Treasures in books, the Messiah, the Big Snow

What is the strangest--or the most grotesque or the most beautiful--thing that you have ever found in a book. Pressed flowers? Old letters? A beaten tissue of gold?

Recently I felt the decided impulse to read The Messiah of Stockholm. What should I find inside but a letter from Cynthia Ozick, which I immediately devoured in the way that one does, when surprised by finding something in the book--some possible mystery, some welcome curlicue in a bland day.

It was not the original but a xerox of a letter from November of 1985, full of sympathy and charm and heart. The letter held compliments for a dead man, no longer useful to him but sweet to share with others, and some for the living as well: hence the xerox. The words clicked and sang well together.

Had it been there along? Had I seen it once before and then forgot? And what do I do with such a thing? It was a bit naughty to read the thing. Do I keep it, send it to the author, bury it in the Messiah until the next time I take down the book to read again? And if I forget it, will I have the same marvelous sense of chance and discovery, or will I simply think that my mind is gone, gone, gone?

What is, I wonder, the most wonderful thing that has been found in a book? The words, of course, but what about the most wonderful thing that was not supposed to be there? Money, old baptismal certificates, marriage licenses, and prayer cards: these things are often left deliberately. But was is the loveliest accident ever to befall a book?

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Illustration: a self-portrait of Bruno Schulz, artist and author of The Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, and the lost book, The Messiah.

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It was the shooting that drew her. The shooting; the murder. Shot in the streets! Lars suspected that Heidi cared more for his father's death than for his father's tales, where savagely crafty nouns and verbs were set on a crooked road to take on engorgements and transmogrifications: a bicycle ascends into the zodiac, rooms in houses are misplaced, wallpaper hisses, the calendar acquires a thirteenth month. Losses, metamorphoses, degradations. In one of the stories the father turns into a pincered crab; the mother boils it and serves it to the family on a dish. Heidi shouldered all that aside: it was the catastrophe of fact she wanted, Lars's father gunned down in the gutters of Drohobycz along with two hundred and thirty other Jews. A Thursday in 1942, as it happened: the nineteenth of November. Lars's father was bringing home a loaf of bread.

--from Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm

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Thanks for the notes and emails--we survived the storm. Judging by the snow on the van, we hit right at a yard in Cooperstown. Pretty impressive for a day. Close by, Roseboom had 38 inches and beat us. With that sort of fall, ramparts rise up after the plows come through. At midnight Wednesday we staggered down to the lake, wading through waist-high snow on the sidewalks. The stairs up to the townhouses were flowing Gaudi-esque slides, and the village library's bactrian made of steel ribbons was buried in dunes--the ribbons of his upper body sending long twisting shadows over the snow. I may be a Southerner, but that was a snow worth seeing! It was pristine, thatching every house, making sculpture out of the ancient crabapple trees, filling squares of lawn outlined with fence or hedge as neatly as sugar in a box. N has been having fun quarrying tunnels and snow caves into the mountain ranges thrown up by the plows.

So far the bad side of a snowstorm at my house means: that the snow's weight broke a window, promptly repaired; that I didn't leave on a trip; that when the boys and I dug out the van, the brake line was damaged; that nobody can do a little auto repair because they're inundated with banged-up cars and half the mechanics can't get in; and that three children have made a cheerful wreck of the house. Must climb up and clear off the porch roofs, but I can't even begin to think about the Other Car, down an alley and under another big shining hill. That one can wait until the big thaw! Should come by April or May, I'd guess...

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