crossings-out) splendid essays and admirable articles and pleasant
memoirs. I see those writers clearly. I knew them well in the years of
my teens, as the 1920s passed and the Great War loomed ahead.
When those gentlemen-writers post their belles-lettres to editors, they
include no illustrations. The gentlemen actually boast of not knowing how to use cameras or gramophones or other modern gadgets, and their readers love the gentlemen for their charming dottiness. (I
have never learned to use a camera or a tape-recorder, but when I tell
this to people they think I am striking a pose to draw attention to
Precious Bane
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myself.)
I do not think the Carthusians would have objected to a gentleman-
writer’s taking a few photographs of their monastery so I assume that
the author of the article trusted his words and sentences to describe
clearly what he saw. The monastery was in Surrey, or it might have
been Kent. This had disappointed me. When I first read the article I
no longer dreamed of becoming a monk, but I liked to dream of
monks living like hermits in remote landscapes; and Surrey or Kent
was too populous for dreams about peaceful libraries. The only place-
name I remember from the article is Parkminster. I looked into my
Times Atlas of the World']xist now and found no Parkminster in the index. (While I looked I vaguely remembered having looked for the same word more than once in the past with the same result.) Parkminster is therefore a hamlet too small to be marked on maps; or perhaps the monastery itself is called Parkminster, and the monks asked the
writer not to mention any place-names in his article because they
wanted no curious sightseers trying to peep into their cells.
But, in any case, the article was published in the 1930s, and for all
I know, the Carthusians and their cells and the word ‘Parkminster’
may have drifted off towards the Age of Monasteries and I may be the
only one who remembers them, or at least what was once written
about them.
Yet, when I think of the man reaching up to his bookshelves, on a
grey afternoon in the year 2020, I see broad gravel paths with trees
above them: whole districts of paths with cells beside the paths and in
every cell a monk surrounded by books and manuscripts.
The man at his bookshelves — the last rememberer of my book —
not only fails to remember what he once read in my book but cannot
remember where he last saw my book on his shelves. He stands there
and tries to remember.
A lay-brother walks along an avenue of his monastery. Lay-brothers
are bound by solemn vows to their monastery, like other monks, but
their duties and privileges are somewhat different. A lay-brother is not
so much confined to his cell. Each day while the priest-monks are in
their cells reading, or reciting the divine office, or tending their
gardens, the lay-brothers are working for the monastery as a whole:
taking messages and instructions and even dealing, in a limited way,
with the world outside the monastery. Each lay-brother knows his way
around some suburb of the monastery; he knows which monk lives behind which wall in his particular district. The lay-brother even gets to know, in a general sense, what the hermit-monks keep in their
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libraries: what books and manuscripts they spend their days reading.
A lay-brother, having only a few books himself, thinks of books and
libraries in a convenient, summary way. He learns to quote in full the
titles of books he has never opened or never seen, whereas a monk in
his cell might spend a year reading a certain book or copying and
embellishing a certain manuscript and thinking of it for the rest of his
life as an enormous pattern of rainbow pages of capital letters spiralling inwards and long laneways of words like the streets of other monasteries inviting him to dream about their cells of books and
manuscripts.
A lay-brother walks along an avenue of the monastery. He has an
errand to undertake but he is in no hurry. This is not easy to explain
to people ignorant of monasteries. Monks behind their walls observe
time differently from the people in the world outside. While only a few
moments seem to pass on an uneventful, grey afternoon outside the
monastery, a monk on the other side of the wall might have turned, at
long intervals, page after page of a manuscript. The mystery can never
be explained because no one has been able to be at once both outside
and inside a monastery.
So, the lay-brother is in no hurry. He stands admiring the vegetables and herbs in each of the gardens of the cells he has been instructed to visit. When each monk has come to the door, the lay-brother asks
him a certain question or questions but with no show of urgency. The
lay-brother will call again, he says, on the next day or, perhaps, on the
day after. In the meanwhile, if the monk could consult his books or his
manuscripts for the needed information. . .
There is more than one lay-brother, of course. There may be
hundreds, thousands, all striding or ambling
