#philip larkin is a horrible misogynist but sometimes he's so right it hurts very badly

[linearao3]

So, in humble offering for my failure to publish this All The Plot And Many Feelings Too chapter in a timely way, I bring you a tiny, self-indulgent drabble of Rey wallowing in Kylo’s books.

When she can’t take it anymore, she does go into the bedroom and read his books.  She scans for the most dog-eared, tattered, water-damaged book she can find, because she wants to know what he likes best. Tolkien, is her first guess, and at first she thinks she might be right, because he actually has two copies of The Lord of the Rings, an immaculate box set and a trio of garish paperbacks.  But as she starts to tip them off the shelf, she sees next to them the mass-market copy of Speak, Memory, opened so often the spine is almost unreadable, and as she reaches for that, she sees that the book beside it, The Once and Future King, is so battered it’s actually held together with a rubber band; she hesitates, because she doesn't want to mess with it if it's actually falling apart.  So she reads Speak, Memory, bemusedly absorbing the alien and beautiful details of an aristocratic Russian childhood until he comes home and finds her there, in front of his shelves.  Then she taps the rubber-banded book.  "Your favorite?"

"Sort of," he mumbles.  "I mean."  He clears his throat.  "Those are my comfort books.  That shelf.  That's why they're so easy to get to."  And it's true that this shelf must be just below shoulder height for him, everything on it easily grasped, and there's only the one row, instead of the two-deep shelving everywhere else.

"Comfort books?"

"Books you re-read when you're sad.  When you need to feel... soothed, or consoled."

She holds up the Nabokov she's been reading.  "This man who thinks he's too good for sleep is consoling?"

He blushes.  "It's good prose."

She supposes it is, at that.  "Does that mean you have uncomfortable favorites, too?"

He rests his hand on another shelf, higher up, in a different case, and she peers at it.  Collected Poems, Philip Larkin.  La peste.  Blindness. The Last Samurai.  Autobiography of Red.  

She marks them with her eyes, and asks him about his Hebrew books, and their sharp-edged, scholarly English companions, hardbacks from university presses with plain covers and colons in their titles.  She recognizes a few from Rabbi Luke’s shelves.

In Rey's experience, people's books, particularly their favorite books, form patterns, and the patterns say things.  Finn’s books (The Power Broker and The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Complete Sherlock Holmes) say, like a calm doctor, What happened here?  And Rose’s books (Anne of Green Gables and Fingersmith and A Wizard of Earthsea) say, It can be better than this; I know it can.  And Poe’s books (Capital and This Bridge Called My Back and possibly every title Haymarket and Verso ever published) say, It will be better; we will make it better; but how?

Ben’s books say, It will all go wrong, and I will be alone when it does.

As she skims through his favorites, comfortable and uncomfortable, she finds societies collapsing like dominoes. Kingdoms fall, plagues turn civilization into anarchy.  And she finds lonely, brilliant little boys, often ugly, often sick.  And she finds only one mark, in all the books; he does not write in his books (though it seems he sometimes throws them across the room or leaves them outside in the weather), but one stanza of poetry, with its leading line, is gently underlined in pencil.  

Isolate rather this element

That spreads through other lives like a tree  

And sways them on in a sort of sense  

And say why it never worked for me.  

Something to do with violence

A long way back, and wrong rewards,  

And arrogant eternity.

The poem is called "Love Again."  

She wants to ask him what the wrong rewards are, or were.  What makes eternity arrogant?  She is not a big reader of poetry herself; her own books (Island of the Blue Dolphins and White Fang and Miss Rumphius), she thinks, say Out of my way and let me fix it, a message few poets seem interested in.  But he comes home and his eyes are so anxious; she just puts her arms around him, and sways with him, back and forth.

“You’re like a tree,” she tells him.  “A big warm tree.”

“Cut me down,” he says, smiling at her “and turn me into paper.”

#kohelet 3:16 #Are there many little boys who think they are a Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the Dog they were sitting on the bluffs #I'm going to go check AO3 for Autobiography of Red fanfic now #Is there a genderbent reylo crossover one yet i wonder #philip larkin is a horrible misogynist but sometimes he's so right it hurts very badly