Paradise
“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”–Jorge Luis Borges
This is the inscription over the main door to the Portland library. I set out today to get to the river park, but I failed. I passed the Bearing Service Company, its walls lined with small compartments full of bearings of every conceivable size. If anyone wants to find their bearings, I know where to send them. I got as far as the library, wandered in, and ended up spending a couple of hours in it, enjoying the architecture, the proportions, the light, the long wooden tables and rather stern wooden chairs, the friendly librarians, the books on display, the arrangement of rooms, the bustle and joy. First there is that inscription, which made me smile, and then I stepped into the main lobby, with its large white-streaked-with-garnet marble columns and its grand art deco staircase, black stone stairs wonderfully etched with natural motifs (foliage, a trout, a bear, a monkey [?], intermingled with a violin, a rolling pin, an envelope, an inkstand, with words woven into the design: CREATE, DISCOVER, HOPE, SEEK). The main reading rooms are two stories high, with fifteen-foot windows to let in the light. I climbed the broad staircase to the third floor (domed, beautifully lit) past all the look-alike portraits of white men in black suits, to a colorful portrait of Dorothy D. Hirsch, a gray-haired woman surrounded by books and greenery, a woman who looks like everybody’s favorite well-informed, well-read, civilized librarian–someone you would expect to make outrageous, irreverent, hilarious observations. In the painting there’s a book by Ursula LeGuin on the table by Dorothy.
I stopped in the library shop to see if they had a postcard of Dorothy (they didn’t), but they were having a sale on used poetry books and I picked up two: Jack Kerouac’s Pomes in All Sizes for $1.80 because I opened it and found this:
There is gladness which the saint feels;
there is mating, which the bitter husband feels;
but when gladness of mating is, is love
And then I bought a little copy of Langston Hughes’ The Dream Keeper, illustrated with strong woodcuts by Brian Pinkney, for $3.60, because when I opened it, I saw two of my favorites, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “I, Too” [sing America], Hughes’ response to Walt Whitman.
I stuffed my new books into the bag on my back and set out to get to the river park, but when I came to the Park Blocks, a long park flanked on both sides by buildings of Portland State University, I had to go exploring. Once again, architectural delights interspersed with horrors (so is America), sinuous art deco statues of women, great monuments to men (Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt), and flowers, flowers, flowers. Men and women were walking their dogs, college kids were rubbing up against each other, a few street people basked in the sunshine, and young men sat arguing on park benches while old men, leaning on their canes, passed puffing by. The day was a marvel as only spring days in a city can be, full of faces and the energy of people going somewhere. I saw a man who looked to be in his forties kneel down to inhale a white hyacinth. An old woman with wild white hair and long skirts read her newspaper.
It came to me, three hours after I’d left home, that I was probably not going to make it to the river park today. I was yearning to get home to my sweet cat, to read more Alan Bennett, to watch Atonement, which just arrived in today’s mail, and to put my feet up and sigh with pleasure. This being retired is good stuff. I recommend it to all my friends.
Tags: Oregon, Portland
Kendall
Thank you for enlarging my experience by so exquisitely describing yours.
With gratitude,
Margaret
It was beautiful yesterday – I drove up to Seattle in the morning, and it was gorgeous up here, too.