Lisa's World

Saturday, 5 May 2018

C.S. Lewis's Grave

The beloved fantasy novelist is buried near a church containing a whimsical etched glass window full of Narnia favorites.

The bones of C.S. Lewis, one of the 20th century’s literary greats, rest within a peaceful cemetery. Nearby, an etched glass window bearing characters from his most famous fantasy world adds a whimsical touch of childhood magic to the churchyard.

The grave of C.S. Lewis lies within the cemetery of the Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry just outside of Oxford. He was buried there in November of 1963, and even today it’s common to find flowers placed atop his tombstone.

C.S. Lewis is best known for his beloved fiction novels, notably The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and The Space Trilogy. He is also known for his popular works of non-fiction Christian apologetics, including Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain.

Lewis was educated at Oxford University, which is only a couple miles from the churchyard. After serving in World War I, he returned to Oxford to become a tutor and fellow in English Literature at Magdalen College. He was one of the “Inklings” that brought weekly fractions of the fantasy realm to the town’s local haunts.

Influenced by close friend J.R.R. Tolkien and others, Lewis returned to Anglicanism in 1930 and began attending Holy Trinity Church. The famous writer was a regular at the church’s 8:00 a.m. service, which he chose because of his dislike of organ music. In 1992, a gorgeous etched glass window featuring beloved Narnia characters was installed in the church. The fantasy scene is located adjacent to the pew where he always sat.

Know Before You Go

It is easy to reach by public transportation (bus) from the center of Oxford.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/cs-lewis-grave?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=05f4c71a23-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_14&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f36db9c480-05f4c71a23-65897069&ct=t()&mc_cid=05f4c71a23&mc_eid=2cd79a4b6a

16 Quotes on Grieving & Loss to Help us Feel Less Alone. Via Aimee-Claire Smith

Sometimes, pain simply needs to be acknowledged and honored. Sometimes, we need understanding more than we need hope.

1. “My longing for you is such that it presses on my breast like tears that cannot be wept.” ~ Franz Kafka

2. “The night I lost you, I lost something inside me. Or perhaps several things. Something central to my existence, the very support for who I am as a person.” ~ Haruki Murakami

3. “Since I was shot, everything seems like such a dream to me. Like I don’t know whether I’m alive or whether I died.” ~ Andy Warhol

4. “This is how I am without you, now. I stand in my kitchen, leaning against the sink, for an hour, my eyes seeing memories. But you are gone.” ~ Waylon Lewis

5. “I don’t understand how the sun keeps rising every morning, or how the moon and stars still glow every night. Sometimes I wish they wouldn’t, sometimes I wish the universe would just stop and mourn your loss till nothing but dust is left.” ~ Kaila Cunha

6. “I want her back. I want everything back, the way it was. But there’s no point to it, this wanting.” ~ Margret Atwood

7. “And my heart aches, in hopeless pain / Exhausted with repinings vain / That I shall greet her ne’er again!” ~ Emily Bronte

8. “You think the grief will make you smaller and sad, like your heart will collapse in on itself—but it doesn’t. I feel spaces opening up inside of me, like a building with rooms I’ve never explored.” ~ Lisa Joy

9. “Should I tear my eyes out now? Everything I see returns to you somehow. Should I tear my heart out now? Everything I feel returns to you somehow.” ~ Sufjan Stevens

10. “I long for you like a ship for the harbour. Every thought of you sinks my heart.” ~ Unknown

11. “The pain of loss is insurmountable and everlasting, fading and heightening to the tumultuous waves of time. In the moment it fades, we continue living, caught up in the regular motions of life. And in the moment it hits us strong, we’re enraged at life because it doesn’t stop; it just goes on no matter the pain, no matter the loss.” ~ Jihad Mahmoud

12. “The day you lose someone isn’t the worst—it’s all the days they stay dead.” ~ Steven Moffat

13. “The times that were the most fun always seemed to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realised how utterly, totally gone she was.” ~ John Green

14. “I miss you like the cloudless night sky would miss the stars if they were stolen.” ~ C.T. O’Connel

15. “One minute I want to remember. The next minute I want to live in the land of forgetting. One minute I want to feel. The next minute I never want to feel again.” ~ Benjamin Saenz

and, lastly, these timeless verses from a poem by Edward Hirsch:

16. “I did not know that the work of mourning
Is like carrying a bag of cement
Up a mountain at night…

…Look closely and you will see
Almost everyone carrying bags
Of cement on their shoulders.”

Author: Aimee-Claire Smith
Image: Annie Spratt/Unsplash
Editor: Sara Kärpänen
Copy Editor: Travis May

Friday, 4 May 2018

Bookplates Hold the Secrets to Books’ Past Lives

The mysterious marks owners leave in their books tell stories of their own.

