But, D'oh, of course, when you get there you remember, Portsmouth Central Library is closed on Fridays. But it might have been a blessing in disguise. I was thrown back on my own resources, my own library, in which there must always be something worthy of re-reading. Some of them not having been looked at for thirty years, reading many of those books is like reading them for the first time.
Andre Gide has been waiting patiently there year on year in several paperbacks and must be worth revisiting. When I say all this is 're-reading', I've arrived at page 88 of The Counterfeiters (Les Faux Monnayeurs) utterly convinced I've never read it at all before. It's nothing like what I thought it was about and I'd surely remember this if I'd read it. It's one of those books that makes me want to do a Top 10 Novels just so that I can put it in.
It keeps saying things that I thought I had thought for myself, like,
You remind me of certain English people - the more emancipated their opinions, the more they cling to their morality; so that there are no severer Puritans than their free-thinkers
and in Edouard's journal, in somewhat heavy prose,
The anti-egoistical force of decentralization is so great in me that it disintegrates my sense of property - and, as a consequence, of responsibility. Such a being is not of the kind that one can marry. How can I make Laura understand this?
I believe Gide was a great intellectual hero, perhaps more in France than in England, in his day but we don't seem to hear so much about him now. I can see how D.H. Lawrence has become less fashionable than he once was but Gide looks as good as he ever did and I'm grateful to Portsmouth Library for being closed and the unlikely benefit to me of an austerity cut in their service.
From the pictures here, it's also not a very sobering thought to see what 37 years can do to how one looks. Between, say, 1983 and 1930. Not very sobering I say because it makes one reach for another glass of wine.
But the third library in the story, after Portsmouth Central and mine, is that of Chichester Cathedral.
It would have been a mildly interesting trip to see it yesterday, and to see the bishop's private chapel with its C13th roundel and the remains of some lapis lazuli that pre-dates Titian's use of it. That would have been fine but it is betting without the Tractatus with a John Donne signature in it.
There are presumably more Donne autographs remaining than there are of Shakespeare. There are perhaps six Shakespeares, all on legal documents. But I don't now if I'm ever going to be in a position to ask to see any of them or, even less likely, touch the item (which I did very gently and with reverence) and be allowed to take a picture of it. But if you don't ask, you never know. So while I'm on a roll, I think I'll phone up Emanuelle Beart to see if she wants to come round to share a bottle of cabernet sauvignon. Tesco Express is still open.
I know there are people who go all the way to Florida to have the cheap and tacky time of their lives in that sunshine. That's nice for them, and good luck, but I don't think that's for me when Chichester has such rare and esoteric thrills hidden away, waiting to be discovered.
