Friendship, book shops and “the heart in pilgrimage”

 Sometimes, not always, I write in a book where I bought it, when and why.  I had reason to go looking for George Herbert the other day and opened "This Booke of Starres" Learning to Read George Herbert, by James Boyd White. Inside I had written – "Oxford August 1995, while on a bookshop tour with Ken Roxburgh" That was a wonderful three days away which took in York, Oxford, Cambridge and Durham and the various bookshops therein.

We had an appalling and hilarious B&B expereince which included a room with broken window sashes, a landlord with open shirt, sweaty chest and non-designer stubble, and a railway line that serviced the main Oxford sorting office and mail trains through the night, during a heatwave in August – oh and the sweaty landlord was also the cook for breakfast!

But I still have several books bought in different places, Ebeling on Luther, Boyd White on Herbert, Keeble on Richard Baxter and a hardback copy of John V Taylor's exquisite The Go Between God. The friendship we have shared for a long number of years transcends but could not exclude our shared passion for books, reading, theology and the joy of the chase. Only, the on line availability of most things has reduced the urgency, the sweaty palms, the raised metabolism, the nervous searching of the eyes along rows of books for that one, just that one, which you've looked for for ages and at a price that leads you to faith in  miracles.

So I'm glad I have books like this – and a one sentence memo to myself to good companionship, literary hunting parties and long pilgrimages to those holy places where books live.

The book itself is one of the best studies of Herbert's poetry of which I have a shelf full. Boyd White has a particular interest in literature and its relation to law, and especially how poetry expresses and expounds human experience of language, self and community, and how language is fluid, shaping the community which shapes it, and how the speaking self is also the listening self, the influencing self also the influenced self. Just the qualifications in complexity needed to appreciate the filigree of self-referential connections which adorn and decorate Herbert's poetry. It is part of Herbert's genius that such metaphysical elaboration nevertheless articulates the deepest and most intense spiritual longings, and in verse where the sense of the transcendent God is suffused with a sense of the self as broken, yearning and hungering for wholeness. Boyd White's book is a wonderful interpretation of Herbert, and a treasured book, for which I am grateful, because of where I bought it, because of the company I kept, and for the sheer brilliance of the writing itself.

Thou hast given so much to me,

give one thing more, a grateful heart

…Not grateful when it pleaseth me:

As if thy blessings had spare days:

But such a heart, whose pulse may be

                                  Thy praise.