A magical, modern-day literary tale. Let go of the past, find inspiration, deal with loss, and ultimately live a happy, blissful life. In Erasmus Cromwell-Smith’s magical, modern-day literary tale, an ailing professor journeys into his past to reveal a world ensconced in stories and poetry, with the hope of imparting inspirational, lifelong lessons.
From his crumpled aesthetic of a tweed jacket or cardigan to his thick British accent, Professor Erasmus Cromwell-Smith is the embodiment of the prestigious New England scholastic institute where he teaches. But at 64, with a sudden diagnosis of incurable brain cancer, he decides to focus his intentions on living each day to the fullest and to share a lifetime of wisdom that he’s treasured throughout the years.
Through an unfolding of conversation, free-verse poetry, and letters, the mentors’ tutelage is revealed. Over 30 thought-provoking poems and reflections are woven throughout, addressing such concepts as:
● How Hope triumphs over tragedy
● How True Love trumps hardship and pain
● What is the Happiness Formula?
● The healing power of Poetry and Art
● The importance of the small details in life
● What is the power of Hope?
● Where does the magic in life resides?
A magical, modern-day literary tale. Let go of the past, find inspiration, deal with loss, and ultimately live a happy, blissful life. In Erasmus Cromwell-Smith’s magical, modern-day literary tale, an ailing professor journeys into his past to reveal a world ensconced in stories and poetry, with the hope of imparting inspirational, lifelong lessons.
From his crumpled aesthetic of a tweed jacket or cardigan to his thick British accent, Professor Erasmus Cromwell-Smith is the embodiment of the prestigious New England scholastic institute where he teaches. But at 64, with a sudden diagnosis of incurable brain cancer, he decides to focus his intentions on living each day to the fullest and to share a lifetime of wisdom that he’s treasured throughout the years.
Through an unfolding of conversation, free-verse poetry, and letters, the mentors’ tutelage is revealed. Over 30 thought-provoking poems and reflections are woven throughout, addressing such concepts as:
● How Hope triumphs over tragedy
● How True Love trumps hardship and pain
● What is the Happiness Formula?
● The healing power of Poetry and Art
● The importance of the small details in life
● What is the power of Hope?
● Where does the magic in life resides?
My name is Erasmus Cromwell-Smith II. I am a scholar and a writer. This book is the story of my father. It is the account of his 2017 poetry class at a New England College. Throughout the years of my tenure, I received several requests from his former students asking me to tell the story of that particular class. I must confess that it took several requests until I became curious enough to spare the time to read about the anecdotical experiences his students had that year. They were right; the more I read, the more intrigued I became until finally I decided to do it to honor his legacy. However, from the beginning, it was a complicated task, as shortly after his passing, his precious archives were sadly lost in a fire, and even though my father wrote extensively throughout his life, for a reason I still do not wholly understand, he never made public any of his poetry. Thus, his literary legacy is limited to several works of fiction published over the years, which did not help me with the task at hand. In the end, the best sources of information were the students themselves, as most still had vivid memories and even some of the class notes. Both allowed me to recreate all the subjects covered that year and more than enough of my father’s own words. But the most difficult of all tasks was to find the books, scribbles, scripts, manuscripts, and writings he used for that class. In the end, it took several trips to his hometown to unearth each one. Fortunately, I was able to retrieve them all, including precise narrations of my father's mentoring sessions found in copious and detailed diaries left by each of his three mentors. As you will see, it was a worthy effort that once completed allowed me to bring out his world of poetry for you all to enjoy forever. It is with great pride that I introduce to you my father, Erasmus Cromwell-Smith.
