Those Lost at Golden Oak

by Nihil Savant

Rating: everyone
Tags: Twilight Sparkle, Slice of Life, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Sad
Length: 2851

Twilight writes about the books lost when the library was destroyed.

Golden Oak Library was not only Twilight's home, it was a collection of some of the rarest books in Equestria. Now that some of her one-of-a-kind books have been destroyed, Twilight tries to make sure those stories are not forgotten.

Published 2014-06-02 22:30:03 UTC
Last updated 2014-06-11 14:03:22 UTC

Flowers for Daisy

Written over two hundred years ago, Flowers for Daisy is a personal favorite of mine. The story, on a surface level, is fairly chiche: two stallions love a mare named Daisy. (Daisy was a less common name back then.) One stallion, the more wealthy, attempts to court her by giving her favorite flowers to her, starting with a bouquet, but eventually giving her an entire garden. The other suitor, Whinny, simply treats her as friend and equal. Naturally, she falls in love with him and asks him to marry her.

Flowers for Daisy seems to be one of the first novels written with this plot, and was easily one of the best. Oddly, it’s the wealthy stallion, Golden Ring, that makes the story rise above its peers. The more time spent around him, the more readers get the impression that Golden Ring genuinely loves Daisy- he seems to know her as well as Whinny, occasionally recognizing and appreciating her interests, attitudes, and mannerisms. However, he struggles to express this, and gets embarrassed and angered whenever ponies point out his infatuation. His parents act similarly, refusing to praise anything he does, but rewarding him with expensive gifts. He tries wooing her only using expensive flowers, not because doesn’t love her, but because it’s the only way he knows how to express his love. While the reader knows the two would never be happy together, her rejection of him is absolutely heartbreaking. After she turns him down, he simply hangs his head and leaves, and never appears in the story again. The reader is left hoping someday he’ll find someone who can teach him the difference between giving presents and giving love.

Daisy is also a fairly interesting character. She’s unsure whether Golden Ring actually loves her or not. And when he starts giving her gifts, she has no idea how to repay him, or if she even should. She never once seems to return Golden Ring’s affections, and remains conflicted on how to view him. His generous gifts both to her and several of the town’s poor contrast with his sour and elitist disposition. Actions may speak louder, but his words directly contradict them. Her confusion doesn’t reflect negatively on her, though, because she has so much of the rest of her life in order. She’s an artist who’s not making much money, but enough to keep her satisfied, and she absolutely loves her work. She just can’t figure out what to make of Golden Ring. Ultimately, she meets Whinny, a fellow artist and fan of her work, at a gallery. Whinny quickly falls for her, and she realizes she loves him later.

This is harsh, but Whinny is easily the book’s greatest flaw. He has no personality whatsoever, merely existing to be a love interest who isn’t Golden Ring. Whinny may, in fact, be the primary reason the book has been lost.

It’s nearly impossible to find reviews from the period, considering novels were often dismissed as a low artform, poems being preferable. However, there’s some indication that the book was fairly popular. Lord Regent, arguably the most famous poet of the era, called one of his characters “A Golden Ring without a Daisy” in a letter to a friend. A few authors indicate that “Whinny” was a short-lived regional slang for attractive, kind stallions, but that may have come shortly before the book’s release. The still-popular Rose Red’s Garden came out a few years after Flowers for Daisy, and is thought to have been written as a rebuttal that cast its Whinny equivalent, Steed, in a more active role.

About a hundred years ago, literary scholars began started demanding “strong protagonists.” For some reason, many critics interpreted Whinny as the protagonist, despite his relatively small part. This lead to many dismissing the story outright- most known texts that refer to Flowers for Daisy use it to compare negatively to other texts. Considering the book had been out of print for a while and continues to be, I’m guessing few, if any, of these critics actually read the thing. Regardless, I’m perhaps the only pony alive who’s both read and enjoyed Flowers for Daisy.

Flowers for Daisy’s author, Heartspring, also wrote a book of poetry simply titled Poems by Heartspring. It’s also pretty rare, so I’ve not had the chance to read it, but I know it’s available at the Canterlot Library.

With its obscurity and bad reputation among scholars, it’s unlikely that another copy of Flowers for Daisy will surface anytime soon. However, unlike a few of the other books destroyed with Golden Oak, other copies have at one time existed. (I know this for certain because the library's copy was marked as a second edition.) Perhaps it will come back someday. I certainly feel it deserves it.

Author's Note

Edit: Fixed some grammar/ sentence structure.

