. . . We need to find the deepest reason for our emotions. The clue came in something delivered through my letterbox yesterday: a “journal for all women interested in spirituality, theology, ministry and liturgy”. It’s not my normal reading, but they sent me a complimentary copy in return for publishing one of my recent posts (Unblocking). In the same issue is an article by a nun, Sister Zoë, writing on Carmelite spirituality†. It’s not about contemplating, she says, but doing. She analyses “doing” from three angles: the Art of Living, Presence and Witness. Prominent in the art of living is Accompaniment, and it was this which particularly caught my eye.
I am told that I am under the Spirit’s tutelage, but there is also a wealth of human companions, ranging from the writings of Theresa and John of the Cross to the community with whom I live, and those people who have particular responsibilities for my initial formation.
I especially liked the notion of finding companionship in reading. Those who live largely solitary lives stand in need of accompaniment too. But we retreat from the pettiness of the present-day. We desire to take refuge in a Mount Carmel of tranquillity. even when garnered in the net of the world’s media (or the net of the Net), is as stifling as living in a house with your next-door neighbours. A curse on those who would have us believe that now is always better than then!
Old books and Nature: companions which transcend time. Now, via the Internet, we can have “accompaniment” which transcends space too. I’m talking about you, dear readers and friends!
*Preceding text edited out on 20th July 2018. It’s reproduced here, where you can also find the reference to a library being a citadel
† Click here to view scans of the full article, and some further excerpts which I’ve copied below
The single most important factor of these early years has been that of accompaniment. I am told that ultimately I am under the Spirit’s tutelage, but there is also a wealth of human companions, ranging from the writings of Teresa and John of the Cross to the community with whom I live, and those people who have had particular responsibilities for my initial formation. As others may testify, such accompaniment is not always received gratefully, However, spiritual accompaniment contains a wealth of wisdom even though it may be resisted or seem bizarre. Having been told by one of my mentors that I have a strong ‘messiah complex’, I find this story particularly apt to describe something which has been given to me through the spirituality of Carmel
One day Chou-Chou fell down in the snow and called out. “Help me up: help up”. A monk came and lay down beside him Then Chou-Chou got up and and went away, The monk bears witness to Chou-Chou’s suffering by presence. He doesn’t try to advise or assist the victim Chou-Chou. He doesn’t judge him for staying immobile in the snow, or ask him him how it happened. He merely lies next to Chou-Chou, and the monk’s compassionate presence is enough. Chou-Chou is empowered lift himself out of the cold and continue his journey.
. . . We need to find the deepest reason for our emotions. The clue came in something delivered through my letterbox yesterday: a “journal for all women interested in spirituality, theology, ministry and liturgy”. It’s not my normal reading, but they sent me a complimentary copy in return for publishing one of my recent posts (Unblocking). In the same issue is an article by a nun, Sister Zoë, writing on Carmelite spirituality. It’s not about contemplating, she says, but doing. She analyses “doing” from three angles: the Art of Living, Presence and Witness. Prominent in the art of living is Accompaniment, and it was this which particularly caught my eye.
I am told that I am under the Spirit’s tutelage, but there is also a wealth of human companions, ranging from the writings of Theresa and John of the Cross to the community with whom I live, and those people who have particular responsibilities for my initial formation.
I especially liked the notion of finding companionship in reading. Those who live largely solitary lives stand in need of accompaniment too. But we retreat from the pettiness of the present-day. We desire to take refuge in a Mount Carmel of tranquillity. even when garnered in the net of the world’s media (or the net of the Net), is as stifling as living in a house with your next-door neighbours. A curse on those who would have us believe that now is always better than then!
Old books and Nature: companions which transcend time. Now, via the Internet, we can have “accompaniment” which transcends space too. I’m talking about you, dear readers and friends!
a wayfarer’s notes 
“To me, a library is a citadel of learning and literature, an open door to the past.”
And, more than likely, a portal to the future.
Wonder how many of the “I's” were mind “I's” as opposed to body “I's” in the post? 😉
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Blimey DBA, I have only just posted this, still editing! But glad you are here anyhow.
And how, can a library be a portal to the future? Not a very interesting one if our town library stays as it is.
You trying to catch me out with the “I's”, eh? My mind “I's” are not opposed to body “I's” – or not for long. They have arguments with one another and then kiss and make up and present one united story. Which is my excuse for writing rarely and painfully.
Bless you, dba, I know you have a new post. I shall come over soon.
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I normally don't visit them anymore and I see what you are saying. The last time I visited I found our library too formal and too uncomfortable. It was like you said–more space than books. I suppose the trend has changed. There must be a new manual on how to screw up a comfortable place.
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Several points emerge for me Vincent from this well-worth-waiting for address, (www.vincent/).
