I can has books

[tree_and_leaf]

A trip to the Oxfam bookshop resulted in money being spent, most notably on a modernish reprint of Evelyn Underhill's history of mysticism, Mysticism, which I have wanted to read for ages, Mrs Oliphant's The Perpetual Curate (a narrative of the woes of a Tractarian priest, caught between a rector who thinks he is a dangerous radical, a faction of local opinion who thinks he's only interested in tat, another faction which is suspicious of his work among the working classes, and who has a love interest he can't afford to marry, and a problem with persistent and untrue rumours that he's having an affair with a shop-girl...), and HV Morton's Atlantic Meeting, an eye-witness account of Churchill and Roosevelt's meeting in 1941 off the coast of Newfoundland.

The latter provided an interesting photograph of a card given by Roosevelt to Churchill, which quoted a verse from Longfellow:

"Sail on, o ship of state!
Sail on, o Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all it's fears,
With all its hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!"

Which stuck me as familiar - because Leonard Cohen refers to it in "Democracy":

"Sail on, sail on, o mighty ship of state
To the Shores of Need Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

It's coming to America first, the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst."

Clever man, Mr Cohen.

Comments

[mrstater.livejournal.com]

Interesting - that reminds me of a bit of a Walt Whitman poem:

"Sail, sail thy best, ship of Democracy,
Of value is thy freight, 'tis not the Present only,
The Past is also stored in thee,
Thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone, not of the Western
continent alone,
Earth's resume entire floats on thy keel O ship, is steadied by thy spars,
With thee Time voyages in trust, the antecedent nations sink or
swim with thee,
With all their ancient struggles, martyrs, heroes, epics, wars, thou
bear'st the other continents,
Theirs, theirs as much as thine, the destination-port triumphant;
Steer then with good strong hand and wary eye O helmsman, thou
carriest great companions,
Venerable priestly Asia sails this day with thee,
And royal feudal Europe sails with thee."

Thou Mother With Thy Equal Brood (http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/wwhitman/bl-ww-thoumother.htm)

[tree_and_leaf]

That's interesting - I suspect Cohen is actually referencing both! In some ways the content of the Whitman (which I didn't know, thank you!) is closer, but the phrase 'ship of state' is Longfellow.

[mrstater.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have known it, either, except that we sang a setting of it in choir! Great poem, though, I love Whitman.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I was so disappointed with the Oxfam bookfair that the only book I bought was Stephenie Meyer's "Eclipse"!

[tree_and_leaf]

Oh NOES!

The theology section was quite good this time, but other than that... it was a bit rubbish :(

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

The man who left as you arrived was carrying off David Jenkins's Bampton lectures for 1966...

I wondered whether the Mrs Oliphant might appeal to you, but missed all the others you mentioned. The oddest book was a biography of Prince Philip from the late 1940s, Captain General, so called because he was honorary captain-general of the Royal Marines; though perhaps it was rivalled by the theosophic history of ecclesiastical masonry.

[tree_and_leaf]

David Jenkins's Bampton lectures for 1966...

Drat. I remember being outraged, at the time, by the 'not just a conjuring trick with bones' remark, though I now think he was quite right....

the Mrs Oliphant might appeal to you

Predictable, aren't I? I saw the Prince Philip book too, but remained oddly untempted by it. There was a very odd esoteric book purporting to contain channeled messages from Jesus, but I find it hard to believe that Our Lord sounds like a vaguely sleazy Californian therapist....