of becoming a monk and living in a library with a little garden and a
wall around me. Apart from the priest’s vague answer, the only information I have about the Carthusian O rder comes from an article in the English Geographical Magazine. But that article was published in the
1930s, at about the time when I was learning to read in my other lifetime that leads back towards the Age of Books. I cannot check the article now because all my old magazines are wrapped in grey plastic garbage bags and stored above the ceiling of my house. I stored them
there three years ago with four hundred books that I will never read
again — I needed more space on my shelves for the latest books I was
buying.
W hat I mainly remember about that article was that it was all text
with no photographs. Nowadays the Geographical Magazine is half-filled
with coloured photographs. I sometimes skip the brief, jargonised
texts of the articles and find all I need to know in the captions under
the photographs. But the 1930s magazines (in the grey plastic bag, in
the twilight above the ceiling over my head) included many an article
with not one illustration. I imagine the authors of those articles as
bookish chaps in tweeds, returning from strolls among hedgerows to
sit at desks in their libraries and write (with fountain pens and few
crossings-out) splendid essays and admirable articles and pleasant
memoirs. I see those writers clearly. I knew them well in the years of
my teens, as the 1920s passed and the Great War loomed ahead.
When those gentlemen-writers post their belles-lettres to editors, they
include no illustrations. The gentlemen actually boast of not knowing how to use cameras or gramophones or other modern gadgets, and their readers love the gentlemen for their charming dottiness. (I
have never learned to use a camera or a tape-recorder, but when I tell
this to people they think I am striking a pose to draw attention to
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myself.)
I do not think the Carthusians would have objected to a gentleman-
writer’s taking a few photographs of their monastery so I assume that
the author of the article trusted his words and sentences to describe
clearly what he saw. The monastery was in Surrey, or it might have
been Kent. This had disappointed me. When I first read the article I
no longer dreamed of becoming a monk, but I liked to dream of
monks living like hermits in remote landscapes; and Surrey or Kent
was too populous for dreams about peaceful libraries. The only place-
name I remember from the article is Parkminster. I looked into my
Times Atlas of the World']xist now and found no Parkminster in the index. (While I looked I vaguely remembered having looked for the same word more than once in the past with the same result.) Parkminster is therefore a hamlet too small to be marked on maps; or perhaps the monastery itself is called Parkminster, and the monks asked the
writer not to mention any place-names in his article because they
wanted no curious sightseers trying to peep into their cells.
But, in any case, the article was published in the 1930s, and for all
I know, the Carthusians and their cells and the word ‘Parkminster’
may have drifted off towards the Age of Monasteries and I may be the
only one who remembers them, or at least what was once written
about them.
Yet, when I think of the man reaching up to his bookshelves, on a
grey afternoon in the year 2020, I see broad gravel paths with trees
above them: whole districts of paths with cells beside the paths and in
every cell a monk surrounded by books and manuscripts.
The man at his bookshelves — the last rememberer of my book —
not only fails to remember what he once read in my book but cannot
remember where he last saw my book on his shelves. He stands there
and tries to remember.
A lay-brother walks along an avenue of his monastery. Lay-brothers
are bound by solemn vows to their monastery, like other monks, but
their duties and privileges are somewhat different. A lay-brother is not
so much confined to his cell. Each day while the priest-monks are in
their cells reading, or reciting the divine office, or tending their
gardens, the lay-brothers are working for the monastery as a whole:
taking messages and instructions and even dealing, in a limited way,
with the world outside the monastery. Each lay-brother knows his way
around some suburb of the monastery; he knows which monk lives behind which wall in his particular district. The lay-brother even gets to know, in a general sense, what the hermit-monks keep in their
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libraries: what books and manuscripts they spend their days reading.
A lay-brother, having only a few books himself, thinks of books and
libraries in a convenient, summary way. He learns to quote in full the
titles of books he has never opened or never seen, whereas a monk in
his cell might spend a year reading a certain book or copying and
embellishing a certain manuscript and thinking of it for the rest of his
life as an enormous pattern of rainbow pages of capital letters spiralling inwards and long laneways of words like the streets of other monasteries inviting him to dream about their cells of books and
manuscripts.
A lay-brother walks along an avenue of the monastery. He has an
errand to undertake but he is in no hurry. This is not easy to explain
to people ignorant of monasteries. Monks behind their walls observe
time differently from the people in the world outside. While only a few
moments seem to pass on an uneventful, grey afternoon outside the
monastery, a monk on the other side of the wall might have turned, at
long intervals, page after page of a manuscript. The mystery can never
be explained because no one has been able to be at once both outside
and inside a monastery.
