Falling House

Beta Radio - On Your Horizon 🎶

 

As far as I remember, the first money I earned fruit of my work was in my first year in Highschool. My school had a small library on the top floor of the old building, a place rarely visited by anybody, let alone the students, and it served more like a storage room for books than a proper library. I have a vague memory of that place, for I am describing events that happened many years ago, but I remember it as a dark, warm and quiet place, with just one window overseeing the small inner playground, and old solid dark wooden furniture. Promoted by my parents and my grandfather, my romance with books had started many years before, when I was only a kid with the pockets still full of innocence. Knowing that the very place where I was attending school every day had its own library caught my interest immediately, enough to make me overcome my shyness and ask one of the literature teachers permission to spend time in the library. His name was Juan B., a short, grave man, with thick glasses, tie, corduroy trousers and a funny way to walk because of a back injury when he was younger. The teacher was surprised that someone showed any interest in the library, used as he was to his students spilling hormones and avid to experiment the practical world instead, and immediately opened the doors of the small library to me and asked me if I would be willing to update their obsolete catalogue. Needless to say, this was like a dream come true for me, I accepted and I would spend hours after my classes during that course labelling books with codes, sorting them according to topic and alphabetically by author, handwriting record cards, one for each book, with all the bibliographic details and archiving them in the small drawers of a metal filing cabinet.

 

Before the course ended, I had managed to bring that library to a new life, cataloguing, sorting and filing hundreds of books. And to the satisfaction of the work done, I had to add a final surprise that was in store for me: even though I never asked for anything like that, the school wanted to show their appreciation for the work done and they paid me a small amount of money they agreed with the literature teacher. When the classes finished on the day I received this money, I ran to the closest book shop in town, just two streets away from my School, and spent all the money I just earned in books for me! Nearly 40 years later, I still have these books with me, and carried them to every country and every city where I lived so far. One of my literary preferences then, as it is now, could not be more obvious when I showed very excited all the books I bought to my mum, when I arrived home: Lovecraft, Mary Shelley, Conan Doyle, William Golding, Maupassant, Stoker, Stevenson, and the cherry on top of that cake, a 560-pages paperback with tiny printed letters including all the short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, which I started reading that same night!

 

The first story in that book was The Fall of the House of Usher, a delightful XIXth Century gothic horror story with many elements of a XIXth Century gothic horror story, including a cursed family, that of the twins Roderick and Madeline Usher, a haunted house which seemed alive, madness, and the obsessive fear of being buried alive. Stories like this fascinated me, set my own imagination in motion and made me dream of becoming a writer myself, a storyteller, one day, which didn't quite happen yet, but I still have time left. And, of course, I continued maturing and developing my interest on this literary genre, becoming a devoted fan of King, Howard, Moore, and my favourite author of all times when it comes to Fantasy, Gaiman. Some weeks ago, I heard of a Netflix series by Mike Flanagan homonymous with that story I read for the first time 35 years earlier, and got curious. I surprisingly managed to find the time shortly after to watch the entire series over a weekend and I truly enjoyed the characters, the acting, the aesthetics and atmosphere, and the ghosts story, only very loosely related to Poe's short story, but nicely weaved with references to the works of the brilliant Bostonian author, including beautifully recited original (or mostly original) poems or references to them, one of which I shall transcribe below.

 

The night after watching the series, I had my 560-pages paperback book with Poe's short stories by my bedside, and read The Fall of the House of Usher again, this time with older eyes in an older body, on a larger bed and in a strange city, but with exactly the same mind of the kid, with the same need and ease to be awed. And the seemingly unimportant decision to watch a Netflix series took me, as it happens, on a trip back in time that kept me awake until the wee hours of the morning, meditating again about events, emotions and experiences in my life, some of which I shared here and now, more aware than ever that life is nothing but a dream within a dream.

 

A Dream Within a Dream

Edgar A. Poe (1849)

 

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow:

You are not wrong who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

 

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand--

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep--while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

 

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🌐 My version of a decrepit House of Usher was photographed in Aurelias Fables & Fairytales.

Done