BY SARAH LASKOW

MARCH 22, 2018

Provenance markings from a book in the Rosenwald Collection. PROVENANCE ONLINE PROJECT/CC BY 2.0

INSIDE THE FRONT COVER OF a book made in the 16th century, someone has pasted a mysterious, black-and-white bookplate. At the top, Greek letters spell out a cryptic identity—“Philos Pontou,” or “Friend of the Sea.” Underneath, the bookplate depicts a noble white unicorn dashing through the water, its horn pointing down into a cresting wave.

In one corner is a year—1917—and the name of the engraver, Joe Andrada. There were no other clues, though, about who actually owned the book.

This particular volume has a long history, and it shows. An edition of St. John Chrysostum’s fourth-century work on the priesthood, the book was published in 1599, by Michael Manger, the “single printer worth mentioning” in 16th-century Augsburg, Germany. It was bound in a deep red Morocco leather, with a border of gold and a crest stamped in the center, the arms of Jacques-Auguste de Thou and his first wife, Marie de Barbançon. Later, another owner, François-Michel de Verthamon, Marquis de Breau, added his own heraldic bookplate inside the back cover. And on the back of the title leaf, there’s an inscription, noting that Félicien Estignard gifted the book to Abbé Pistre, former Curé of Conne, in December 1861.

But some time after that, the book must have passed into the hands of this Philos Pontou, whoever that person might be. In theory, a bookplate should identify its owner. But in this case, by the time the book had entered the collection of the University of Pennsylvania, the identity of this cryptic “Friend of the Sea” had become obscure.

Who is Philos Pontou? PROVENANCE ONLINE PROJECT/CC BY 2.0

As long as there have been books, their owners have been finding ways to leave marks on them. In a personal collection, these notes might evoke a particular memory: the college semester dedicated to finally reading James Joyce’s Ulysses or the name of the boy who gave the book as a gift. But for librarians and curators, those assertions of owners’ identities—provenance marks, they’re called—are clues to a book’s history.

“They help you understand how these books were used and who was reading them,” says Laura Aydelotte, the director of the Provenance Online Project at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. Since 2011, the project has collected more than 15,000 images of provenance marks in books from the university’s own collection, as well as from a handful of partner libraries.

The project focuses on “primary provenance,” that is “anything that’s in or on the book itself that tells you who owned the book before,” says Aydelotte. (Secondary provenance material would be, for example, a receipt or auction record that records the transfer of the book from one owner to the next.) These marks can be bookplates, marginalia, bindings, or even more obscure details, such as the particular way an owner once dog-eared the pages.

An untraced inscription. PROVENANCE ONLINE PROJECT/CC BY 2.0

Over the history of printing, these provenance marks have evolved. In medieval times, some libraries marked the edges of a book’s pages, and illuminated manuscripts might include a portrait of the book’s owner. In the past, a book’s owner might use a formulation such as “Lucinda, her book” to assert ownership, rather than the more modern “This book belongs to … ” Coats of arms used to be a popular way of marking books. Bookplates appeared with the age of print, stamps later on. There are painstaking and creative provenance marks, such as embroidered bindings, but the most basic assertion of ownership—writing one’s name—has been a constant.

The cataloguing staff at UPenn’s special collections started posting images of provenance information online in part to help solve the many mysteries they came across. They were also curious to know more about previous owners. When the project posted an inscription from “Celestino Joaristi, Havana, Cuba,” his descendants found the image and filled in the details of his life: A student at UPenn in the 1930s, he left school suddenly to take over the family hardware business in Cuba after his father died. Another bookplate prompted an old friend to comment that he had known the book’s owner in Algeria during World War II. But many of the bookplates and notes remain mysterious. Who is represented by this bookplate featuring a squirrel and a strongman? Who was Anastasia Löwin?

A mysterious bookplate. PROVENANCE ONLINE PROJECT/CC BY 2.0

Philos Pontou was eventually identified, with the help of the Ritman Library, which specializes in texts about ancient mysticism and had other examples of the bookplate in its collection. Philos Pontou, according to the Ritman, is a pun on the name of René Philipon, a French count who lived until 1936. His library was sold three years after this death, but he had left behind his mysterious mark, a puzzle for future collectors.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mystery-bookplate-collection?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=8ea59c48ef-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_03_26&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f36db9c480-8ea59c48ef-65897069&ct=t()&mc_cid=8ea59c48ef&mc_eid=2cd79a4b6a

A Photographer’s Journey Through the Former Spas of Soviet Georgia Remnants of communist leisure in the shadow of war.

The town of Tskaltubo, in Georgia, had everything a Soviet citizen could want from his or her annual, state-sponsored, two-week vacation. Located near the Caucasus Mountains, it offered a subtropical climate and thermal water treatments at an array of sanatoriums. But since the collapse of the USSR, the town has changed. There are fewer visitors to the few sanatoriums that remain in operation. Those that closed were either left to decay, or are now housing refugees from the Abkhaz-Georgian conflict.

