Back in the Middle Ages, when Illuminated Manuscripts were all the rage, the monks poured themselves into this craft. Written on velum, animal hide or sheets of parchment, the monks would painstakingly–with a sharpened quill feather– copy and illustrate ancient texts. For whatever reason, I imagined that they did so with a kind of superhuman stoicism, so blissed-out by God that they’d be oblivious to the actual drudgery of this ball and chain office job. However, I recently came across a list of comments that monks had written into the marginalia of the pages they were working on. This is a sample of some of them:
New parchment, bad ink:
I say nothing more.
I am very cold.
Often, when my mind
is idle, I wonder of
women.
That’s a hard page and a
weary work to read it.
Brother Michael has gas
from the cabbage, and
I can take no more.
The parchment is hairy.
Thank God, it will
soon be dark.
Oh, my hand.
If I had a horse,
I would ride her away
through meadows and
into the sun!
My chair is wobbly.
My heart has been
sad for a long time.
Now I’ve written
the whole thing: for
Christ’s sake, give me a
drink.
Writing is excessive
drudgery. It crooks your
back, it dims your sight,
it twists your stomach
and your sides.
If Brother Ignatieff
coughs one more time
I will be called to act.
The hair shirt is
asking too much today.
Why, O Lord, why?
St. Patrick of Armagh,
deliver me from writing.
The ink is thin.
Impure thoughts,
Impure thoughts,
Impure thoughts!
Curse you Brother Francis!
While I wrote I froze
and what I could not
write by the beams of
the sun I finished by
candlelight.
And to make matters worse,
today the bread did not rise!
This is sad! O little
Book! A day will come
in truth when someone
over your page will say,
“the hand that wrote it
is no more.”
I can see what he is
doing beneath his cloak
and I am curious.
Vespers cannot come soon enough.
I fear it is my feet that smell rotten.
I should like to be the
wolf that devours the lamb.
I killed a bird yesterday,
so rich is the boredom in my life.
I like killing birds.
Pink rays are spreading
over the blush of sky.
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