If ever I finish the saga Tale of a Spirit, the gain will be seen, for me, to have been the internet and certain people thereon, ultimately the blogging primarily, (I don't want to give too much away before I write the remainder of that saga). I didn't know if it would work or not for my needs whose fulfillment was interrupted rudely by the remainder of the saga, but it did, and precisely as given in your last paragraph, You, Us and the transcendence of space and even time.
I was, longer ago, a Librarian by trade. I ordered books and joined in the arguments with the authorities against the systems of cleansing the realities existing, they saw fit to provide the climate and the HISTORY for the public, some of us didn't want it rewritten. There was troubled times and ultimately I went my way. I have since been denied access and use of facilities. This did not make me sad and now I see it all as the need that these authorities have to cement an identity that will show itself failed, then become extinct, I will not be a part of that.
Neither I my body nor I my mind, nor anyone else I find myself being. I keep a close watch on this heart of mine, my eyes wide open all the time…Johnny Cash.
Seems like a lot of us bloggers are on the same page today, this week. Does happen and is remarkable. Takes many forms and manifestations.
Thanks Vincent for the fine read, more than enjoyable, as always.
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My mother is a librarian. I fully echo your “a library is a citadel” sentiments … as would she. Perhaps you would be more comfortable in one of these.
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I like my rants. I'm okay in my body and brain.
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There is (as always, of course) much to ponder in this post. Haven't really explored the local (country town) library, only popped in to use the internet, but reminds me of the recent experience when self had to discard a rather eclectic, long held collection of books; most of which ended up on the doorstep of the local “Salvo's” thrift shop. Hope that the orphans found good homes .. heh.
One of them was a “Boy Scout's Annual” circa 1930 and some of the attitudes expressed in the “boy's own adventure” short stories of that period certainly wouldn't pass the “politically correct” veneer of today.
But that is partly the point. Those underlying attitudes were held at that time. There were a couple of other “Boy's Own Adventure” books also and it was interesting to read of the attitudes toward native Africans, Americans and indeed, natives of all “other” nations. One thing that struck me was that they – despite the facade of “political correctness” – are still quite current among large sections of European populations. There is, methinks, not a lot of value in “papering it over”, hiding it in the closet. Those books should be freely available .. and discussed within context .. otherwise we end up with a situation so aptly portrayed in Orwell's 1984.
As for the other bits, have always been fascinated by “Transactional Analysis” – the Parent-Adult-Child scripting.
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I understand your sentiment with public libraries. They are the same here across the pond – prominently displayed “fringe” cultures… with most good books hidden or tossed away long ago.
As you say, our modern society – if it had a mind as an individual – is solely focused on the self in a critical and conscious way. It is forgetting the primal and what I would call “real” self.
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without 'I', who?
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there is absolutely nothing wrong in I. only if we tried to respect the I, the world would have been a better place.
if you cannot love 'I' how can you love 'U'?
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and there is always that curious conundrum “love thy neighbour as thyself”. If one cannot love, respect, and be gentle with oneself .. then i pity the poor neighbour .. heh.
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Davo, it is a very curious conundrum, and fortunate are those, in my opinion, who have not been blessed with knowledge of the Holy Scriptures or equivalents. Less to get confused about.
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Ghetufool, it all starts and ends with “I”, but the sickness is not to know the full extent of what the “I” holds. There is some Indian story about the man whose house is built on a treasure of gold. He doesn't know what is under the ground.
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Tim, I don't know what society is focused on. You may be right, but I assume everyone to be like me, and to look through their own eyes and not through some common eyes of society. Making such an assumption, I naturally ignore everything that contradicts that assumption!
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Davo, that is precisely it. The value of a library is to see through many eyes, especially the eyes of people in the past; for then we are in a better position to judge the follies of the present.
But these librarians don't want that! They think they are priests to define truth, or agents of the Government Ministry of Propaganda.
Yes, Eric Berne & parent, adult, child. Valuable but not the only way to slice things. I currently (as you will have seen) prefer the old-brain/new-brain split. Where new brain is intellect, old brain is lizard-brain, full of survival-wisdom. New brain contains the ability to imagine (and therefore lie to oneself amongst other things). Old brain ecstatically feels its kinship with nature.
As for “spirit”, it's just an expression.
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BBC, I like your rants too. I wasn't getting them any more then I adjusted my set to receive them, now that you've moved to another frequency.
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Jim, I was interested to read of your librarian days, and I agree with you that deprivation of its facilities is nothing to regret. I shall write further on libraries. they used to be better! They were something in life taken for granted. Then you appreciate the past when it's taken away.
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Beth, thanks for those pictures of beautiful libraries. I am going to write more on this!
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Well, Scot, I wonder if something has changed world wide on the library business to screw them up in parallel, in different countries at the same time!
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it suddenly reminded me that you are a pretty 'self-healed' man. you must have a tremondous willpower.