The Equilibrist
The old brownstone building complex has housed the Royal Cambridge Scholastic Institute for more than two hundred years. The top-ranked New England educational institution has a rather British flavor quite fitting to its rich traditions, rigorous discipline, and demanding curriculum. However, no one embodies better the character of the prestigious school than Professor Erasmus Cromwell-Smith. His thunderous voice is paused in cadence, quasi-perfect in diction, and as hard and heavy as it gets in a Southern English accent. Everything about the never-married and childless sixty-two-year-old professor is worn and wrinkled, including his tweed jacket with leather shoulder pads, cashmere cardigan, leather briefcase, face, hair, shoes, and even his glasses. And yet, as unkempt and mundane as he appears, his students describe him as an “awesome teacher!” or, borrowing from a great American, an “insanely great” poet. But the taciturn and circumspect pedagogue simply transforms himself when he commences each of his poetry classes as if morphing from a seemingly catatonic state into a stampede of charisma, knowledge, light, and endless patience. What nobody knows but his doctor and himself, is that earlier in the week he had been diagnosed with a very aggressive and incurable form of brain cancer that, barring any miracles, will soon incapacitate him from doing what he loves most in life. Not prone to inaction, and much less feeling sorry for himself, Professor Cromwell-Smith quickly makes a couple of significant resolutions. First, he will treat each day as if it is his last; second, he will reveal in his class a series of life-long secrets he has treasured over the last fifty-four years. So, in a way, his class of 2017 is fortunate. They will be the recipients of an unknown but valuable gift from the great old master professor, albeit at the risk of being interrupted at any time, perhaps permanently, by his terminal illness. A young woman with long golden curls is the first to arrive. She has been looking forward to taking his class ever since she heard Professor Cromwell-Smith recite a poem from the Chilean Nobel Laureate, Pablo Neruda. Today, the students sense something new as the professor walks in at a faster pace than usual. There is tension in his jaw and by the way he is pacing with quick strides back and forth, something he never does, it quickly becomes obvious that he is eager to start, irrespective of whether every attendee is ready. He then interrupts the classroom's nagging buzz with his opening words for the new year.
Chapter 1
Freedom and Equilibrium
“In my class, the most important rule is punctuality, just be on time for everything. If the class is at eight, show up a few minutes early so you can be ready and fully prepared by eight.
“This year our class will be a journey into the world of poetry, but with a twist, as through narration and reading, I will be taking you to the place where I was born and grew up,” the professor says, pulling out a stack of crumpled papers from his well-worn leather briefcase.
“Here we go.”
I was born in 1954 in the small town of Hay-on-Wye in Wales. Back then, my birthplace was still medieval, and I mean it literally, not only in its ways and architecture, but also due to the mentality of much of the population. There were many traditions, and all of them were so rigid as to defend the village’s own character and folklore, shielding it against the winds of change blowing across the entire kingdom.
My unintended birth occurred while my parents were still living in post-war Britain that, almost a decade after the end of World War II, still had open wounds, painful scars, and continued to suffer economically, especially in the countryside where some reconstruction and repair of civil works were still taking place. Entire families had been decimated. It was common that at least one of their members had not made it back from war. Others had come home severely wounded physically, many others, emotionally.
Britain at the time seemed split into two worlds. A significant portion of the country had moved on, but the rest was still getting over the devastating armed conflict.
My hometown however, with its hamlets and cottages, pubs and narrow streets, and hand-painted store signs (always in picturesque but opaque tones), has something unique about it. The whole town has countless “antique book” merchants. Each small shop holds aged books of immense value and importance, a few being the only surviving copy. Others are exquisitely written, painted by hand. Each store has its own share of mysteries and secrets.
Many of these books are amazing labyrinths of knowledge ready to be explored. Some of the stores are quite sizeable in a cavernous type of fashion. Ancient books surround you, some in piles, some in wooden cabinets, they are everywhere you look. Some books are off limits, others preserved in airventilated locked containers. Inside the town’s army of bookshops, on one side the scent of old paper and leather combines with plenty of dust, then, on the other are the erudite, in some cases eccentric and mysterious store masters, that often are, the owners themselves.
Thanks to my insatiable curiosity and willingness to become acquainted with these knowledgeable shopkeepers, I was raised between these bookshelves. Throughout my younger years, I met often with the brightest and most tolerant of this unique breed of antiquarians, those willing to put up with an annoying and quizzical youngster returning, again and again, to learn from them and their treasures.
I left town for good in my mid-teens, thanks to a scholarship to Oxford. By this point, I had delved into countless mysteries and wisdom that I have never shared before with anyone. But all of this happens a lot later…
It starts right after my eighth birthday. I first see him at Mrs. Coe’s shop. He has this incredibly funnylooking handlebar moustache that curls on the sides and he keeps on rolling. He has huge and inquisitive green eyes, and his lips are all bundled up into the shape of a tiny frozen kiss. Curious, I peak from afar at all his movements, until he pays and waves goodbye, tipping his tam-o’-shanter to Mrs. Coe. As he leaves, he glances over and squints at me. Then, for no reason I can discern, I follow him staying twenty steps behind, until eight streets later when he steps into a bookshop and just a couple of minutes afterwards, I do as well.
Little do I know that by doing so I have stepped into a world that is going to steer my life into an endless journey of discovery and quest for knowledge.
“Come right in, come on young lad, don’t be shy… You must be into books, right?” says the man I’ve followed.
“Right, sir.”
