The Foreign Service Journal, June 2004

I. Dust, Mozart, and a faint whiff of fading mildew Blend in the background. A ripping sound, as covers stuck together, are pulled apart. Idle thoughts: Do paperback books go to the Old Books’ Home? New arrivals invite: My Traitor’s Heart speaks to The Promise of a New South. An old-timer, World of Our Fathers , looks on, too long ignored. With broken spines, papers falling out, old reading projects on Faulkner, Conrad, and George Eliot, completed or abandoned, speak of youthful seductions and more mature affairs, broken off. Remnants of now-dried intellectual guts and youth lie splattered all over the floor. Truman precedes Wilde, The Little Prince studies Exiles’ Return , while the Constitution sniffs at Thoreau. Palestinians peer out at Flanders While Pascal and Nietzsche sit astride Rousseau; Criticism in the Wilderness meets Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City , Abroad. A small New Testament, a survivor from childhood, Lies forlornly in the corner. Education sought, accomplished, and frustrated; Knowledge and art claimed and sometimes possessed. A library, an organization, an alphabetization of a love, a recurring urge, a disappointment. The boxes from the Jerusalem shippers, with books spilling out here, some unpacked there, Speak of transitions, previous shipments, occasional destinations; Travels and careers blur, previous locations call out: Dijon, Abidjan, Kingston, Athens. II. Idle thoughts recur: Did the knowledge gained with the reading Equal the distance of the voyages, plus the fun of the adventures, Divided by the absence of his company all those years? The old battles had played out mostly between the covers of these volumes, Whose titles and authors hint at the specific campaigns waged: Did it matter that I had read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time as a young person and run away from home briefly in a nocturnal act of readerly solidarity? Or that Rousseau and Simone Weil and Henry Fielding and company had pushed me to leave home and sent me to West Africa years ago? Or that I could recite by heart Hopkins’ “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” even if at his funeral? There should have been more boxes, More books read, things known, stands taken, issues grap- pled with, adventures enjoyed; Another dark night of the soul or two, here and there; Perhaps the shippers had made a mistake, perhaps not; Empty shelves beckon. A kind of order ensues. Idle thoughts have to be filed, stuffed in a book on the shelf, Perhaps, where they will fit well, in Turgenev’s slim vol- ume, Fathers and Sons , On the last shelf, at the end of all the novels. 100 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 4 William Roebuck joined the Foreign Service in 1992 and has served in Kingston, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He is currently assigned to Damascus. The stamp is courtesy of the AAFSW Bookfair “Stamp Corner.” R EFLECTIONS Unpacking: Morning with My HHE B Y W ILLIAM V. R OEBUCK