So, the lay-brother is in no hurry. He stands admiring the vegetables and herbs in each of the gardens of the cells he has been instructed to visit. When each monk has come to the door, the lay-brother asks
him a certain question or questions but with no show of urgency. The
lay-brother will call again, he says, on the next day or, perhaps, on the
day after. In the meanwhile, if the monk could consult his books or his
manuscripts for the needed information. . .
There is more than one lay-brother, of course. There may be
hundreds, thousands, all striding or ambling through the leafy streets
of the monastery while the last of my readers runs a finger along the
spines of his books and tries to remember something of my book. And
although I think of the lay-brothers as walking mostly through a particular quarter or district of the monastery, I know there are districts and more districts beyond them. In one of those districts, I decide on
the grey Sunday afternoon when I have to decide whether to begin my
writing or to go on sipping — in one of those districts, in a cell with
grey walls no different from all the grey walls in all the streets in all the
districts around it, in a collection of manuscripts that has lain undisturbed during many quiet afternoons is a page where a monk once read or wrote what the man in the year 2020 would like to recall. The
monk himself has forgotten most of what he once read or wrote. He
> could, perhaps, find the passage again — if he were asked to search for
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109
it among all the other pages he has read and written in all the years he
has been reading and writing in his cell. But no lay-brother comes to
ask the monk to look for any such page. Outside the monk’s grey walls,
no footstep sounds on many a grey afternoon.
The man cannot remember what he once read in my book. He cannot remember where among his shelves he once put away my thin volume. The man fills his glass again and goes on sipping some costly
poison of the twenty-first century. He does not understand the importance of his forgetfulness, but I understand it. I know that no one now remembers anything of my writing.
So, on many a Sunday afternoon I leave my writing in its folder. I
cannot bring myself to write what will become at last a greyness in a
heap of manuscripts I can hardly imagine.
In the bookshop, I paid for my books and pocketed my change. The
books were still on the table where the man had stacked them while he
checked their prices. The m an waited for me to take away the books
so he could go on with his gazing, but I wanted to say something to the
man. I wanted to reassure him that the books would be safe in their
new home. I wanted to tell him that some of them were books I had
wanted for a long time — unjustly neglected books that would now be
read and remembered.
The topmost book was Precious Bane by M ary Webb. I touched the
faded yellow cloth cover and I told the man that I had been searching
for a long time for Precious Bane; that I intended to read it very soon.
The man looked not at the book or at me but out at the rain. With
his face towards the greyness at his window, he said that he knew Precious Bane well. Or rather, he corrected himself, he had once known the book well. It had been a well-known book in its time. He had read it,
but he hardly remembered it, he said, especially since his health was
not what it had been. But it didn’t matter, he said. It didn’t m atter if
you couldn’t remember anything about a book. The important thing
was to read a book; to store it up inside you. It was all there inside
somewhere, he said. It was all safely preserved. He lifted a hand, as
though he might have pointed to some precise point on his skull, but
then he let the hand fall again into the position where it normally
rested while he gazed.
I took my books home. I entered the titles and the authors’ names
in my catalogue, and then I put each book in its correct place in my
library, which is arranged in alphabetical order according to authors’
surnames.
On the following Sunday, when it was time to stop sipping and to
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Gerald M urnane
begin writing, I thought as usual of the man in the year 2020. He still
tried and failed to remember a certain book, the book that I had written forty years before. But after he had walked away from his shelves and had sat down again to sip, I thought of him as knowing that my
book was still safely preserved after all.
Then I thought of the monastery, and I saw that the sky above it
had been changed. A golden glow was in the air; it was not so much
the yellow of sunlight; more the dark-gold of the cover of Mary Webb’s
unjustly neglected book or the amber of beer or the autumn colour of
whisky. The light in the sky made the avenues of the monastery seem
even more tranquil. The lay-brothers on their way from cell to cell
sauntered rather than walked. Each monk in his cell, when he reached
for a certain book or manuscript, was utterly calm and deliberate.
And when he held up a page to inspect it, the light from his window
lay faintly gold on the intricate pen-strokes or the tinted initials, and
he found with ease what he had been asked to find.
On that afternoon, and on many Sundays afterwards, I wrote while
I sipped. When I next called at the bookshop I had been writing for
six months of Sundays.