Choking on Air

Rainbow Dash stayed the night at my old home once, and we spent the night discussing the Daring Do books. Impressed with my knowledge of those, she started picking out random books and asking me to tell her about them. And I did. This went on for a while, until she reached the conclusion that I loved books so much that I knew every book in the library. And I do. She asked if there was any book I’d ever completely hated.

I replied that, when you read as much as I do, you start to see both the good and bad in everything you read- a great book can still have a moment or a character that doesn’t work well, and a bad book can have flashes of brilliance, or at least competence. And avid reader can get something, whatever it is, out of anything they read.

But there was an exception- the book I couldn’t say anything nice about. I showed Rainbow Choking on Air.

Choking on Air is a collection of poems rather than a story, though not even twenty years ago scholars would have scoffed at the idea of calling them poems. They don’t rhyme, there’s no meter, there’s no structure. Many don’t even use punctuation or basic syntax. The sheer act of reading the thing is an assault on the eyes.

And then there’s the contents. Nothing but a constant barrage of swearing and grotesque imagery. I read one to Rainbow Dash, even she was disgusted to hear it and I was embarrassed to say it out loud. It honestly infuriated me that something this effortless and this disgusting could be published, while so many good poems and great stories never make it out of pony’s heads. These horrid ideas could have only been written by somepony completely sick.

But after Rainbow left, I couldn’t get Choking on Air out of my head. I’d held it up as the ultimate example of “bad,” the exception to the rule. I had make sure that was accurate.

A secondary reading did little to change my opinion, but it became a bit more coherent. I identified a character through all of the nonsense, a half-protagonist, half-icon called “a Scream.” Even recognizing that, the thing was just too revolting and incoherent to enjoy. But I decided to look into it’s history anyway.

The author is a stallion named Thunderush. He was diagnosed with a muscle-degenerative illness about a year before writing Choking on Air. I regret my complaints about the collection’s publication- it turns out the library’s copy was the original manuscript, given by Thunderush to a friend, who after unsuccessfully attempting to publish it, had it bound and donated to the library. His disease would leave him nearly completely paralyzed before the donation was made. Fortunately, Thunderush is still alive and recent medical advancements are helping his recovery. I’ve heard he recently regained mobility in his head and neck.

I’ve always said that good books exist outside of context, but knowing the story of it’s origin helped me change my perspective on Choking on Air. I gave the collection another look, a more studious one. The only completely grammatically correct sentence in the thing is “Are you reading this?” Found in the last poem. The anger the poems evoke in the reader is actually supposed to be there. The bile the book spews out exists to hide the underlying sadness, both by disguising it’s intent and by making the reader too overwhelmed to continue. It’s a bunch of poems about negative emotions, expressed through negative emotions, and eliciting negative emotions. Frankly, it’s genius.

That said, Choking on Air was not an enjoyable read, even when approaching it from the right perspective. Also, while I’d never want to limit pony’s freedom of expression, the expression of purely negative emotions seems destructive, and I’d rather live a constructive society. It was good, but I still don’t really like it, if that makes any sense. I’d love it if we were in a position where you could formulate your own opinion on it.

Woah, Woah, Windigo

There’s not much to say about the actual text of Woah, Woah, Windigo. After all, it’s a twenty-page book for preschoolers. There’s only one sentence on each page. I wish I’d read it more than once, if I had I could probably recite the entire thing here.

It tells the story of an earth-pony filly who’s been picked on by her pegasus friend for not being able to fly. After going to bed, she awakes to see a windigo outside her window. It offers to let her ride on it, and show her around the sky. She agrees, but soon gets cold and tired, eventually asking to go home. The next day, she tells her friend she prefers the comfort of the ground.

The book, being for children, is naturally very simplistic. However, I find the moral to be good for children- some ponies can do different things than you, but you have your own comfort area and interests in which to thrive. That said, it’s perhaps not presented fairly well. The filly really enjoys flying until she suddenly gets cold, undermining the final idea. I think it’s a good story, but a flawed one.

In fact, there’s substantial evidence that the story was may have been perfunctory. The author, Sky Seer, was an artist by trade, and never wrote anything else. A few of the pages also appear, in slightly modified forms, in her other collections, scraps, and galleries. I theorize that Woah, Woah, Windigo was initially an art book with a bit of a story running through the pictures, and Sky Seer chose to add a few more drawing and text to make it a complete narrative. I’m no art critic, but the drawings were beautiful, especially the ones of the sky at night, with the filly and the windigo flying through them.

But none of those things are what Woah, Woah, Windigo is known for. About forty years ago, a parental group subjected Woah, Woah, Windigo to one of the largest and most extensive book burnings in Equestrian history.

