Wednesday, July 3, 2019

Swedenborg - Chapter 3


(This one needs some updating - it's obviously from nearly 30 years ago, and some of the time/period references don't hold up.) 


Chapter 3
 

    He collapsed into the chair, gasping. Even putting books on a shelf was becoming too much.

    As he desperately tried to catch his breath, he could feel the tickle in his lungs beginning again. He readied for the inevitable.

    The coughing came in an explosion. His body bent forward, his face flushed with pain.

    He coughed again and again, until he felt as if his lungs would leap from his body. Every muscle in his chest ached with the strain.

    Then, slowly, too slowly, the attack subsided.

    His lungs throbbed. His throat was raw.

    He wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, slumped back into the chair.

    And he thought of Joy.

    Joy chiding him about his smoking.

    Dear sweet, Joy, concerned about him, warning him even as the tumor in her stomach grew and the cancer spread through her organs and into her bones.

    "I don't want to have to take care of an old invalid," she'd said gently.

    He picked up the book resting on the table next to his chair and opened to the title page.

    Middle English Love Poetry, it read. And below, in her neat script, "To my beloved Middle English husband, Ergo age duremus, quamvis adoleverit aetas; uta murque annis quos mora parva teret.”

    Still let us love, he silently translated, although the years be hasty, and use the hours that brief delay is wasting.

    Ah, Joy.

    It was one of the few books he had kept. Well, few by his standards.

    In the last year, even as the doctors fought to halt the cancer that was spreading through his lungs, he'd given away thousands of books accumulated through 50 years as a student and as an Oxford professor of history.

    Now, he had a few hundred books that he had had shipped across to Carthage with him. Enough to get him through a few semesters of teaching. And to aid him in his last quest.

    Perhaps inspired by the Crusades he so loved, he had in the past few decades become a crusader of sorts himself. At first, he'd fought academic battles, especially in the 1960s and 1970s when the lust for the new threatened to undermine the educational system that had formed him.

    But gradually, in part through Joy's influence, he'd begun to look at society as a whole. He welcomed the new ways that cleared away a lot of the old stuffiness and rigidity that deserved to be overturned - stuffiness and rigidity of which he himself had been guilty. He even remembered an embarrassing article he'd once written as a student condemning the concept of higher education for women. The anti-feminists who so loved his works kept trotting that one out, to his discomfort.

    Still, amid the welcome changes he saw a coarseness creeping in, and with it, something darker.

    So he wrote, spoke, did battle on television, radio, and the opinion pages. One newspaper branded him "Lewis Staples, Curmudgeon Crusader." Accompanying the article was a caricature of him in crusader's armor, his sword raised against a gaggle of pornographers, media stars, and popular writers.

    Then the battle against the cancer had begun. And he knew he had time and energy for one last fight.

    That's when the offer to teach for a year at Carthage University had arrived. A former student was the history department chairman there. The invitation to the highly respected historian was intended to gain a feather in the former student's cap.

     At first, he'd been inclined to simply toss it away. But then another old friend, a compatriot in his cultural war, wrote to describe some of the current danger spots in the world. Carthage was among them. A little further research, and he began to sense behind the invitation something more than an ambitious young academic.

    It was a longtime foe hoping for one last victory.

    So he'd taken the offer, knowing that he might not live another year.

    I'm not dead yet, old Scratch.

    He opened the book, and started reading. Tears welled.

    Ah, Joy, my love.

Pax et bonum

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