Dream•sync

So you may or may not know, but I have this thing for old stuff. Which includes ancient stuff that you see in museums - come to think of it, I passed a truck yesterday on the highway that was a corporate Archaeology company...hmm...should look them up. Anyway, I have this thing for old books. Really old. You know the kind - the ones you find in a back corner of your grandparent's house that smell kinda musty - they smell "old".

There's a shop in the adirondacks that has some - The Maxton House. I remember back when it was some guy's antique shop that was just PACKED with old junk. A few cool tidbits, and lots of old books, but mostly junk :) Then another family bought the house and all the stuff and cleaned it out and started this wonderful little shop with crafts. To my delight, they kept a room in the back for all the old books for sale. Every year I go back to that store and look at the books. The place was recently sold to another family and I'm hoping they don't change the old book corner...we shall see... This year I got a really old hymnal, a book with photos of Israel from the early 1900's and a book on the National Parks with old photos from the 1930s. Nice, old books.

But none of them equal to the one I've been searching for since..oh...1996. Yeah - that long. Which in comparison to other peoples searches isn't that long, but I digress...

It started in my High School AP English class. Actually it started much earlier than that but it wasn't until High School AP English that I made the connection... I was required to read several books before the start of the school year - my senior year. Which means that I really wasn't that into it as the beginnings of senioritis had already set in. Nevertheless, I read the books and wrote reports, then found I had to read a Biography. Ugh. I have a hard time with anything other than fiction - I love adventure stories, and somehow reading about another person's life just wasn't that interesting to me.

I looked a several biographies from the library and started a few but just couldn't get into them. Then I discovered this old book on my mom's bookshelf - Norman Hapgood's "Abraham Lincoln, the Man of the People. It was an old book - but it was about Abraham Lincoln - and it was written not too long after his death. 'not too long' is relative in terms of a biography. Let's just say it was written only 30 years after his death and not a hundred or so. In other words, this guy had access to Lincoln's contemporaries, which was important to me. Even as a 17-year-old.

So I pulled it off the shelf and started reading. I think I finished the book in several days - it was actually a good book. I learned a lot - including a few stanzas from what Hapgood said was Lincoln's favorite poem. It's called 'Mortality' or 'O Why Should The Spirit of Mortal Be Proud?'. And it was written by William Knox back in the mid 1800s. The Bio didn't give a book for that poem, and it only gave a few stanzas. But I recognized one of them:

'Tis the wink of an eye, 'tis the draught of a breath,
From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,
From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud,--
Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud?

So where had I read that before? Ah yes....so it really started with a Michael W. Smith song on his i2eye album called 'Live and Learn'. I remember hearing this song in the basement in my parent's house and trying to decipher the words in that stanza, never realizing it would connect me to a book in the living room and send me on this quest.

That song came out in late 1988. So if you figure I got the album for Christmas that year or the next, I was 10 or 11 when I first heard the song. Crazy - that means I've known vaguely about this poem for 20 years or so... ok now I feel old LOL

Back to the 'quest'. So I read the biography on Abraham Lincoln and wrote a report on it. And I still cherish that old book that reintroduced me to that president and to the William Knox poem.

Flash forward about a year to my freshman year of college. Public Speaking was a course that everyone had to take. Mine was in Alfred I think? In one of the back rooms maybe - I could be totally off. I remember what the room looks like but not where it was... anyway, for one of the assignments we had to pick a poem to read. My first thought went to 'Mortality', but that meant I had to find the complete poem. I had to read something for a minute and a half and 3 stanzas were not going to do it.

Over to the library, searching for poems to read, hoping to find Mortality. Not seeing it showing up anywhere and getting discouraged. Scrounging the shelves for Poem anthologies that might have that poem in it. Finding something :)

Namely the 'World's Book of Best Loved Poems' from the early 1900s. Couldn't believe it when I looked in the index and found the complete text of 'Mortality'. The complete text which is something like 15 stanzas. I had the author, I had the full poem, and I had more than that - I had a book title and a date. Specifically, 'Mortality' by William Knox, from 'Songs of Israel' 1847.

I paired that poem with John Donne's 'Death'. and Did well on my project. And now I had a book I could refer to for that poem at any time.

And seeing as this is a 'quest' story... I'm going to finish it in another post. Have to keep you in suspense for a bit longer :)

Listening to: "Enough" from The Best of Passion
Reading: 'In The Courts of the Sun' by Brian D'Amato. Very interesting story line.
Studying: 'Living Beyond Yourself' by Beth Moore. Week 4: The Joy of the Lord is Our Strength.
FB Friends: Read it in situ here: dreamsync.blogspot.com