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I can't really showcase my projects because they are too ordinary,
To ordinary for who Vincent?
BTW, I work with wood at times also.
I make I MAKE THESE
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BBC: Too ordinary for me to write about, and for my readers. Don't get me wrong, I love to read about yours and see the pics.
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Ghetu, I don't think of it as willpower, in fact I see myself as passive to the forces that move me. But I know others would call it the will.
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“these librarians don't want that! They think they are priests to define truth, or agents of the Government Ministry of Propaganda”
A shred of evidence to back up this ill informed comment, which would befit a letter published in the Daily Mail, would of course be welcome.
In addition, if you don't like what your council have done, then why don't you stand for election to it?
The minute someone cites “political correctness” you know that they are too lazy to formulate a proper opinion and to back it up with evidence.
Why don't you go into that library and ask the librarians why they put certain materials on more prominent display than others, rather than making assumptions on the internet that, as a librarian, I can assure you are ill informed and ludicrous?
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I guess I can't speak for any other country, as to Librarians and what they want and what they think and what they do, but here, in the USA, we have had a procession of dumbing down elementals thruout our society, libraries included, and the servants of this dumbing down control these venues of public influence and do control to a large, very large, extent who sits on ANY city council or school board or in any office of any government body at any level, I hesitate to call these servants 'all the same' but ie, they are, thru the processes adopted by the controllers for so long and those who get the servants positions 'play the game, POLITICALLY CORRECT'. Easy to see in the USA, maybe elsewhere you are not as developed yet in this atrocious mode of social reality that undermines intelligence and feeds the public garbage thru such widespread and thoroughly designed propagandic systems/mediums that they CAN'T HELP but eat.
Just thought I would give that, having been a librarian and knowing who runs what.
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I certainly hope that this discussion or comment section does not deteriorate too much.
Doubt very much that Vincent is “ill informed and ludicrous.
Sources of information ARE everywhere – to those who have need to search for it, but as an older person tend to agree with Vincent. May well be generalising, but have the tendency to feel that some “uncomfortable” information is being “hidden away”, put on the back shelves – and other information “promoted” .. to suit “social conditioning” and political purposes.
??(a)unlinked (b) lowercase librarian pete”.
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Dear Librarian Pete, you have every right to come here with all guns blazing , after I have (still enraged) left a comment on the “Good Library Blog” which includes the remark “The way our local library is going I would happily see it burnt down without waiting for it to close voluntarily.” I welcome your spirited response.
I am shocked that any of my remarks would befit a letter in the Daily Mail: at least we seem to have something in common there, to despise that particular newspaper. But I imagine that no one bothers to deride or execrate political correctness until they perceive it trampling on something which they hold dear.
Your twice-iterated request for “evidence” rather bears out my point. The writing in my blog is not researched in that doubtless praiseworthy way. The whole point of the article was to demonstrate that emotions themselves are evidence enough. My sense of anger was evidence of something threatening my sense of well-being.
Perhaps I have a deficient sense of time, and a neurologist may one day find a “cure” for this disease though it doesn't exactly trouble me. I define myself by it: interpreting the present by an awareness and often a memory of the past.
Subsequently analysing my experience of incoherent anger in the library, I saw that it had been predicted in Orwell's 1984: an attempt to give bread and circuses to the people whist denying them their own memories, removing concepts from general circulation, establishing a Ministry of Truth.
Pete, I have seen sales of books in the Foyer of the old library over the last twenty years. At first they were getting rid of excellent substantial books which were a trifle out of fashion, or which breached some librarian's criteria for what readers should be allowed to see. In more recent years, the books on sale have been uniformly trashy. That's because the books which they bought say ten years ago to replace the substantial timeless ones have themselves become out of date.
Over time I have realised that the library expected that no book should last more than three years before being sold off. The experience of entering the library is now as depressing—more than—entering Waterstone's, the only bookshop in town now. Ottakar's which it replaced was a shop with its own quirks which I grew to love. But now Waterstone's has also moved to the new shopping centre, on one floor instead of two, with no little corners where I might find something of interest.
I don't think I could stand for election to the county council on the single issue of a public library, especially as I am neither teacher nor librarian, just an ageing man with minority tastes and above all, memories.
At school on the Isle of Wight, I used to visit the Seely Library in Newport, administered like others by the County Council. What I did not realise till the other day was that its magificent reading rooms and wonderful collection were created in 1904 by the Seely family, who created the first public library in the country. So the internet tells me anyhow.
I also remember from the age of 7 visiting the Hastings library at the Brassey Institute, less impressive for its reading rooms but again with a wonderful set of books. At that age I was working through the row of William books by Richmal Crompton. They had more than 20 of them, and probably lots of Enid Blyton too: an early victim of the librarians' thought police.