After I had paid the man for my books, I told him I was a writer. I
told him I had been writing on every Sunday since I had last seen him.
By the following winter I would have finished what I was writing. And
by the winter after that, my writing would have been preserved in a
book. I wanted the cover of my book to be a rich, gold colour, I told the
man, although he seemed hardly interested. I did not care about the
colour of my dust-jacket, but when forty years had passed and the
jacket had been torn away or lost and my book had been stored in a far
corner of a shop like his, I wanted the gold colour of its spine to stand
out among the greys and greens and dark-blues of all the almost-
forgotten books.
I told all this to the man while he went on gazing out into the sunlight as though it was still the same grey that he had gazed at when he told me about the books he could never forget. But this time the man
would not reassure me. He was the last of a dying race, he told me.
There would be no more shops like his in forty years. If people in those
days wanted to preserve the stuff that had once been in books, they
would preserve it in computers: in millions of tiny circuits in silicon
chips in computers.
The man lifted his hand. His thumb and his index fingers made the
shape of pincers, with a tiny gap between the pads of the two fingers.
He held his fingers for a moment against the light from outside and
Precious Bane
111
stared at the crack between them. Then he let his hand fall, and he
went back to gazing in his usual way.
On the following Sunday I did not go on with the writing that I had
wanted to become a book with dark-gold covers. I sat and sipped and
thought about circuits and silicon chips. I thought of silicon as grey,
the grey of granite when it was wet from rain under a grey sky. And
I thought of a circuit as a grid of gold tracks in the grey. I saw that the
tracks of a circuit would have a pattern hardly different from the paths
of a monastery. The circuits I thought of seemed rather more remote
from me than any monastery. But the pattern was the same. I could
see only thin trails of gold across the grey, but I supposed the gold
came from close-set treetops on either side of the long avenues of the
circuit. The weather over the circuits would have been an endless calm
autum n afternoon, the best weather for remembering.
I still could not imagine what sort of people would walk beneath the
overspreading autumn-gold. But a few Sundays after I had first
thought about circuits, I began to write about a monastery where a
page of writing might have been buried deep beneath a stack of
manuscripts in a grey room but that page would never be lost or forgotten. As I wrote, I believed that my writing itself, my account of the monastery, would rest safely for ever in some unimaginable room of
books under gold foliage in a city of circuits. That monastery, I wrote,
was only a monastery in a story, but the story was safe and so, therefore, was the monastery and everything in it. I saw story, monastery, circuit,, story, monastery, circuit . . . receding endlessly
in the same direction as the lifetime that would have ta
ken me
towards the Golden Age of Books.
But as I wrote I came to see that the monastery was not, of course,
endless. Somewhere, on the far side of the monastery wall, another
greyness began: the greyness of the land of the barbarians, the streetless steppes where people lived without books.
Those people would not always stay on their steppes: the Age of
Books would not go on for ever. One day the barbarians would mount
their horses and ride towards the monastery and turn backwards the
history I had so often dreamed of.
I stopped writing. I poured another drink and looked far into the
deep colour in my glass. Then I read aloud what I had written of my
story, pausing now and then to sip, and after each sip to gaze at the
red-gold sunset in the sky over all that I could remember.
The ballad o f Hilo H ill
©
CHERRY WILDER
My name is Gatlin Kells and I am a balladmaker at the Songfabrik
in Derry, on the shores of the Western Sea. O ur songs and tales
have spread far and wide throughout the Rhom ary land. We have
two presses now at this Derry branch and ten copyists; there is
hardly a boat that comes or goes from Derry town without bringing
us new work from the city or carrying our broadsheets. 1 am not
long out of my apprenticeship but M aster Jup is pleased with my
work. I sing, of course, and play guitar and blockflute but my best
efforts are in seeking out subjects and in writing texts.
Jupiter Star, the master balladmaker, comes from a musical
family; the Songfabrik was founded in Rhomary city by his grandmother, Leona Star. There are branches at Pebble, Silver City and Edenvale, the satellite branches, all run by grandchildren of the
Star family, but our own branch, run by Jupiter, the youngest, has
flourished out of all proportion. Derry is a young town, even by the
standards of this planet, barely fifty years old. It did not get going
as more than a way-station until the great drought drove the Vail
out of the Western Sea: our ancestors were wary of those sea m onsters even if they had a friendly relationship. Derry, from the moment it was settled at all, became a place for news and legends.
Strange Attractors (1985) Page 15
