‘Lectures I will never give’

An curious coincidence. Last Saturday, at the Oxfam bookshop in Greenwich, I bought ‘A Poet’s Journal’ by George Seferis. It begins shortly after the liberation of Greece at the end of World War 2 and goes through to 1951, years of the Greek Civil War. It is, in part, Seferis’s own internal conversation with Cavafy. I’d never heard of the book. It seemed, at Oxfam prices, worth a read.

Then last Monday, in the Oxfam bookshop at Ealing Broadway, I found a copy of ‘Madness, Rack, and Honey – collected lectures’ by the American poet Mary Ruefle. I recognised one of the chapters from Poetry magazine some years ago. The chapter headings are intriguing; ‘Someone reading a book is a sign of order in the world’, ‘I remember, I remember’, ‘Lectures I will never give’. Her method is to accumulate short sections; a sentence or two, a paragraph, a list, a quotation. And one of the short sections of ‘Someone reading a book…’ is about reading the notebooks of George Seferis, and copying out her favourite passage.

In fact, it’s about re-reading the notebooks, except that she had forgotten reading him the first time. She was simultaneously reading her own private journals from twenty years before, in which she discovered she had been reading the same pages:

‘and (I) had copied into the journal by hand my favourite passage, which was identical with the passage I had copied earlier in the day, believing completely that I had never encountered it before: “But to say what you want to say, you must create another language and nourish it for years and years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, with what you will never find again.” ‘