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Building a Library
by
I grew up in a house full of books. When I say that, I mean it in the most literal way imaginable, for no matter how I was taught to regard books as objects of veneration, they were first and foremost part of the fabric of everyday life. Among my early memories, in fact, is one of scaling my parents’ floor-to-ceiling shelves like a mountain climber to search out volumes with particularly engaging cover illustrations, at which I’d then stare for hours, trying to imagine myself into the scenes they portrayed. At the time, I couldn’t have been older than seven, and the images that attracted me were those mixing history and adventure, the fantastic and the utterly real. I remember being struck, for instance, by an old Bantam paperback of Howard Fast’s novel Genghis Khan, which bore on its cover a painting of the Mongol leader on horseback, at the head of a regiment of troops. Although I never did go on to read the novel — nor, for that matter, to develop a taste for historical fiction — I still recall the joy of contemplating that portrait, the way it made me feel like a whole world had opened up in the palm of my hands. It is this that draws us to books in the first place, their nearly magical power to transport us to other landscapes, other lives. Yet such a memory also reminds me that the pleasures of literature are not merely aesthetic but visceral, that while we may love books for the words within them, part of their appeal has to do with their status as objects, as artifacts in and of themselves. Of all the lessons of my childhood, this may be the one that resonates most. To this day, I live surrounded by books, in a home where the walls, floors, tables, nearly all available surfaces, are covered with the printed word. It’s a lifelong immersion, this bibliomania, in which the sights, the smells, the impressions of the volumes — from the musty scent of old newsprint and yellowed pulp paper to the feel of a slick new cover — are, in their own way, as important as the contents themselves. Every place I’ve ever lived, it’s been like that, from my childhood room to my college apartment, where even the windowsills were pressed into service as impromptu shelves. When I was eighteen, and spent a year driving across America to live out my most deeply held bohemian fantasies, I did so in the company of a duffel full of paperbacks; twelve years later, after losing two boxes of books while moving from New York to California, I spent hours poring over one old photograph, sometimes through a magnifying glass, which pictured, in the background, many of the missing volumes, as if it were a treasure map, a guide to replacing what had been lost. I don’t mean to make too much of this, but on some level it’s as if my library completes me, as if without it, I would be bereft. I have a friend who, the last time I saw her, told me she was having trouble getting to work in the morning because she wanted to spend time with her books, and I had to laugh in recognition at her admission, for this is, in essence, the story of my life. When I say that books tell the story of my life, I’m not being hyperbolic, although there are other things that matter to me. Still, in some way I can’t quite quantify, the act of standing before my library, plumbing a line through all those volumes, feels like excavating something, some inaccessible part of myself. Partly, this has to do with the collector’s mentality, a cast of mind with which I’ve been blessed (or afflicted) since I first developed the capacity for self-conscious thought. As a kid, I used to personalize my books, to make characters out of them, imagining my collection as a kind of vast metropolis, as if by thinking metaphorically, I might transform the abstract notion of the library and make its meaning palpable in the world. These days, I consider my books in far more concrete terms, and when I visit with them, it’s not to seek out any overriding order, but rather a loose chain of association, as random as the juxtapositions I find on the shelves. For a long time now, I’ve arranged my books alphabetically by author, with no attention to subject or genre, as if to facilitate this process; I find myself fascinated by the unexpected correlations that arise. What do Aristotle, Antonin Artaud, Margaret Atwood, Saint Augustine, and Ken Auletta have in common? Nothing, except they all sit together in my bookcase, like the leaves of a fluid, nearly interactive scrapbook, reflecting my interests, tastes, desires, even my aspirations — in short, a manifestation of my mind. On the one hand, such a manifestation has everything to do with memory, with books revisited, books recalled. What makes it meaningful, however, is more than just the books themselves — or, at least, more than what they say. My old Signet paperback of Three by Flannery O’Connor (Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, A Good Man Is Hard to Find) is as important for what it brings back about the experience of reading it as for the transcendent lucidity of O’Connor’s writing. Merely picking it up evokes the night twenty years ago that I lay in a Flagstaff, Arizona motel bed as alienated and lonely as Hazel Motes, trying to read while waiting for daybreak, when I would board a train bound for the East Coast, and home. On the shelf beside it, Everything That Rises Must Converge still bears my margin notes from high school; each time I see it, I remember that one fine teacher who introduced me to O’Connor, and, in the process, gave me a whole new filter through which to reckon with the world. Thinking about that, I’m reminded of the other works this man assigned — The Great Gatsby, King Lear, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf — all of which I still carry from house to house, bookcase to bookcase, as if they can no longer be separated from myself. This, it seems to me, is one of the most powerful gifts a library can offer us, to represent our histories, our ideas, our imaginations, until our inner lives begin to take shape in three dimensions, to occupy a physical space that, while outside us, stands in some significant fashion for who we are. Of course, the issue of who we are is a complex one, as much about possibility as memory or ideas. When it comes to libraries, that means unread books, which is as it should be, since any library worth the name must outstrip its owner’s limitations or turn static, becoming little more than paper warehoused on a wall. At the most basic level, it’s a matter of possibility, of literature’s