Word: sanctums
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...music of it in my mind. I agreed to write about it. I kept the image of him alone and healthy reading his own poetry, astonishing songs of his own mind and making. Feeling less effete than I have in a long time. I walked into the Advocate sanctum after the meeting had ended and everyone had departed, traces of the carnage of Saturday night's Brautigan reception still heavy in the air. Fled for awhile at least that old vision; born at last I think...
...this heritage! To think that all these distant figures were great, that we too may become like them. What seems so impossible to us now is that anything could have happened to damage them. Their names, engraved in faint gold lettering on wooden plaques, crowd the walls of the Sanctum on the second floor of our House at 21 South Street. Pegasus, the winged horse, has been carved into a wooden throne chair, featured above The Advocate's motto: Dulce est Periculum. There is also another: Veritas nihil veretur, which means (I read a translation of it the introduction...
...Monday nights, the Advocate Board gathers about a rough-hewn, medieval table in the Sanctum, slouching in the grand wooden chairs with these mottoes carved in them, and talks about its own survival. Our emotions languish with the seasons, because there is seldom any heat in the building; during the winter, we huddle in our overcoats about the table (many choose to wear gloves and hats) or crouch like Milton's toad before the fireplace, burning old issues of The Advocate to keep warm. Exalted, we are artists, suffering through the cold moment of neglect. Our words perish...
...were either editors or regular contributors at the time. Looking back on it all, on James Agee's parody of the Saturday Review. on The Advocate's politics in 1938 when they issued a ballot in Latin from their Bow Street offices, on the memoirs of Eliot haunting the Sanctum with his fin-de-siecle mannerisms, it seems as if this history has been severed from the present. Too much that is heretical has happened since that other age, and it is enough that literature should continue to be possible...
...Advocate -sponsored readings at Harvard used to involve people like Robert Frost and Marianne Moore: they were events, and everyone in Cambridge attended them. Afterwards, the fortunate literati crowded about the bar in the Sanctum of the Advocate House and listened to performances. Late in the evening, the guest would be solemnly propelled over to the Register, where he signed his name, along with anyone else who was arrogant enough to think they deserved to be recorded as present...