Today marks the one year anniversary of me being a bookseller. It may not seem like much, but I wore pink to celebrate anyhow. This morning I woke early and walked to Cafe Allegro, and on the way back two hours later staggered out of Magus Books and the University Bookstore with a copy of Elaine Showalter's Jury of Her Peers, Billy Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors (it looks so interesting) and Rose Macaulay's Personal Pleasures. I may or may not have purchased Personal Pleasures already this past Sunday, but this was a far better copy, was cloth bound and had an inscription. And then I ran home terribly afraid and thought about my dwindling bank account the whole time and how I actually may not be able to pay my rent. This is pathetic. This is what my year of being a working women has brought me to.
We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .
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