Books, as Pocket Gardens

A true paucity on the Internet these days--a really good essay, one in which you find yourself nodding in agreement, resonating to its rhythm, where you want to pass it on to others. And so I am.

Check out Seattle writer and poet John Olson's essay entitled "A Garden in the Pocket" posted on March 4th, 2010 over on Steven Fama's blog, "The Glade of Theoric Ornithic Hermetica."

It opens with a Chinese proverb: "A book is like a garden carried in the pocket."

Books, writes Olson, have "a feel and a smell that you cannot find in anything electronic ... the end result of a great deal of effort. So that whatever making goes into the making of the book will make you wonder at what a wonderful thing a book is..."

Look down. Down at the ground. There is consolation in seeds. They become trees. Leaves. Pages in a book. The book opens, and a skeleton of sound dances from page to page in an astronomy of ink...

One day I pulled a meaning out of a word I did not expect and it grew into an orchard of fruit, peaches and plums swollen with light, a larynx extending the granite of a wooded solitude...

Yes.

"Books may disappear but their essence will not," he says.

And yes again.