robert service week

I have decided to make this Robert Service week.

When I was 17, and alone in the big wide world for the first time, I was a cafe worker and musician. I had very little money and was lucky to eat AND have an apartment. I met other musicians, artists, photographers as well as bankers, lawyers, stockbrokers,computer programmers and more. I discovered that coffee brings everyone to the table. Revolutions have begun in coffee houses, philosophy discussed, love found, love lost, books read, business done, music played...

In my free time, sometimes I spent hours in a second hand book shop, reading the books sitting on the floor next to the shelves or stacks of unshelved books. The owner was very kind to me. He was one of my regulars in my cafe and knew I didn't have any money to buy, but never said a word. He noticed that there was a book which captivated me and I returned to read it time and time again. It was in his antique books section, a first edition by Robert Service called, "Ballads of a Bohemian".

One day, I put it back on the shelf with a softly resigned sigh, and he came over and put it back in my hands. I protested, but he said something very kind to the effect that it was a very special book and it deserved me as much as I deserved it.

That book was always with me for years. Often it was under my pillow, and always in my backpack when I traveled. The thing that captivated me was that in it was the very first person I had met in the world that saw the world as I did...it didn't matter to me that it was nearly a hundred years before.

Imagination is the great gift of the gods. Given it, one
does not need to look afar for subjects. There is romance
in every face.

Those who have Imagination live in a land of enchantment
which the eyes of the others cannot see. Yet, if it brings
marvelous joy it also brings exquisite pain. Who lives a
hundred lives must die a hundred deaths.
-Robert Service

I re-read this book this week and it was like catching up with an old friend and reliving old times. He was a young man in Paris determined to make a living with his pen or die trying. It wasn't his poems that I related to, but the personal remarks inbetween. Indeed, his poems go between being silly and a bit bleak, but the man I love very much as I came to know him in his personal writings.

True contentment comes from within. It dominates
circumstance. It is a resignation wedded to philosophy, a
Christian quality seldom attained except by the old
-Robert Service