Treat each day as if it is your last.
Professor Erasmus Cromwell-Smith has a secret. Two, actually. The first: the beloved, rumpled poetry professor, the one who pedals his rusty old bicycle through the New England snow, has just been told he is dying. The second: for fifty-four years he has guarded a treasure, and now, before time runs out, he has resolved to give it away, one class at a time.
Week after week his lectures swell from a small classroom to an overflowing auditorium as he carries his students back to Hay-on-Wye, the Welsh town of books, where three eccentric antique book dealers, an equilibrist, a sorceress and a war hero, armed a wide-eyed boy, poem by poem and scroll by scroll, with everything a human being needs to be happy: courage, hope, resilience, magic, and the luminous formula that binds them all together, the Happiness Triangle.
But hidden inside the lessons is a love story. Her name was Victoria. She vanished without a goodbye four decades ago, and he never loved again. And in the front row, arriving early every single week, sits a young woman with long golden curls who is slowly realizing that the professor’s story sounds impossibly, heart-stoppingly familiar.
A dying man’s final class. Three unforgettable mentors. Thirty-two poems. One lost love. And a last session that no one in that auditorium, least of all the professor himself, will ever forget.
Dead Poets Society meets Tuesdays with Morrie
“Magical, modern-day fairy tale… over 30 thought-provoking poems and reflections… a captivating fictional realm.” BlueInk starred review
https://erasmuscromwellsmith.com
https://www.youtube.com/@TheEquilibristArchive