Trusty, dusky, vivid, and now true

Sometimes even powerful memories drift severely out of all context. Such is the case for me, in regards to my first encounter with four very potent words.

I can say with comfortable surety that it occured between the age of fifteen and nineteen. I sat in my room and opened a novel whose title I have long since forgotten. I have also forgotten the contents of this novel in their entirety, with one exception: the author made a dedication to Eudora Welty. It was a very short one: "Trusty, dusky, vivid, and true".

My young mind was transfixed by this sequence of adjectives. Then as now, I am normally not one to dwell on introductions, dedications, preambles, prologues, or the such. But these words were worthy of focus. I read them aloud, repeated. Trusty and true, at first appeared synonomous, then stood out distinct. Bookending cousins. In contrast, dusky and vivid presented a paradox. A paradox that I found impeccable for expressing a deep love.

I held this up to such high regard that I began letters to my then-girlfriend with the phrase. I admit doing so with some trepidation. Partly because I wasn't sure she would like the comparison. But mostly because she wasn't vivid at all. And as for the trusty, well, I can only hope the letter was not the reason we broke up months later.

Years later, in a fit of muse, I'd recall the phrase. I decided it deserved a second chance. With some courage, I reintroduced it - into letters to another girlfriend. She didn't drop me nearly as fast, but neither I nor her thought she was particularly dusky.

Over the years,I've met a gaggle o' trusty's, a handful of duskies, a few vivids, and even a few true's, but never altogether. I stood in a bookstore in Mission feeling generally contemplative when I picked up an unfamiliar biography on Chatwin, and read with shock those four words again. According to letters kept by his wife, it was one of Chatwin's personal favorites. Not because he had read the dedication I had. Even better, it's originally from a poem by Scottish traveler, Robert Louis Stevenson in Songs of Travel:

TRUSTY, dusky, vivid, true,
With eyes of gold and bramble–dew,
Steel–true and blade–straight,
The great artificer
Made my mate.

Honour, anger, valour, fire;
A love that life could never tire,
Death quench or evil stir,
The mighty master
Gave to her.

Teacher, tender, comrade, wife,
A fellow–farer true through life,
Heart–whole and soul–free
The august father
Gave to me.

So it took eight years for the origins to come to light, but neither is the magic of this sequence dispelled. One day I may even find it's avatar.