potential to transform us, although in another way, it has to do with time, with how many volumes one can experience in a normal span of years. In The Books in My Life, Henry Miller suggests five thousand as a viable number, which sounds about right. Still, although I read something like a hundred books annually (which means that, at forty-one, I’ve already made my way through the equivalent of a good-sized library), I can’t sneak a glance at a shelf in my house without noticing titles I haven’t read. Some are old, like Vanity Fair or Look Homeward, Angel, both of which I’ve carted around for decades, waiting for the ideal moment to sample what I’ve been assured are their deep and lasting charms. Others are more recent, new releases, a situation only compounded by my work as a reviewer, which guarantees that books arrive each day on my doorstep, unbidden if not wholly unexpected gifts. Most, it goes without saying, are not compelling, but what’s astonishing is just how many linger, expanding my library in unintended ways. Haiku collections, solo performance texts, books of rock criticism, graphic novels, even odd bits of religious commentary, like William Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man, originally published in 1528 and lately re-issued — such volumes occupy my shelves like promises of some distant future, reminding me of everything I one day hope to learn, to encompass, even if that day may never come. There are those, my wife among them, who would argue that all this collecting amounts to little more than hoarding, that it’s irresponsible, or self-indulgent, to keep the books I do. But while, in a way, it’s hard to counter that position, I prefer to take a different point-of-view. For me, there are two parallel tracks involved here, one having to do with reading and the other with what we might call the conceptual library, with what a collection of books should stand for, what it should be. If, after all, my library equally represents my past and my future, it also signifies the things I find important, the avenues of culture that attract me, that, in some indefinable manner, I mean to preserve. In a sense, it’s a variation on the great books argument, the idea that, with either a personal or a collective canon, certain resources have to be there, whether or not they’re ever used. Yes, I own books I’ll never read, such as Gray’s Anatomy or Finnegans Wake, but they seem to me like touchstones, pillars around which a library should be built. As for whether or not I actually refer to them … well, to tell the truth, I see little difference between these volumes and the ones I have read and probably won’t return to again. In both cases, there’s no practical need for their continued presence; it’s been years since I thumbed through, say, The Iliad, or Mark Twain’s Roughing It, or The Shining by Stephen King. Still, without them on the bookshelves, my library would feel strangely empty, as if an essential component, a key connective fiber, had been left incomplete. It is for precisely this sort of connection, as my wife likes to remind me, that we have public libraries, but as much as I like the idea of such places, the reality of them leaves me cold. They’re too anonymous, all those shelves stretched to the edge of perspective with who-knows-what upon them, with books bearing neither memory nor inspiration, no personal stamp of any kind. At heart, I think, these reservations get back to the notion of the library as living, as tactile and emotional as well as intellectual, as a record of individuality, of identity, of its owner’s otherwise ephemeral inner life. A decade ago, when I moved to Los Angeles — the same move in which I lost those boxes — I pared down my library to five hundred titles, and put the rest in storage in New York. The idea was that, in so doing, I might free myself from the burden of possession, but ultimately I only felt I’d sheared off pieces of myself instead. Over time, as things were re-issued and sent to me, I replaced a good deal of what I’d left behind, so much so that when, eight years later, my family and I moved into the house we now inhabit (a place chosen, in part, because of an elaborate built-in bookcase), I had accumulated an additional fifteen hundred volumes, which I spent a week or so alphabetizing and installing on the shelves. When I finished, I walked the house elated by a sensation that felt a lot like reassurance, as if in the reassembling of my library, it was really my own personality that had been restored. Not long ago, I had a similar experience in a storage facility in Upper Manhattan, as I looked through books I hadn’t seen in ten years. Although I was there primarily to check on their condition, no sooner did I open the first box than I was flooded with the same wonder I’d known as a seven-year-old, exploring the mysteries of my parents’ shelves. Now as then, it wasn’t the books, per se, that captivated me, but more their status as mirrors, as markers of my life. In one box, I discovered The NFL’s Greatest Games, a book I’d read in the fourth grade, now woefully outdated; elsewhere, I found a paperback of Raymond Carver’s A New Path to the Waterfall, the first book on which a review of mine had been blurbed. As always, there were unread volumes — Salman Rushdie’s Grimus, David Payne’s Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street — symbols of my own long-lost intentions, my forgotten possibilities. Yet standing there, knee-deep in the detritus of this other lifetime, I found myself confronted once again by the power of reparation, as if the elements that had drawn me to each of these books in the first place were still present, waiting to be reclaimed. It is this that gives our libraries their peculiar satisfactions, their ability to reveal not just who we are but who we were, as well as who we want to be. Like all great creations, they define us even as they push against those definitions, and challenge what they mean. In light of that, as only seems appropriate, I’ve finally decided to give up my storage space and move the rest of my books to California, to unify my collection once and for all. I’m not sure where I’ll put them, but in the end, that’s not the issue, nor will it ever be. Rather, what’s at stake is a certain throughline, something I might call a continuous vision of myself. There are books I’ve read, and books I’ve never read, and books that fall somewhere in between. But taken all together, they represent the best I have to offer — my thoughts, my history, my aspirations, and yes, in many ways, my dreams. |