“Georgia, as a Republic of the Soviet Union, proved to be the perfect host for building many sanatoriums,” says photographer Reginald van de Velde, who visited a dozen of these sites across Georgia and Abkhazia last summer. In addition to the thermal and mineral qualities of their water, “some even had sources with radiotive isotopes in them,” he says, noting that “radioactivity was once considered a healthy thing, curing everything from infertility to paralysis.”

The remains of a theater inside a Georgia sanatorium.

Vacation was a serious business in the USSR. It was enshrined in the 1936 Soviet constitution, as a “right to rest.” Using a voucher system, workers could stay at a sanatorium and receive health-promoting treatments. They were often built to capitalize on natural resources, such as the one in Naftalan, Azerbaijan, where visitors could soak in crude oil (a treatment that is still available today). Georgia’s appeal was not just its spring waters, but also the region on the Black Sea coast known as Abkhazia.

“This pristine coastline soon gained an enormous popularity amongst the Soviet elite, and was dubbed the ‘Russian Riviera,’” says van de Velde. Abkhazia drew so many visitors that at its peak, apartments in Sukhumi, the main city, were more expensivethan ones in Moscow. Stalin, in addition to visiting sanatoriums in Tskaltubo, owned a dacha overlooking the Black Sea.

But in 1992, shortly after the collapse of the USSR, Abkhazia sought independence from Georgia. “With the Georgians being the single largest ethnic group in prewar Abkhazia, they pretty much all fled the war-torn country due to the heavy and deadly clashes between the Georgian army and the Russian-backed Abkhaz separatists,” says van de Velde. More than 220,000 people left as refugees, and some of them still live in makeshift homes in Georgia’s former sanatoriums.

A building that was once used for dining, with an open-air terrace at left, Georgia.

The Abkhaz-Georgian conflict remains unresolved. Most of the world considers Abkhazia part of Georgia—the disputed territory has been recognized by only four countries: Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Nauru. The U.S. State Department advises against any travel to Abkhazia, as does the British Foreign Office. So van de Velde prepared a great deal before attempting to enter.

“There’s only one way to travel into Abkhazia via Georgia, and that’s via the famous Enguri Bridge. No vehicles are allowed to cross, so you need to walk the bridge by foot or make use of one of the horse carriages,” van de Velde recalls. “The Georgian police held us at the border for three hours for no apparent reason. Once you cross the other side, you bump into a Russian border operated by the military, doing a proper check-up as well.”

The view from the terrace of a former sanatorium on the Black Sea, Abkhazia.

Van de Velde didn’t know what to expect once he finally got into Abkhazia. “You enter a country no one ever visits, no one ever sees. You enter this fascinating entity secluded from the outside world. It’s unspoiled, its unknown, it’s subtropical, it’s war-torn, but it’s also incredibly beautiful and pristine,” he recalls. Evidence of violent conflict is still impossible to escape. “All the roads remain severely damaged and potholed, many homes are abandoned, and when you inspect them up close you see the impacts of bullets and shelling.”

Late one afternoon last summer, van de Velde found himself on the terrace of an ornate sanatorium in Abkhazia. Between the vast columns were sweeping views across the Black Sea. “Abkhazia suffered severely from the war,” he says. “But there’s still so much grandeur and beauty to be found.”

Atlas Obscura has a selection of van de Velde’s photographs.

The impressive entrance hallway to a sanatorium in Abkhazia. It had been converted into a hotel, but was abandoned during the Abkhaz-Georgian conflict.

The remains of a thermal spa in Georgia, featuring rings of individual tubs. — The impressive entrance hallway to a sanatorium in Abkhazia. It had been converted into a hotel, but was abandoned during the Abkhaz-Georgian conflict.

Don't be Beautiful

The Message of the Bee

Snowwolfs Woodland Nook

Yesterday at 11:00

The Message of the Bee

The humble bee is hiding
In the blossom's golden cells;
He, and he only, can tell me
Where the queen of the fairies dwells.
He is out on a royal message,
He has her high command
To bring his tribute of honey
To her table in fairyland.
And this is why he is ranging
From blossom to blossom to-day;
He is busy making nectar
For the lips of elf and fay.
He will carry the golden treasure
To all their kith and kin,
To a bank in a wood where a portal
Will open to let him in.

This tiniest of portals
Lies hid as violets hide,
Two blue-bells stand as sentries,
They guard it on either side.
He will hum, as he enters, the password,
And they — they will nod in the sun,
Then stand again to their duty,
And this is all that is done.

I too have seen this portal,
And a child can understand
That there is no other doorway
To the realms of fairyland.

by Alexander Anderson (1845-1909).
Art Becky Kelly