Spring light shifts to summer light this morning, I notice, because the sun in my window is in my eyes and this is new. I will walk to school today, slowly. I will pack a lunch, spring greens, cold chicken breast. I will carry milk for tea, Godwin, and the camera. I will walk and read at the same time and compose a paragraph in my head and write it out when I arrive at the office. I will sit in the library where it is dark and cool and look for articles on Lives of the Necromancers and feel a thrill where there are none and a thrill where there are one or two or several. I will emerge from the dark knowing something more and feel perplexed as I do when there is more to know, to read, and squint in the sun and forget that yesterday's darkness put me in a rage.
***
from Godwin's Lives:
The human mind is of so ductile a character that, like what is affirmed of charity by the apostle, it "believeth all things, and endureth all things." We are not at liberty to trifle with the sacredness of truth. While we persuade others, we begin to deceive ourselves. Human life is a drama of that sort, that, while we act our part, and endeavour to do justice to the sentiments which are put down for us, we begin to believe we are the thing we would represent.***
I will clear my desk and pull books from the shelves. I will send out poems. I will walk home, fat backpack on my back, camera astride, and feel the sun on my skin. I will walk and read at the same time and compose a paragraph in my head.
***
As of 1850 there are no book chapters, no journal articles, and no dissertation abstracts on Godwin's Lives of the Necromancers. Not one. The research librarian and I scratched our heads together. What's it like to be the first to write on a book (aside from Godwin's reviewing contemporaries, I mean Poe, for example, who reviewed the thing in December of 1835 for the Southern Literary Messenger)? Strange! Nothing left but to mine the canon of thought on Godwin's other works, which is crazy vast, ranging from political science to philosophy to intellectual history to literary theory and the birth of the gothic novel. I can't even think about it right now.
***