“Well, well, well. You've come to the right place,” he says flashing an enormous smile while still twirling his eccentric moustache.
From then on, once a week after school, I would roam for hours through what became my favorite place on earth, ‘The Morris-Rose and Sons’ antique bookshop (est. 1832). This I do, until Justin Morris IV, the shop owner, not only gives me a space to sit and read, and for us to chat, but also chooses for me a leather-bound manuscript that quickly seizes of my attention, and over time becomes a door into a world of wisdom and wonder.
Yesterday as I saw him busy with customers, I tried to enter quietly, but my clumsiness prevailed. First, the door’s old bicycle bell, wound and unwound in slow motion, then I tripped twice over the same old book. So much for my entrance.
Today, as I walk on pins and needles through the store to my tiny reading place, my heart quickly picks up pace when I see from afar the gold burnished pages of my gigantic ‘good old’ book waiting for me.
Sometime later, after all his customers leave, he comes by and sits with me. It has now been a timeless two hours with my eccentric, self-appointed mentor, a fortunate and quite fitting circumstance indeed, for a single child with a very active imagination, a natural gravitation toward the land of dreams and a keen propensity to the world of books.
“Why are the pages and the letters so large?” I ask.
“There are some who claim that those were the only sizes of paper available then. There are others that assert that in the absence of proper lighting and proper reading glasses, writers needed to magnify everything they wrote in order to see well enough what they were doing.”
“Freedom lies within you?” I read and translate the Old English aloud, dictionary on hand, my tone asking for validation. However, it is pointless, as I cannot understand a word. After countless days trying to figure out the giant, old book, I remain stuck.
“In life, there are always alternating forces pulling and throwing us into extremes, a flow that gravitates like a pendulum from one extreme to another.”
“Balance is to be free within life’s pendulum, as if within the swings of a metronome.” I sit totally still and gaze in frustration at the handpainted image on the oversized yellowish page. He stares at me with benign eyes and the endless patience of a genuine pedagogue.
“Erasmus, lift the book and look at the spine from the top,” he requests. I see a piece of paper wedged between the leather cover and the spine. I clip it with my fingers and open it.
“Go ahead, read it.”
“The Quibbler and the Street Juggler”
Standing by the corner under the broken streetlamp,
on a dusky, foggy and misty night,
the quibbler does what he always does,
he mumbles and grumbles, rambles and tumbles,
his thoughts and words about anyone and anything.
His big blue eyes dart in near darkness,
right and left, left and right.
And they seem,
while filled with magnetic intensity,
as if about to pop out, of his eye sockets!
And as he stares,
trying to follow the pirouettes of the lonely shadow,
he wonders aloud,
“What is it with this fellow?”
Down the street,
unaware of being watched,
he juggles while sitting high above the cobblestones,
pedaling the single wheel in quick bursts,
while glued to the saddle,
contorting into impossible angles and acrobatic circles,
always defying gravity.
Backwards, downwards, upwards, and sideways.
“He juggles while in balance,
his hands are always keeping multiple objects floating in the air,
but never handling more than two at once,
despite the swings, twists, and turns,
he never loses focus nor concentration
and does it all with absolute confidence and resolute determination.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, but why juggle?” the quibbler rambles non-stop.
“And so what? Who cares about living a life on the edge
filled with contortions and near misses in every other corner?"
“Because that’s what we do in life.
We juggle and seek to maintain balance,
and through practice and experience we want to master both, as he does,
as if they were second nature to us.”
Finally, reason prevails and the quibbler concludes,
“As the juggler, again and again,
we strive and we struggle through the streets of life,
sometimes by defying the impossible and the improbable.
That’s what we do, we seek, we find, and we conquer,
then hang on for dear life.
“To maintain balance and be a master juggler,
requires a disciplined and constant effort,
as they are both a couple of the keys,
to a wholesome and well-grounded life.”
As I finish reading, I visualize the movements of the acrobat; I can feel and almost touch his freedom.
“So, in life, you must juggle to be in balance, but to be able to do so, you will need to learn and practice endlessly as both will give you the knowledge, experience, and self-confidence to execute impossible things fearlessly. Mind you, that as with the quibbler, you’ll always be surrounded by ignorance and pessimism. The naysayers will always be out there until your results overwhelm them. Above all, never forget that to maintain balance takes continuous hard work,” says my mentor.
I do not want him to stop, but that’s him. Accurate, in motion, brief, and to the point.
