The Eyes of the Heart A Memoir of the Lost and Found Chapter One I bring Naya into the Magic Kingdom. Naya is my grandmother, my mother's mother, who diedin 1961 in her ninety-fourth year. She walks across the green library carpet and stands at the window looking out across the stream toward my wife's vegetable garden and the rising meadow behind it with a dirt track running through it up into the sugar woods on the hillside. The Magic Kingdom is my haven and sanctuary, the place where I do my work, the place of my dreams and of my dreaming. I originally named it the Magic Kingdom as a kind of joke--part Disneyland, part the Land of Oz--but by now it has become simply its name. It consists of the small room you enter through, where the family archives are, the office, where my desk and writing paraphernalia are, and the library, which is by far the largest room of the three. Its walls are lined with ceiling-high shelves except where the windows are, and it is divided roughly 'in half by shoulder-high shelves that jut out at right angles from the others but with an eight-foot space between them so that it is still one long room despite the dividers. There are such wonderful books in it that I expect people to tremble with excitement, as I would, on entering it for the first time, but few of them do so because they don't know or care enough about books to have any idea what they are seeing. They are the books I have been collecting all my life, beginning with the Uncle Wiggily series by Howard R. Garis. In 1932, when I was six, I sent my unfortunate mother all over Washington, D.C., looking for Uncle Wiggily's Ice Cream Party, but she never found it, and it wasn't until about sixty years later that I finally located a copy and completed the set. There are first editions of all the Oz books, some of them the same copies I read as a child, with "Frebby Buechner" scrawled in them because I was less sure about the difference between b's and d's in those days than I have become since, and also of both Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, with a later edition of each signed by the original Alice herself when she came to this country in 1932 as an old lady to receive an honorary doctorate from Columbia University on the centenary of Lewis Carroll's birth. Underneath her academic robes she wore a corsage of roses and lilies of the valley and in her acceptance speech said she would prize the honor "for the rest of my days, which may not be very long." She died in 1934 at the age of eighty-two. There is a drab little Jenny Wren of Dickens's A Christmas Carol as first published in 1843 with green endpapers and the four hand-colored, steel-engraved plates by John Leech, and a Moby Dick or The Whale in the original shabby purple-brown cloth with the "usual moderate foxing" throughout, as the catalogue description apologetically notes. There are a number of seventeenth-century folios, including the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, Jeremy Taylor, and John Donne, that I started buying when my wife and I were on our honeymoon in England in 1956 with some British royalties that were due me then. There is North's Plutarch and Florio's Montaigne and the first collected edition of Ben Jonson, 1692, which I was beside myself with excitement to discover bore the inscription Jo: Swift, Coll Nova in an eighteenth-century hand, only to learn from the British Museum years later that it was not, as I'd wildly hoped, the great Jonathan but one John Swift, who matriculated at New College, Oxford, at the age of fifteen. On the walls are the framed autographs of some of my heroes. There is a photograph of the portrait of Henry James that his friend Sargent painted on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, inscribed by both Sargent and the Master himself, who distributed prints of it to the faithful. Nearby Anthony Trollope has signed his name together with the words "Very faithfully" beneath a carte de visite photograph that shows him in granny glasses scowlmig through whiskers that erupt from his face like the stuffing of an old sofa--"all gobble and glare," as Henry James once described him in a letter--and there is a sepia cabinet photograph of Mark Twain on the lower margin of which he has written, "It is your human environment that makes climate," whatever exactly he meant by that. And then, matted with red damask in a gilt frame, there is the upper part of a sixteenth-century vellum document in which Queen Elizabeth, the only real Queen Elizabeth, grants permission to someone whose name I cannot make out to travel to Flanders on official business. When the trip was completed, the document was canceled with four gill-like incisions, and at the top of the page the queen signed it "Elizabeth R." Between her signature and the document's first line there are two free-floating squiggles, which my wife and I long ago decided mark where she tried out her quill pen to make sure it wouldn't spatter ink when she made the great flowing loops that fly out like pennants in the wind from the bottom of the E and Z and R and the upper staff of the B. On the sash of the large window at the end of the room, where Naya stands waiting for me to get on with my description, there is a stone I found wedged into a crack in the rocky ledge we stepped ashore on when I made a pilgrimage to the island of Outer Fame 'in the North Sea one summer in honor of St. Godric, who often visited there in his seafaring days in the twelfth century and about whom I had written a novel several years earlier. In the novel I describe how on his first visit to the island Godric ran into St. Cuthbert, who had died some four hundred years before, Cuthbert says that long before Godric arrived, he was expected there and then explains himself by saying, "When a man leaves home, he leaves behind some scrap of his heart. Is it not so, Godric? ... It's the same with a place a man is going to. Only then he sends a scrap of his heart ahead." When I finally managed to pry the stone loose with my pocketknife, I discovered, to my wonderment, that it was... The Eyes of the Heart A Memoir of the Lost and Found . Copyright © by Frederick Buechner. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Eyes of the Heart: A Memoir of the Lost and Found by Frederick Buechner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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