See this piece from BBC News for the fate of the Brassey Institute Library.
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Thanks for the further comments, Davo & Jim.
I suppose I feel that the rule of the majority doesn't work when the majority have been manipulated and deceived I don't care if I am in a minority of one. In earlier life, I found refuge in libraries because I found that it was possible to find kindred souls there, even though they were long dead and came from (say) China or India. Within those volumes, if one looked assiduously (or guided by flashes of intuition) one could find dissenting voices, whose views had not been censored.
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Librarian Pete, I would warn you Europeans, you British in Particular, not to become in the FASHION of the USA and follow it into the gutter of worthlessness in your intelligence, you, you having been the leaders for so long, in intelligence, don't NOW follow blindly this false mentality that is proferred up as the means of success by cowboys and rough riders of plains so low as to be deep into the valleys of depressions and sure self-destructions. Chart a better course my friend!
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Funnily enough, last night I watched the film No Country for Old Men which as you may know, is a violent evocation of life today in West Texas, through the imagination of a novelist and the film directors the Coen brothers.
It was hard for me not to see it in childlike way as reflective of the reality in USA today. Perhaps it is, perhaps it's not, but I don't have the perspective to know. I would have to live there to know and even then I would still be in a small selective world, the world of my own experience and those events which by some spiritual law (perhaps) I attract by the signals beamed out by my individual aura to the wider universe.
But it was not the kind of film to bear the Texas Tourist Board's Seal of Approval! And does not encourage me to make the visit.
I must see with my own eyes! Though it is debatable what “my own eyes” means. This is the theme of Accompaniment. Am I, in this journey of life, accompanied by a guide? Like Dante who was accompanied by Virgil in the Inferno and by Beatrice in Paradise? I seek the company of old books: have done that since childhood. And I also used to seek the company of a wise guide, who used to appear to me in dreams, in female form—a mother substitute perhaps. I would call her the Goddess.
Jim, your remarks don't offend me of course but there are plenty of Brits who would object twofold to your remarks: (1) they don't see themselves as Europeans at all, being merely a few islands anchored offshore from Europe (2) they don't see themselves as following the fashion of USA in these matters of dumbing down and the pruning of any comparative perspectives, because that pruning has prevented them from seeing beyond the current six months. They look to the future but have no roots in the past. They have no vantage point to see their own foolishness. I speak in particular of the Government and the “managers” of the old professions such as doctoring and teaching, who are obsessed with performance targets and whatever else affects their promotions, for they have no depth and no conscience.
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When I say “I’d be happy for my local library to burn down” I hope this doesn't fall foul of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, in the sense that it implies encouragement to commit a terrorist act!
I haven't specified which library it is. King Henry II said in the hearing of his knights: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” and then they went and murdered Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. But if I had influence over events in this way, to inspire acts of arson, I would try a lot harder to influence mankind in less destructive fashion.
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When did I cease going to libraries?
When I became wealthy enough to buy any book I wanted to have. But this excludes me from many books which I don't know that I want, for i could not reach that conclusion without reading them.
Libraries were utterly essential to me from the age of 9 to somewhere in my late 30s when I found myself in the fortunate position of being able to buy. My exposure to libraries was perhaps not the common one. I lived in southern Africa, and the libraries available to me in the 1960s were curious places. But wonderful to me. The library I frequented at the age of ten regarded me as a terror. I would turn up and take six books and come back the next day to take six more…
The collection of books was (even then) old fashioned. Much of what I read was published before 1930. Much would now be regarded as misogynist, or racist. I was utterly delighted with the American fiction I read (courtesy of the American Institute in Lusaka, Zambia). I reveled in the strangeness and otherness of the world it presented to me, the way it was 'English' but 'not English'. Nobody then thought of rendering American fiction in Anglicized fashion, or vice versa ('Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone' – for God's sake!). Nobody tried to make the Hardy Boys 'acceptable' to me, or Mark Twain, or Anne of Green Gables. The whole point was that this presented me with a different world view.
It took me a long time to 'get' things, though. I remember going into the university library and innocently asking 'Where is the fiction section?' The librarian gave me such a look!
Kathleen
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Kathleen, your phrase “When I became wealthy enough to buy any book I wanted to have” influenced me subconsciously to title my latest post “Downsized”.
Your being a ten-year-old library terror sounds like Roald Dahl's Matilda, but I'm sure your parents were not like hers.
It's clear that children are not so much “influenced” by books (believing everything they say) as provoked into further curiosity. For who knows what a child's destiny is? It would be an honour for a library to contribute to that, by enabling the widest possible perspectives through non-censorship of the older materials.
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[…] Excised from accompaniment […]
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[…] latest post on A Wayfarer’s Notes, Accompaniment, started out with a different agenda: to try and escape a continuing writer’s block by […]
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