#kostova

Then my grief reached me, an unspeakable fire.

Since that moment, I have known many times what I first experienced then. Until then, my forays into written French had been purely utilitarian, the completion of almost mathematical exercises. When I comprehended a new phrase it was merely a bridge to the next exercise. Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension , the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light.

Saint Mary's Church, my father said, was a homely little piece of Victoriana that lingered at the edge of the old section of campus. I'd passed it hundreds of times without ever going in, but it seemed to me now that a Catholic church was the right companion for all these horrors. Didn't Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn't it expert in superstition? I somehow doubted that the hospitable plain Protestant chapels that dotted the university could be much help; they didn't look qualified to wrestle with the undead. I felt sure those big square Protestant churches on the town green would be helpless in the face of a European vampire. A little witch burning was more in their line--something limited to the neighbors

As an adult, I have often known that peculiar legacy time brings to the traveler: the longing to seek out a place a second time, to find deliberately what we stumbled on once before, to recapture the feeling of discovery. Sometimes we search out again even a place that was not remarkable in itself--we look for it simply because we remember it. If we do find it, of course, everything is different. The rough-hewn door is still there, but it's much smaller; the day is cloudy instead of brilliant; it's spring instead of autumn; we're alone instead of with three friends. Or, worse, with three friends instead of alone.

I shall conclude my account as rapidly as possible, since you must draw from it vital information if we are both to--ah, to survive, at least, and to survive in a state of goodness and mercy.  There is survival  and survival, the historian learns to his grief.  The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia.  And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime.

As we set off among moonless streets, I felt that sadness that comes with dropping down from a height, leaving anything lofty.

But I turned my feet away from the cheering pub--a mistake that has been the downfall of many a poor scholar--and towards Rare Books.