His Father's Library...

Christ has given us to understand that there are many rooms in His Father's House. This is splendid news of course as it gives hope for us all. Somewhere there will be an allotted space - howsoever tiny or peculiar - for each and everyone, if only we would choose to take up residence therein.

A veritable heavenly Gormenghast no less, peopled with some utterly bizarre coves no doubt, each pottering about in their unique and particular manner. I do rather love that notion, it is so wonderfully inclusive. Heaven will have its standard saints of renown and proper fame, but also there will be room given to the so many who never quite understood their purpose on earth or ever appreciated that their quirks and oddities added to the necessary theme of redemptive humanity.

I would aspire no more - and no less - to be one of these latter sorts. It's a goodly and a Godly intent. And should it so pass that I find, in time - or rather perhaps out of time and into eternity - that a room in that mansion is mine, I do so jolly hope it can be the Library.

For there must be a Library in that mansion mustn't there? None would be complete without it. Some may wish for the billiard room or the kitchen garden in which to feel at ease, but for me the Library is the thing.

An eternity in which to read could be for some a hellish prospect one owns. But when I consider the volumes I simply must either return to or to try anew, I simply find there cannot be sufficient time in this mortal life to do it all and that Heaven must supply the gap.

To put it thus. In just some twenty hours or so it has struck me that I cannot rest until I have once more completed 'War and Peace', taken a revisit to 'Moby Dick', been nostalgic about a thirty year old yet intensely relevant dissertation on the nature of literary fiction titled 'The World and the Book', absorbed the entire output of Thomas Mann and not just 'The Magic Mountain', taken at least a dip once more into Albert Camus not to mention finally reread Sartre's 'Roads to Freedom' trilogy, compared Herodotus to Thucydides again, given Dante one more go, not failed to appreciate George Eliot as one did as a callow youth, spent a happy month in the company of Eliot, T. S., remembered what it was like to be sixteen and enthralled by Robbe-Grillet, suffered with dear mad William Blake and pondered in the serious company of Tennyson.........there is hardly an end, and all this is just what one would wish to achieve before the weekend were out.

You can see the difficulty. Quarts into pint pots do not ye go. There is the day job to consider, yet to mention family commitments and so forth.

Time simply does not permit it all. Only eternity is sufficient for the purpose.