“All right then,” Mr. Morris says emphatically, already busy choosing our next reading. He flicks through the book’s huge pages until he finds it, then sets the book wide open right in front of me. I see a hand-painted image of a tightrope walker high above the patrons, on the right side, and I see the poem for the first time. I glance through it and then start reading it aloud.
“The Equilibrist”
Our lives are like those of circus equilibrists.
We walk through a thin and narrow,
but very strong wire, our emotional life.
The wire is our support system,
made of thousands of filaments tightly wound together.
Along it lies, among others,
our feelings, our faith, our friends, and family.
Equilibrium is tough and challenging,
as it requires endless focus, rehearsal, and attention,
just as the wire does, life swings, up and down and right and left.
As the tightrope walker slides each slipper forward,
as if caressing the wire,
his feat as our lives, becomes a balancing act.
The more he, like us, practices equilibrium,
the more knowledge and experience he acquires,
the more self-confident he becomes,
because a man on a wire requires near perfection
for each of his well-choreographed moves.
Without a solid emotional life supporting us,
like the wire of an equilibrist, there is no balance in life.
When we fall into excesses of effort (like work),
or excesses of freedom (like fun),
we lose equilibrium and fall from the wire.
And the safety nets down under, if we have them, become our lifesavers.
When supported by the wire, a
nd if we attain sound self-confidence,
we can walk unaided through the swings of life.
But the ultimate balance is only attained by the equilibrist,
with the stick,
which is love.
“Are we all equilibrists, Mr. Morris?” I ask.
“No, but we all should seek to be one,” he replies.
“Besides not falling from the tightrope into excesses, why?”
“Balance is one of the foundations of happiness. But as important as balance is, the true message lying underneath this writing is about inner freedom. As you can see, freedom is perilous and since it only begins within you. Its exercise requires a kind of self confidence that only experience and knowledge can provide."
“My boy, there’s no truer expression of the power that inner freedom gives than the performance of an acrobat. He not only thrives on it but performs because he calls on it for strength.”
I gradually realize that I am the one who has to be free inside. “Freedom lies within me,” I blurt out, nodding and quietly smiling with tight lips.
The words linger, caught in the old bookshop’s stuffed air and over the rows of antique books that today have fulfilled their mission in spades with me. And that’s how it all starts, with four words. Me, a young boy fascinated by ancient books, and a wise old man who becomes a guiding light, a life mentor whom from then onwards and forever I’ve called, The Equilibrist.
Time has evaporated in a blink. The dismissal bell snaps the class and the professor from the trance they are in, back to the present. “Class, next week we’ll continue with my life’s journey.”
“The Happiness Triangle” (The Equilibrist series: Vol. 1)
Erasmus Cromwell-Smith
“The Happiness Triangle” is a must read by an author who has proven that dedication and faith lead to works that are truly touching and unforgettable.
“The Happiness Triangle” by Erasmus Cromwell-Smith is a combination of storytelling, poetry, memoir, and life lessons. I was instantly drawn in with his writing and the story he tells. As I, along with every other living being, am constantly dealing with change and the mental consequences of this instability, there were many proclamations that touched base with me as they were either similar to what I was hoping to feel or an indication of where my head needed to go to find peace and happiness in a world that is unforgiving and often isolating. The first was at the beginning of the book:
“So, in life, you must juggle to be in balance, but to be able to do so, you will need to learn and practice endlessly as both will give you the knowledge, experience, and self-confidence to execute impossible things fearlessly. P 28
It is as though Cromwell-Smith was writing directly to me with genuine caring. The poetry, the story, and the lessons presented throughout this entire text are meaningful and bring thoughtful consideration that can be experienced by anyone, at any time of their lives. The writing in its entirety is straightforward and honest, impacting my life from the very beginning all the way to the last page!
“Balance is one of the foundations of happiness. But as important as balance is, the true message lying underneath this writing is about inner freedom” p 32
“No matter what others think, to dream is to contemplate life through magical magnifying glasses” p 36
“love yourself, love others, and love life, and all of it will be magical, or rather, a magical miracle for you” p 66
“Because even in the face of great tragedy and hardship, through the loss of everyone and everything, nothing or no one can deprive you of your ability to hope,” he replies. Pg 105
“you need to treasure and learn from your past, but never be a slave to it. Too many of us live ‘ever after’ consumed by things that no longer exist, things that are otherwise long gone, but still linger in the tortuous, masochist, and narrow, very narrow corridors and labyrinths of our minds,” p 122-123
Rest assured that the key to solving it is to never detach but rather be absolutely immersed in your life p 203
I give this book five stars and insist it be read with an open mind and an open heart to reap the benefits of Cromwell-Smith’s insight.