The controversy centered around two main points, the first being the filly’s disappearance. Shortly after the book’s publishing, there was a widely publicized case where a filly in Canterlot disappeared from her home. She was thought to have been kidnapped. Authorities later found her in Las Pegasus, having apparently snuck out at night and hopped a train, attempting to visit her older brother. Regardless of how well things turned out, the event caused widespread panic among parental groups, who advocated that children be cautious of strangers. The group decided that Woah, Woah, Windigo taught poor messages to children, saying that a “decent” story would have the filly refuse to go with the windigo.

The second issue was the actual windigo. While nopony has seen one in over a thousand years, their role in the story of Equestria’s formation still makes the creatures very threatening to some. One father said of the book, “It might as well have told my daughter to play chess with a manticore.” Sky Seer’s statement on why she used a windigo hardly helped matters- “They’re just beautiful creatures. A little scary, maybe. But really pretty.” Parents took this to mean that not only were windigos dangerous, they were enticing. The windigo’s inherently threatening nature, doubtless, added fuel to the parents’ first problem; not only is it a stranger appearing at her window, it’s an incredibly suspicious and dangerous stranger.

The more the book was discussed, the more ponies started believing the book was deliberately trying to teach children poor lessons, though I’ve yet to see any statements that adequately explain Sky Seer’s theoretical motivation for doing so. Things continued growing worse until a group named Parents for the Safety of Foals bought or stole every known copy of the book, piled them in front of Sky Seer’s home, and burned them.

Despite calling it “the scariest night of her life,” Sky Seer is known for her surprisingly good humor about the event. My personal favorite of her quotes- “Once I realized they weren’t going to burn down the house, I debated busting out the marshmallows.” She also is apparently not too distraught at the destruction of her books, saying “Yeah, it kinda sucks. But do you know how many pony’s bought copies just to burn them? Loads! Book made me way more cash as kindling than it ever did as a story. I ate great for years.” Sky Seer continued her art career, mostly unaffected by her work’s public shaming and destruction.

While I try hard to see where the parents were coming from, I can’t condone book burning under any circumstances. Surely it would be more productive to discuss the book’s ideas with your child, even the ideas you disagree with. Then again, I’m not a parent, so I’m not sure I can judge. Still, I don’t think anything can make me approve.

The library’s copy seems to have survived the burning by being misplaced. I found it misfiled under “non-fiction,” in a section reserved for biographies. Part of the shame of the event surrounding Woah, Woah, Windigo is that I doubt if any copies are found they will actually be read. The book’s destruction was so public that any survivors will simply become collector’s items. But even that’s theoretical, since there’s no record of any more surviving copies.

I was actually considering handing the library’s copy to a publisher, to create a second run of the book, before the library was destroyed. I guess Tirek succeeded where overprotective parents failed.

Introduction

Hello, citizens of Ponyville. I hope you don’t mind if I speak as your princess for a bit. Many of you are still recovering from Tirek’s attack, as is all of Equestria. My thoughts and sympathies are with you all, above everything else, and I will do everything in my power to help. Together, as citizens, as a community, and as friends, we will recover. And we will grow stronger.

But the real reason I’m writing this is not to speak as your princess, but rather to speak as your local librarian. Or former librarian, I should say. While I don’t want to compare my loss to those actually harmed by Tirek, I can’t help but mourn the loss of Golden Oak Library. It was more than an old tree filled with dusty books, it was my home. It’s where I had my first party with my Ponyville friends, where I had my first sleepover, and where I read so many fascinating books. I miss it.

However, I’m okay. My friends all still here. I’ll always preserve the good times had at Golden Oak in my memory, even as I make new memories in my new home. The sudden destruction of the library dealt a blow to me, but one I can and will recover from.

What can’t be recovered, though, is the books. Golden Oak has stood in Ponyville for decades. In fact, considering the number of times the Canterlot Library has had to move locations, Golden Oak may have housed books in it for longer than any other building in Equestria. It may not have been the biggest library, but over the many years it stood, it collected several rare books. Some of them were thought to be the only copy of that book in existence. Now even they’re gone.

Gone, but not completely forgotten. I read them. Depending on the book, I may only have vague memories of the lost stories, but I read every one of them. While they may never be read again, ponies poured their souls into crafting each carefully-placed word. I refuse to let those works of art simply fade away. I can’t re-create them, but at least I can document them. This text exists to remind the world of the existence of these stories, the stories collected and lost at Golden Oak.

Author's Note

Hello all. This story is pretty experimental, at least for me, being less of a story and more of a review-anthology. Feedback is welcomed!