The first book was a familiar book, the old friend that you can't bear to part with. Whenever I think about moving overseas I always debate whether or not I should lug my heavy, hard-bound copy of Lord of the Rings with me, or if I should just pick up a new edition in some random bookstore I might wander into during some Sunday afternoon while exploring the streets of Dublin or London or Galway.
That was always the toughest decision to make, when packing my things in my head, for my pretend journey to a faraway place: what to do with my books. Music has become wonderfully portable now, TV I can walk away from pretty easily, and movies are everywhere.
My books, though, are always the hardest to leave. Not that I even spend that much time with them, but they're always there, waiting for me, for whatever mood I'm in. I've always been comforted by books, shelves and shelves of them, lining the walls, libraries and bookstores and friends' collections. A home without books is a cold house, a place without life or thought.
So if I'm heading to that deserted island I need to choose carefully. I'm already bringing one book that has given up its secrets to me, and so the second one needs to have some surprises left in it. I thought long and hard about those great novels out there that I haven't read yet, one of the Classics that you have to commit yourself to when reading it. Always wanted to read some Dostoyevsky, or finally try and read me some Dickens, see what he's all about.
I could line up books like Crime and Punishment, Oliver Twist, or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and select the best classic complement to my guilty pleasure, but it wouldn't feel right. Maybe it's partly a "what if I don't like it?" thing, or maybe it's because I just don't want to bring along another thick novel. I need something else.
So I have decided on poetry.
If you are only going to have two books with you, you can't go wrong with a book of good poems. They lend themselves well to repeated readings, and offer up a sense of beauty and comfort (I am all alone on a deserted island, remember.)
Since I'm not really allowed compilations, I choose The Wind Among the Reeds by William Butler Yeats.
While I know "The Song of Wandering Aengus" by heart, and have read most of the poems in this selection already, they are still new to me, still waiting to be studied and read aloud and thought-over. They're full of that ancient-Celtic-romantic-mythological business that I dig so much, and seem to be the appropriate companion to another book which deals in myth and themes of the fading beauty of the world. (Okay, so maybe I do like fantasy a bit more than I realized. But again, if I'm all alone on a boring-ass island, I'm going to want something to escape into. I don't think David Sedaris would quite work in this setting.)
Consider the first poem from The Wind Among the Reeds, "The Hosting of the Sidhe." While perhaps my friends from Dublin might be able to identify more of the place-names and characters in the poem, depending on their own individual knowledge of Irish myth, for me it's the foreignness of the names that excites me, the sound "Clooth-na-Bare" makes when you say it out loud, or the vision of the host riding over those damp green fields with shadowy mountains in the distance.
I've traveled to Ireland enough to know that it's certainly not a magical place full of fairy-like creatures with twinkles in their eyes ready to spirit you off to Tir-na-nOg. I've met enough of the real people there to realize it's a place just like everywhere else, yet not like everywhere else.
There is enough of the Otherness to it, enough of a difference between my home and my background, that still makes it a romantic place to me. The Otherness quickly becomes something strangely familiar to me, something that reaches deep down in my soul and shakes something loose, and it pulls at me and it haunts me and I don't think it will ever go away.
The host is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare;
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,
Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,
Our breasts are heaving our eyes are agleam,
Our arms are waving our lips are apart;
And if any gaze on our rushing band,
We come between him and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart.
The host is rushing 'twixt night and day,
And where is there hope or deed as fair?
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away.
