Not just any port in a storm
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs is in good condition and only $4. A sticker inside the cover says Ex Libris DS Rickard. I used to know a Mr Rickard but he wasn’t DS. I add the book to the pile I’ve already gathered.
But all unnoticed by me the skies have darkened over Bishopdale. Then the lights flicker and thunder shakes the shop.
Everyone looks to the window. The day has turned as dark as evening. The clouds are ceiling height and Bible black, the world compressed to a thin band of heavy air, held between land and sky.
Hail smacks the pavement outside and bounces. It hits so loud on the roofing iron that I look up, half expecting to see the ceiling rent open, running with water. The building feels as flimsy as a tent.
There are perhaps a dozen of us in the shop. Some laugh nervously. Most just stare through the window. You don’t want to be out in it. You do want to see it, to witness its primal violence.
Outside in the darkness a young man sprints past the window, a bag held hopelessly over his head.
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm.
Those words have to be in this shop somewhere, words 400 years old, words written with a quill pen. Much has changed since Shakespeare wrote King Lear, but not storms. They retain the power to awe. They seem such unmistakable expressions of a furious universe.
Let the great gods
Who keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads,
Find out their enemies now.
If the great gods chose, they could sweep us away like fleas. Our ancestors knew that. Dogs still know that. I’ve never owned a dog that didn’t cringe and tremble in a storm.
“Any port in a storm” is the first of three storm proverbs in the dictionary. The shop is now a port for a dozen random strangers, united only by our need for shelter. We are walled in by old books, by the words of the dead, all awaiting our eyes to breathe them back to life.
As I always do I’ve gathered books I’ve read before, unable to resist them. Under my arm I’ve got Camus’s Outsider, which changed my world when I was 17, Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, which made me cry, and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, one of the few books my mother ever owned. Inside the front cover of this copy of the Rubaiyat, in old black ink and perfect penmanship:
Happiness this Xmas and always, Nance. Margaret.
Where’s Nance, now? Where’s Margaret? Where’s always?
The Moving Finger writes; and having writ Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
Storm proverb two: the sharper the storm, the sooner it’s over. The dictionary traces those words back to Seneca of Rome. Seneca was contemporary with Christ. And sure enough, just as in Seneca’s day, the storm is already waning, the hail melting and running to the gutter, the skies lifting, the thunder now distant, light returning. We’ve ridden it out, the 12 of us. We’ve shared five dramatic minutes quite by chance. And now, in the promise of kinder weather and the delusion of permanence, we set about returning to our separate lives and the books of the dead, as if the storm never was.
Proverb three: after a storm comes a calm. And that little saying is traced back to a book of instruction for nuns, written in the 13th century.
Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lytteltonbased writer, columnist and playwright.