This from James Kugel in 'Traditions of the Bible':

It is certainly no accident that... only 'half' the Bible's story has generally been found worthy of study in universities, for example. Courses there - elsewhere as well - tend to be devoted exclusively to what, with some justification, might rather be called the 'pre-Bible'. Students are led backward through the stages of individual biblical books' composition, breaking things down to their putative original components, which can then be studied and explained in terms of the political or social history of the ancient Near East. None of this is particularly harmful, I think, but the fact that this is all most students are likely ever to know about the Bible certainly is. How difficult would it be for such courses to be reconfigured so as to complete the picture, moving from the 'pre-Bible'... to the Bible proper, those same chapters or books as they were known to, and interpreted by, Jews and Christians in the formative centuries...?

And again:

The activity of ancient biblical interpreters was a - perhaps the - striking instance of how interpretation is inevitably a kind of second authorship. It was their Bible, and no ragtag collection of ancient Near Eastern texts, that was canonized in the closing centuries of the Second Temple period, and their Bibles is, to an extent with which all who love God's word must reckon, ours today.

I am reading James Kugel's 'Traditions of the Bible' with an eraser in my hand. He has helpful and interesting things to say. The imbeciles who have read this copy previously and left their marks all over it, do not. It almost makes me want to spend the $90 or so to get a pristine copy of my own.

So far I have identified at least three distinct culprits. One writes in capital letters with a spiky pencil and leaves notes where he disagrees with Kugel, accusing him of ambiguity and evasion. The second has a softer pencil and leaves fewer comments. His aim seems to be to guide the subsequent reader by labelling sections with stars or with instructions to 'skip'. The third and fortunately least prominent critic, uses a yellow highlighting pen and should be shot.

Many of my readers have been leaving excellent suggestions of poetry for the unpoetic to sharpen their teeth on. Amanda reminded me of Housman. I love Housman for lots of reasons but mainly because his poems are so firmly grounded in a particular place that is part of my childhood as well as his. Reading them now, in a foreign land, they make me homesick and happy in almost equal measure.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

And this:

  In my own shire, if I was sad,
Homely comforters I had:
The earth, because my heart was sore,
Sorrowed for the son she bore;
And standing hills, long to remain,
Shared their short-lived comrade's pain.
And bound for the same bourn as I,
On every road I wandered by,
Trod beside me, close and dear,
The beautiful and death-struck year:
Whether in the woodland brown
I heard the beechnut rustle down,
And saw the purple crocus pale
Flower about the autumn dale;
Or littering far the fields of May
Lady-smocks a-bleaching lay,
And like a skylit water stood
The bluebells in the azured wood.

  Yonder, lightening other loads,
The seasons range the country roads,
But here in London streets I ken
No such helpmates, only men;
And these are not in plight to bear,
If they would, another's care.
They have enough as 'tis: I see
In many an eye that measures me
The mortal sickness of a mind
Too unhappy to be kind.
Undone with misery, all they can
Is to hate their fellow man;
And till they drop they needs must still
Look at you and wish you ill.

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