A Book of Verse – and Thou

Many years ago I worked for Holmes Book Company in Oakland, California. It was one of those lovely old bookstores that have pretty much disappeared along with the dodo and saying “Joe and me” rather than “me and Joe.”

I’d just dropped out of High School and I needed the work. It looked better than bagging groceries. And, and, I can’t say how lucky I was to get that particular job. While my prospects weren’t very good, I had one thing going for me. I loved to read. And as it turned out Holmes and eventually other bookstores would become my true Alma Mater.

My education was following my nose, picking up a book either recommended or because it caught my fancy and from that taking up another, and then one more, and so on. (Yes, eventually there would be diplomas. But truthfully the one that says B.A. was a quick pass through on my way to graduate school. I worked and took every test in lieu of classwork I could. I barely recall the layout of the campus… Holmes, Wahrenbrock’s, and Moe’s would be my schools. The first two now merely bookman’s history…)

Anyway…

One day I decided to read the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. For reasons I no longer know, I decided to take up five or six translations and read them in tandem while on my lunch breaks. It was a three or four month project. Unfortunately at the time my lunch consisted of those small cheese and cracker packages. They were nasty little things, but I had barely any taste buds worthy of the name, and they were cheap.

Sadly, today, whenever I hold a copy of Omar Khayyam’s quatrains in my hand I have, if you will, a flashback; and the odor of cheap processed cheese wafts from the cover and pages of the book, evoking a long gone world.

Parts I don’t miss. The cheese, for instance. But, youth is a lovely memory…

Anyway.

What caught me at the time, and led me to read the book was that famous line from Fitzgerald’s version.

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

A quick look in a decent dictionary revealed that “enow” meant enough. And, reading introductions, I quickly learned that Fitzgerald had actually created the line by conflating two of the quatrains for his own purposes. But that seemed okay, as there are as many as two thousand verses attributed to the master, and every translation we get is an exercise in selection, usually revealing more about the editor/translator than Omar Khayyam, who remains ever elusive, ever beyond any certain interpretation.

Still, that ecstatic call, symbolized by both eros and alcohol was a heady thing for me. It spoke of a spirituality that defied my Baptist upbringing, and opened completely different ways of seeing myself, and the world.

I was entranced, enchanted, and felt I was onto something important.