Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

236 The Last Ten Years
after the tourists had gone. With another Greek friend, they attended an
outdoor exhibition of modern sculpture, including a Gaudier-Brzeska dog
that ‘‘did not fill EP with enthusiasm.’’ The highlight of the trip was the
‘‘sacred fount’’ at Delphi that Ezra had visited only in his imagination
when writing The Cantos:
Castalia is the name of that fount in the hill’s fold,
the sea below . . .
Grove hath its altar
under elms, in that temple . . . (Canto 90)
After Ezra joined Olga in 1962, she had begun to throw the coins for
the I Ching readings daily for both of them. In 1966, she started to record
her findings in a series of blue school notebooks (‘‘to put some order into
my a√airs’’): ‘‘These hexagrams have always been made, usually in the
morning, first thing after breakfast . . . commencing with mine, read
aloud to Ezra, then his,’’ she noted. (Pound mentioned the I Ching in
Canto 102—‘‘50 more years on the Changes’’—inspired by Confucius’s
saying, ‘‘If many years were added to me, I would give it to the study of
the Book of Changes.’’) On the flyleaf of the first notebook, he scrawled:
‘‘Olga = Courage.’’
The earliest notebooks contained only the hexagrams, but soon Olga
began to record Pound’s health, diet, response to visitors, and dreams,
interspersed with her own thoughts and reminiscences of childhood, family,
and friends. The notebooks also included ‘‘notings down’’ that Olga
happened upon when thumbing through The Cantos, Guide to Kulchur, and
other (often undocumented) sources, for example: ‘‘Curiosity, that’s my
advice to the young—have some curiosity,’’ and ‘‘A good deal of literature
seems to spring from hate, but something vital emerges from the fragments,
which is not hate’’ (translated from the Italian). The so-called I
Ching Notebooks provide a valuable record of the last ten years of the
poet’s life and are closely interwoven into the text of this biography.
Ezra began su√ering from severe depression again and was admitted to
the Fazio Clinica delle Malattie Nervose e Mentali of the University of
Genoa on March 11, and he remained there until April 16. Professor