar