What W. H. Auden Can Do for You by Alexander McCall Smith

Author:Alexander McCall Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

9

A Vision of Agape

It was a summer evening, in June, and I was on my way to a speaking engagement in Perthshire, a part of Scotland that I have always loved for the beauty of its hills and glens. The longest day was only a week or so away, which meant that at that latitude it would barely be dark at midnight. And that evening the light was gentle; not the tired light of a hot day, but that bluish evening light of a day on which the temperature has never really reached the point where one might take off one’s jacket and roll up one’s sleeves. The invitation had been outstanding for over a year as it had been difficult to find a date that suited both me and the organizers of the event. Now our diaries had coincided and I was shortly to address a gathering of the Friends of the Inerpeffray Library, one of the oldest libraries in Scotland, having been set up in the seventeenth century by a local landowner of intellectual tastes.

The library lay at the end of a Roman road, surrounded by fields in which wheat and barley were yet to ripen—lush green paddocks half-hidden by unruly hedgerows. Rioting nettles, clumps of blackthorn and rowan, wide-leafed docken grew along the side of the road until suddenly we reached an old schoolhouse and an ancient graveyard of weathered gray stones. The organizers appeared and introduced themselves, and I was taken to see the library before the guests arrived.

Belief in the word can assume the qualities of a religious faith. At the time when Lord Drummond built this place to house his precious collection of books, Scotland was prone to outbreaks of lawlessness and fierce local enmities. The lives of many were lived under the heel of powerful local clan chiefs who administered rough justice. Life was hard in every respect: this was not the rich landscape of settled England—Highland Scotland was a place in which people scraped a living and more often than not went to bed hungry.

It was a place of strong religious views. The Scottish Reformation was late but had been passionate and had brought with it a commitment to the setting up of a school in every parish. What later came to be seen as a strong Scottish commitment to education had its roots in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Books were the instruments of truth. Books were the means by which the poor could free themselves of what Auden once described as “the suffering to which they are fairly accustomed.” This attitude toward books has stubbornly survived in Scotland, mirroring, perhaps, the Irish attitude to music: both are consolations that will, in their individual way, always see one through.

My talk was preceded by a reception. This was held outside the converted ancient church that the library used for its meetings. A couple of open-sided tents had been erected under which drinks and snacks were prepared, and people milled about, chatting in the benign evening sunlight.

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