Old books in other hands

I read a lot. I love books. I love the stories and facts themselves, but I also love the object of a book, especially old ones, the older the better. And the older they are, the less I care about the subject matter. A farmer's almanac of 2005 would be garbage before I finished page one; the same almanac of 1722 would be this year's Harry Potter as far as I'm concerned.

I own many that I've bought from second-hand stores, maybe a garage sale here or there; I stole one from a deconsecrated church in England when I found it shoved behind a box of moldy hymnals. I've been given expensive ones and rare ones and didn't deserve them; there are short ones, fat ones, the original six-volume biography of Lincoln. I like the yellowed pages and I even like the dust. What I most like is wondering who held the book before me, seeing someone's name written in careful script on the upper-right corner of the frontispiece. "Who was 'Burton Brown'?" I wonder. How much did he pay for it? Did they put it in a sack or did he carry it away? Where did he buy it? Was he a nice person? Was it a gift or for him?

Knowing my hand is holding the very thing that his held before helps me be a part of history. His hand picked it up, another put it away; another packed it up, another unpacked it years later. One hand, another, another; another. Now mine. Our eyes reading all those pages, each of us meeting the words on a page for the first time. It's like a message in a bottle found long after the ship's survivors have gone.

Consider this, and imagine you wrote it:

"No eye shall see the poem that I write
For you; not even yours; but after long
Forgetful years have passed on our delight
Some hand may chance upon a dusty song
Of those fond days when every spoken word
Was sweet, and all the fleeting things unspoken
Yet sweeter, and the music half unheard
Murmured through forests as a charm unbroken.

"Merely the plain and ordinary page
Of two who loved, sole-spirited and clear.
Will you, O stranger of another age,
Not grant a human and compassionate tear
To us, who each the other held so dear?
A single tear fraternal, sadly shed,
Since that which was so living, is so dead?"

That poem was written in 1913. It was published in a book called 'Collected Poems by Vita Sackville-West' that I bought in 1992 from one of the last used bookshops in Charing Cross Road in London . The book was published in 1934 and fell out-of-print almost immediately; printed copies became scarce. Over the years, time took the lives of many remaining copies — mine was almost one of them, and the water damage was acute — and now there are few left.

After the events of September 11, 2001, I took the book off my bookshelf and sat reading it, mostly for something to do, and came across this poem.

In 1913, Vita Sackville-West was in love with another young woman. It was a secret she didn't dare let anyone know, so there she is on the page reaching out to those of us who have survived her, like some message in a bottle, telling us her passion, telling us that she was real, that she loved and lived and that she knew we would be coming after her. So some part of her has survived - from 1913 to 1934 to 1992 to 2001 to 2007. That's how long it's taken to tell you this.

And now you know it. And we're right there with her in 1913. So throw the bottle back out there. Our memories will disappear with us, but I hope someday someone picks up your thoughts, your words, your secrets. Maybe my own too, with time.

So write your secrets, and I'll write mine.