Gallery of Clouds

<b>A personal and critical work that celebrates the pleasure of books and reading.</b><br><br>Largely unknown to readers today Sir Philip Sidney&#146;s sixteenth-century pastoral romance <i>Arcadia</i> was long considered one of the finest works of prose fiction in the English language. Shakespeare borrowed an episode from it for <i>King Lear</i>; Virginia Woolf saw it as &#147;some luminous globe&#148; wherein &#147;all the seeds of English fiction lie latent.&#148; In <i>Gallery of Clouds</i> the Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an extraordinary homage to <i>Arcadia</i> in the form of a book-length essay divided into passing clouds: &#147;The clouds in my Arcadia the one I found and the one I made hold light and color. They take on the forms of other things: a cat the sea my grandmother the gesture of a teacher I loved a friend a girlfriend a ship at sail my mother. These clouds stay still only as long as I look at them and then they change.&#148;<br><br><i>Gallery of Clouds</i> opens in New York City with a dream or a vision of meeting Virginia Woolf in the afterlife. Eisendrath holds out her manuscript&#151;an infinite moment passes&#151;and Woolf takes it and begins to read. From here in this act of magical reading the book scrolls out in a series of reflective pieces linked through metaphors and ideas. Golden threadlines tie each part to the next: a rupture of time in a Pisanello painting; Montaigne&#146;s practice of revision in his essays; a segue through Vivian Gordon Harsh the first African American head librarian in the Chicago public library system; a brief history of prose style; a meditation on the active versus the contemplative life; the story of Sarapion a fifth-century monk; the persistence of the pastoral; image-making and thought; reading Willa Cather to her grandmother in her Chicago apartment; the deviations of Walter Benjamin&#146;s &#147;scholarly romance&#148; <i>The Arcades Project</i>. Eisendrath&#146;s wondrously woven hybrid work extols the materiality of reading its pleasures and delights with wild leaps and abounding grace.